Zcash NU7 Aims for 25-Second Blocks on November 5

Making Private Payments Feel Like Payments

Privacy chains have a persistent usability problem that has nothing to do with cryptography: they are slow to confirm. Zcash's answer is NU7, a network upgrade targeting November 5, 2026 that cuts the time between blocks from 75 seconds to 25. CoinDesk reported the timeline on September 18.

• Block time: 75 seconds down to 25, roughly tripling confirmation speed
• Issuance held flat: block rewards divided by three, with the halving interval stretched from 1.68 million to 5.04 million blocks
• Fee mechanism: ZIP-235 removes at least 60 percent of transaction fees from circulation, to be reissued as supplemental block subsidies starting February 2031
• Schedule: code complete September 30, testnet October 6, final activation decision October 20, mainnet target November 5

Why Block Time Is the Whole User Experience

A 75-second block means that in the worst case you stand at a counter for well over a minute before a payment is considered settled, and in practice merchants wanting more than one confirmation wait several minutes. That is fine for a store of value and disqualifying for a payment network. Shielded transactions, where the privacy actually lives, feel this most because they are the transactions people most want to use in person.

Cutting to 25 seconds does not make Zcash a card network, but it moves the experience from awkward to tolerable. The engineering caveat worth stating plainly is that faster blocks are not free: shorter intervals increase the rate of orphaned blocks and slightly change the security assumptions around confirmation depth. Whether 25 seconds is the right point on that curve is a judgement the network has now made rather than a fact.

Note also that faster blocks do not mean more throughput. This is a latency change, not a capacity change. Confirmations arrive sooner; the number of transactions the chain can carry per minute is unchanged. That distinction gets blurred constantly in upgrade coverage, and it matters if you are sizing a payment integration — the same practical concern behind fee-and-settlement work like Circle's Arc mainnet paying gas in USDC.

What Does ZIP-235 Actually Do to Fees?

This is the more unusual half of the upgrade, and it is worth explaining carefully because the shorthand descriptions get it wrong.

ZIP-235 is a draft specification titled Remove 60% of Transaction Fees From Circulation. It requires that miners route at least 60 percent of transaction fees out of circulation through the mechanism defined in ZIP-233, while the remaining 40 percent continues to reach miners as before. Critically, the removed funds are not destroyed. The proposal states they are automatically and algorithmically reissued through future block subsidies rather than being permanently burned or held as a discretionary reserve.

The intent is to smooth the long decline in mining income. Zcash's issuance falls through successive halvings, and deferring a share of today's fees into subsidies beginning February 2031 props up the security budget at the point where it would otherwise thin out. Based on historical activity the proposal estimates this would set aside roughly 210.86 ZEC a year — a small number today, which is rather the point of starting early.

Who Decided This?

The fee parameters went to a coin-weighted vote. About 2.4 million ZEC participated, which the count puts at 66 percent of the eligible pool. Of that, 98.9 percent backed keeping the existing halving schedule and 96.6 percent chose February 2031 as the date collected fees start returning to miners. Five core builder teams — the Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar, ZODL and Shielded Labs — agreed on the package.

November 5 is a target rather than a commitment. The activation height gets chosen on October 20, and if testnet throws up problems the date moves. Anyone running a node or a service should be watching the October 6 testnet deployment rather than the November headline.

Zcash has had a busy year on the institutional side too, including the Grayscale Zcash ETF amendment. The privacy-tech direction more broadly is visible in work like Zama's confidential vaults on Ethereum. More in our crypto coverage.

Sources: CoinDesk — September 18, 2026; ZIP 235 — accessed September 18, 2026.