Zcash price in focus after NU7 upgrade reshapes payment speed
Published on 11/09/2026 at 18:39 | Editorial responsibility: Rafael Müller, Editor-in-Chief AD HOC NEWSWhat NU7 changes for ZEC
- Zcash activated the NU7 upgrade at block 3,543,405 on November 6, 2026, at 02:34 UTC.
- The target block interval fell from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, while 60% of transaction fees now go to a reserve for future mining rewards.
- Investing.com displayed Zcash at 1,234.88 US dollars when read on November 9, with a market capitalization of 20.97 billion US dollars.
The Zcash price remains in focus after the network activated its NU7 upgrade at block 3,543,405 on November 6, 2026, at 02:34 UTC. The protocol change targets faster private-payment confirmations, but the practical timing for users still depends on the confirmation rules applied by exchanges, merchants and other services.
When read on November 9, the Investing.com page displayed a Zcash price of 1,234.88 US dollars. The same page showed a market capitalization of 20.97 billion US dollars, 24-hour volume of 801.81 million US dollars and 16.96 million ZEC in circulation. These figures are a snapshot from the cited page and not a separate close-of-day calculation.
Faster blocks, conditional benefit
According to CoinDesk, NU7 reduced the target interval between blocks from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. A first confirmation can therefore take about 25 seconds on average once the network operates at the new target. An exchange requiring three confirmations could reduce the expected on-chain wait from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds, although that does not determine when the exchange credits a deposit.
The upgrade also limits the amount of private transaction activity that can fit into a block. CoinDesk reported that the measure reduces the maximum daily download burden for wallets from 271 megabytes to 169 megabytes. At the same time, the upgrade specification estimates that capacity for simple private payments could rise from about three to more than six transactions per second. These are protocol-level capacity estimates, not a guarantee of realized user demand or throughput.
New fee allocation and legacy risk
NU7 changes the distribution of transaction fees. Miners now receive 40%, while 60% is removed from circulation and recorded in a reserve intended to support future block rewards from around February 2031. CoinDesk reported that the mechanism preserves Zcash's 21 million coin supply cap. The change addresses future network-security funding, but it does not by itself establish miners' net revenue.
NU7 also retires Zcash's original Sprout privacy pool by disallowing the version 4 transaction format on which it relied. CoinDesk reported that about 12,224 ZEC remaining in Sprout became unspendable, with no recovery mechanism approved at the time of its report. For investors, the upgrade therefore combines a potential usability improvement with a material change to legacy infrastructure and fee economics.
Further Zcash coverage is available on the Zcash topic page.
