Zcash activates its NU7 upgrade, cutting the target block time to 25 seconds and reducing wallet work for private payments

Zcash's Network Upgrade 7 (NU7) is live on mainnet. It cuts the target time between blocks from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. It also reduces the work wallets must do to find incoming shielded payments and sets aside part of transaction fees for future miners. Developers fixed the activation at block 3,543,405 in October, crypto.news reported.

The faster block schedule does not add new coins. According to Decrypt, the change produces about three times as many blocks over the same period and cuts the subsidy paid per block to match, so daily issuance of ZEC stays the same. The trade-off is consensus stability. Shorter intervals raise the chance that two miners find competing blocks at once, and pre-activation analysis put the theoretical stale rate near 3.26% at 25-second spacing.

The wallet change matters as much for usability. Shielded Zcash wallets have to scan the chain to find the notes they own, and slow synchronization has been one of the main complaints against private payments on the network. NU7 reduces that scanning load. The fee reserve addresses a long-term question for any proof-of-work chain: how miners will be paid once block subsidies shrink.

On Bitcoin, privacy still depends on coordination at the wallet level, not on the protocol. Bull Bitcoin now offers Payjoin on deposits and withdrawals and applies it by default to every on-chain buy or sell made through BULL Wallet, Bitcoin Magazine reported. The publication describes it as the first exchange to do so. In a Payjoin, the sender and the receiver both contribute inputs to one transaction. This breaks the common assumption of chain-analysis firms that all inputs in a transaction belong to one owner.