The Zcash NU7 mainnet activation height has been set at block 3,543,405, which is approximately November 5 at the current block time. Any coins still remaining in the old Sprout pool must be treated as a hard cutoff. After NU7, all v4 transactions will be invalid, and Sprout transfers can only be written using v4. Coins still in the Sprout pool at the moment of activation will be permanently unspendable—users must move them before activation. Other changes: Block time has been reduced from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, reducing the time for exchanges to wait for three confirmations from nearly four minutes to just over one minute. Sixty percent of each block’s fees will be temporarily removed from circulation and returned to miners starting around February 2031; the halving schedule remains unchanged. Additionally, limits have been added for shielded operations per pool and across the entire network. The height was proposed by Sean Bowe in a PR on October 20 and has been approved by two developers. However, as of this afternoon, the ZIP 259 deployment specification still lists it as pending, and node software must include this height to be valid.