The post Zcash Is Running—Devs Want to Make It Faster appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
In brief Zcash developers are targeting Nov. 5 to activate NU7, an upgrade that cuts block time—the interval between confirmed batches of transactions. A companion rule shrinks the reward miners earn per block by roughly the same factor, so the total amount of new ZEC created each day doesn’t change. 98.9% of voting coinholders chose to keep Zcash’s Bitcoin-style halvings intact, and a new mechanism will start banking transaction fees in 2026 to help pay miners after 2031. Zcash developers are targeting Nov. 5 to switch on NU7, the network’s next major upgrade. The biggest improvement is set to be block time, the gap between each confirmed batch of transactions, drops from 75 seconds to 25. That’s a three-times speedup for a coin built around zero-knowledge proofs—math that lets someone prove a payment is valid without revealing who sent it, to whom, or how much. Shorter blocks mean shielded, private transactions confirm almost as fast as a card swipe. Myriad: How high will Bitcoin go? Click to make your prediction. Developer Sean Bowe said NU7 hits Zcash’s testnet on Oct. 6, and the team will set the final mainnet activation height on Oct. 20 after watching how the network behaves under the new rules. The Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar Group, ZODL, and Shielded Labs—the separate teams and companies that build Zcash’s software—reached what developers called unanimous agreement on the upgrade’s scope and timeline, with the underlying specifications due by Sept. 30. Faster blocks create an obvious problem: three times more blocks per day would normally mean three times more new coins minted, unless something offsets it. NU7’s fix, a proposal called ZIP 218, divides the reward paid per block by roughly three. Per the spec, this keeps total issuance per unit of wall-clock time exactly where it was. That…