Barely days after activating its major NU7 network upgrade, Zcash developers are pushing for an additional decrease in the privacy-focused blockchain’s block intervals. A newly submitted draft Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) seeks to lower the target block generation time from 25 seconds down to 20 seconds, accelerating transaction settlement across the ecosystem.
Authored by developers ValarDragon and Evan Forbes, the initiative was posted to the Zcash community forum on Sunday. The creators hope to submit the proposal to an upcoming community poll, aiming for its formal incorporation into the proposed NU7.1 upgrade. By trimming five seconds off the current target, the modification is designed to decrease waiting periods for initial confirmations. According to the developers, this speed enhancement will directly benefit users conducting point-of-sale transactions, transferring funds onto exchanges, and executing cross-chain asset swaps.
Despite the faster pace of block production, the authors clarified that the network's total daily capacity for shielded, private transactions will remain unchanged. Furthermore, the overall issuance schedule for Zcash will be preserved, ensuring that coin distribution rates align with existing economic models. Readers following broader crypto developments will note that this proposal closely follows another architectural shift on the network.
Just this past Friday, the Zcash mainnet activated its NU7 upgrade, which implemented an aggressive reduction in target block times, cutting them from 75 seconds down to 25 seconds. Alongside this change, NU7 introduced a Network Sustainability Mechanism, a feature built to funnel a share of transaction fees back into future mining incentives while strictly maintaining the hard cap of 21 million ZEC tokens.
