Zcash’s NU7 upgrade activated early on Friday at block 3,543,405, cutting the target time between blocks from 75 seconds to 25, CoinDesk reports. By the time of writing the next 225 blocks had averaged about 39 seconds, and mining difficulty was still adjusting.
For a merchant, the first confirmation should arrive in about 25 seconds on average. An exchange that waits for three confirmations could see its wait fall from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds, although each service sets its own rules.
Faster blocks come with a cost. Tests of the Zakura node software, built by Valar Group and Project Tachyon, ran on 80 computers across 11 regions. Discarded blocks rose to 3.43 percent at 25-second spacing, against 1.57 percent at 75 seconds.
The upgrade also lightens the load on wallets. The worst-case daily download for finding private payments falls from 271 MB to 169 MB, and capacity for simple private payments is estimated to rise from about 3 to more than 6 a second.
On fees, miners keep 40 percent and 60 percent goes to a reserve that starts feeding block rewards around February 2031. The 21 million supply cap is unchanged.
NU7 also retires the old Sprout pool, which leaves about 12,224 ZEC unspendable. Co-founder Sean Bowe has outlined a way to recover it, but none had been approved as of Friday.
Whether the extra orphaned blocks matter once real traffic arrives is the number to watch.
