Zcash developers have locked in a working timetable for Network Upgrade 7, aiming to cut confirmation waits so shielded transfers can move more quickly without changing the coin’s privacy model.
On September 17, Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe posted that every major builder group had reached the same conclusion on both the contents and the calendar.
The Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar, ZODL, Shielded Labs, and the related engineering teams, including talks between Zakura and Zebra, signed off after coinholder sentiment results and earlier community polling.
The plan puts NU7 on the official testnet on October 6 and, if that run looks healthy, on mainnet around November 5.
A final go-or-wait decision, including the exact activation height, is reserved for October 20, a week before Zcon.
Code for the features is supposed to be ready by September 30, 2026.
Until the October review, November 5 is a target, not a guarantee.
The change users will notice first is block timing.
Under draft ZIP 218, the target gap between blocks would fall from 75 seconds to 25 seconds.
Anyone who waits for one or two confirmations—shops, exchanges, bridges—would see that wait drop by about two-thirds.
A first confirmation that used to arrive after more than a minute would, on average, arrive in about 25 seconds.
That is still slower than a card tap, but it is meant to make a fully private on-chain payment feel usable rather than awkward.
Faster blocks do not mean a faster flood of new ZEC.
The subsidy per block would be cut by the same factor, and the halving interval would stretch from 1.68 million blocks to 5.04 million so issuance over calendar time stays on the existing path.
Holders who voted backed that path almost unanimously: about 2.4 million ZEC took part, and 98.9 percent preferred keeping the current halving schedule.
NU7 also folds in the Network Sustainability Mechanism.
Roughly 60 percent of transaction fees would be pulled aside for a time and later returned as extra miner rewards starting in February 2031, after later halvings have thinned the block subsidy.
Version 4 transactions would be turned off, which stops further spending from leftover Sprout funds.
Bowe stressed that the upgrade does not add new transaction formats and should not force major wallet work.
Full nodes, indexers, and block explorers are more likely to need patches.
ZIP 218 also sets per-block action limits, including a cap of 330 Orchard actions, with estimates that typical two-action Orchard throughput could rise from about 2.9 transactions per second to about 6.6. Sender, recipient, and amount would still stay hidden.
For a privacy network that has used 75-second blocks since launch, the point is practical: fewer empty seconds between a payment and a confirmation people will actually trust. If testnet holds and the October 20 review is clean, that shorter wait is what NU7 is supposed to deliver in early November.