Zcash Sets NU7 at Block 3,543,405 While the Spec Says Undecided

Zcash's next upgrade now has a number. NU7 is set to activate at mainnet block 3,543,405, which the network should reach around 5 November, after Zcash Improvement Proposal editors agreed the height this week. Sean Bowe filed it as pull request 1405 on Tuesday. The change cuts block time from 75 seconds to 25 and shuts down Sprout, the original shielded pool, for good. One thing it does not have is a merged specification, because ZIP-259, the deployment document, still lists the activation height as undecided.

Three times the blocks, same wall clock

The speed claim is arithmetic, not a benchmark. At 25-second blocks a payment waiting on three confirmations clears in about 75 seconds instead of roughly 225, which CoinDesk rendered as a drop from nearly four minutes to about a minute and a quarter. FinanceFeeds makes the same calculation and adds the caveat that matters: block production is probabilistic, so the numbers are targets and not promises. Coinholders endorsed the change weeks ago. About 2.4 million ZEC voted in September, and Odaily puts support at 99.9%, a figure no other account read here carries.

The spec has not caught up

Two accounts describe the review differently. CoinDesk, writing at 08:10 UTC on Wednesday, said the proposal had two approvals and had not been merged. FinanceFeeds, checking that evening, said the two approvals filed on 20 October now show as dismissed after later changes to the pull request. Both agree on the part that governs: nothing has been merged, and ZIP-259 still says undecided. The accounts of the approvals themselves do not reconcile, and we could not establish which state is current. Node software must carry the chosen height first, and Bankless notes NU7 skips the roughly three-month gap Zcash usually leaves between a node release and activation. ZIP 259 warns that operators who do not upgrade could keep running the old chain.

Fourteen days to leave Sprout

Sprout is the part with a countdown. The pool dates to 2016, stopped taking inflows at the 2020 Canopy upgrade, and depends on version 4 transactions, which NU7 prohibits from the activation block onward. Odaily counted 22,309 ZEC in it, then 22,263 as of its Thursday press time, worth roughly $30 million and about 0.45% of shielded coins. This desk's September report had about 23,000 ZEC in the pool, and no account read here reconciles the two counts. Bankless is careful about what happens next. The coins are frozen, not burned.

Sprout spending "may never be reenabled," ZIP 2003 says, in the wording Bankless quoted on Wednesday.

Miners take a third and get some of it back

The reward side reads two ways depending on which account is open. CoinDesk says the existing schedule for halving mining rewards by 50% is preserved. Odaily says the per-block reward falls to one third, which follows from tripling the number of blocks, though neither account states that reconciliation outright. On top of it sits the Network Sustainability Mechanism. Sixty per cent of each block's transaction fees are pulled out of circulation into a protocol-level balance, miners keep 40%, and the balance is paid back through mining rewards from around February 2031, at block 8,939,664 in Odaily's count. The package is the one coinholders backed in the vote.

Nothing here is a clock time. Every account gives 5 November as an expectation derived from a block height, and a chain running fast or slow moves the date with it. Zakura's public dashboard, from the full node project Bowe leads, lists 3,543,405 as the planned mainnet point, and the upgrade has run on testnet since 5 October. The price readings are no steadier. FinanceFeeds had ZEC near $1,361 on a CoinGecko check Wednesday, up about 11.8% on the day; the ticker on Odaily's page early Thursday showed $1,276.57, down 1.17%. Different hours, so the two do not conflict, and neither is a daily close. Holders who still control Sprout keys have about two weeks, measured in blocks and not in days.