Zcash Activates NU7 and Triples the Speed of Its Private Payments

Zcash has completed one of its biggest network changes to date. The NU7 upgrade switched on early Friday at block 3,543,405, mined at 02:34 UTC, and it shortens the target gap between blocks from 75 seconds to 25. Private payments should now confirm roughly three times faster.

What Faster Zcash Blocks Mean for Users

By 04:59 UTC the chain had added 225 blocks at an average of about 39 seconds, since mining difficulty was still catching up. A shop could see a first confirmation in around 25 seconds. An exchange that waits for three confirmations could cut its wait from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds, though each service sets its own rules.

Tests, Wallet Limits and New Fee Rules

Developers at Valar Group and Project Tachyon tested the Zakura node software on 80 machines in 11 regions. Discarded blocks reached 3.43% under heavy load, against 1.57% at the old pace. NU7 also caps private transaction activity per block, lowering the worst case daily wallet download from 271 to 169 megabytes and possibly doubling simple private payment capacity to over six per second. Miners now keep 40% of fees, while 60% goes to a reserve that starts feeding block rewards near February 2031, without touching the 21 million coin cap.

Sprout Pool Retired

The upgrade also shut down Sprout, the 2016 privacy pool, leaving about 12,224 ZEC unspendable. Co-founder Sean Bowe has described a possible recovery method, but nothing has been approved.