Zcash's NU7 Call Lands Today: 25-Second Blocks, 60% of Fees Sealed to 2031 — and ZEC Is Up 8.9% at the 1,296.92 Gate

The Go/No-Go Call That Sets November 5

Zcash's ninth network upgrade stops being a testnet experiment today. The developer call scheduled for 20 October is where the NU7 mainnet activation height gets assigned — the last field still blank in the deployment spec, where ZIP 259 still reads Mainnet: TBD, to be set on October 20. Mainnet activation is targeted for 5 November, a week before Zcon, with the activation height itself locked at that call.

Holders already voted the direction. Nearly 2.4 million ZEC took part in the September coinholder poll — roughly 66% of the eligible pool — with 99.9% backing the move to 25-second blocks, 98.9% keeping the bitcoin-style halving schedule, and 96.6% setting February 2031 as the date the fee reserve starts paying back out. The timeline and the checklist live in Sean Bowe's forum thread, which has tracked the upgrade from code completion to testnet height 4,465,026.

The caveat worth stating plainly: 5 November without an activation height is a plan, not a commitment, as Cointelegraph noted when the target was first announced. Today's decision is what converts it into a block number.

Twenty-Five Seconds Instead of Seventy-Five

NU7 cuts the target spacing between blocks from 75 seconds to 25. The Zcash Foundation's framing is operational rather than ideological: a user waits 75 seconds on average for a first confirmation today, and that wait is a real obstacle at a point of sale, on an exchange deposit and on a bridge between chains.

Three times as many blocks does not mean three times the supply. Under ZIP 218 each block's scheduled reward is divided by roughly three and the remaining halving intervals stretch to match, so daily issuance stays where it was and the 21 million cap is untouched. Faster settlement without dilution is the entire point of the change.

The public testnet, which activated at block 4,465,026 on 4 October — a day ahead of the Zcash Foundation's own estimate — has been running the new spacing for two weeks. The Zakura NU7 dashboard showed a median gap of 19.5 seconds across its latest 300 blocks against the 17.3 seconds it lists as the expected figure at a 25-second target. Zebra 7.0.0-rc.0, the release candidate operators were told to upgrade before the testnet height, shipped on 2 October.

Where 60% of Every Fee Goes Until 2031

The second half of NU7 is the Network Sustainability Mechanism. From activation, 60% of every block's transaction fees are removed from circulation and held in a reserve while miners keep the other 40%. The reserve is reissued as supplemental block rewards beginning February 2031 — the date coinholders approved, and the configuration documented across ZIP 234, ZIP 235 and ZIP 237.

The daily withhold has not been published in ZEC terms, and that matters for scale: block subsidies, not fees, are where almost all ZEC issuance has come from. What the mechanism does guarantee is the shape of the revenue curve after the subsidy halves again — a second, fee-funded stream that grows in relevance exactly when the scheduled reward stops carrying miners on its own.

The Sprout Deadline Inside the Upgrade

One change inside NU7 carries a deadline for holders. Activation disables version 4 transactions, which suspends Sprout, Zcash's original shielded pool. Any ZEC still sitting in Sprout when the upgrade goes live becomes unspendable unless it is moved before then — the one item worth checking this week if you have a 2016-era wallet lying around.

Bowe's guidance is that the upgrade should not affect wallets in any significant way, while full nodes, indexers and block explorers may need work. Operators have had the Zebra release candidate since 2 October to test against, and the testnet run is the evidence the mainnet call will be judged on.

1,296.92 Is the Line Between 1,450 and 1,049

ZEC is trading at 1,260.29 on Binance, up 8.86% on the session after printing 1,280.00 — its highest print since 14 October — against a session low of 1,118.76 and about $196 million of turnover in 24 hours.

The bigger map: the coin topped at 1,698.00 on 26 September and then gave back in a series of lower swing highs — 1,600.02 on 28 September, 1,494.52 on 30 September, 1,412.12 on 2 October, 1,349.30 on 12 October, 1,286.54 on 14 October and 1,191.76 on 19 October — until 18 October printed 1,049.01. That low is 38.2% below the top and 98.8% of the way back through the September vertical that began at 1,041.70 on 14 September, so the retrace stopped 7.31 above the base of the move.

Today's candle reclaimed the 0.236 retracement at 1,202.17 and closed above the 19 October high. That leaves price directly under two lines inside 17 points of each other: the 14 October lower high at 1,286.54, which today's 1,280.00 missed by 6.54, and the 0.382 at 1,296.92. A daily close above 1,296.92 breaks the lower-high sequence and opens the 0.5 at 1,373.51, with the 0.618 at 1,450.09 behind it.

Failure there leaves the structure intact: 1,202.17 is the first shelf, 1,049.01 the second, and the September base at 1,041.70 is what invalidates the rebound outright. Context for the level: ZEC is down 16.49% over 30 days and up 3.41% over seven, ranked 10th at a $20.6 billion market cap on Coinpaprika, and still 26% below its September peak — after running from 368.03 on 28 June to that 1,698.00 high, a 361% advance.

Three dates carry the story from here: today's activation-height decision, Zcon a week later, and the 5 November target. The test worth watching is not the block time itself but whether venues reprice their confirmation thresholds around it — a 25-second block only speeds up a deposit if the exchange on the other side counts fewer confirmations. On the chart the test is simpler, and it is one number: 1,296.92.