Zcash targets November upgrade to make private payments up to three times faster

Public blockchains create a privacy problem. Paying from a visible address can expose its balance, previous transactions and links to other addresses. A shielded Zcash payment hides the sender, recipient and amount from the public record, allowing a customer to pay without handing the merchant or anyone watching the blockchain a searchable trail into their finances.

Zcash block times

Blocks are batches of transactions that miners add to a blockchain, and a payment receives its first confirmation when it appears in one. Cutting Zcash’s target block time would let an exchange or bridge that waits for a fixed number of confirmations release ZEC in about one-third the time.

At a shop counter, it would still be slower than tapping a card, but the shorter wait makes a direct private payment more practical, in the view of Zcash’s developers.

Producing three times as many blocks would not create three times as much ZEC, however. The proposal divides the reward paid with each block by three and extends the halving interval from 1.68 million blocks to 5.04 million, leaving issuance over time largely unchanged.

NU7 would also introduce Zcash’s Network Sustainability Mechanism.

Roughly 60% of transaction fees would be temporarily removed from circulation, rather than paid to miners, under ZIP-235. Those coins are intended to return through block rewards beginning in February 2031, adding to miner income as Zcash’s regular issuance falls through successive halvings.