ZCASH JUST MADE ITS BLOCKS 3X FASTER, AND QUIETLY LOCKED 12,224 ZEC AWAY FOREVER. NU7 went live Nov 5, 2026, at block 3,543,405. Block time went from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. Issuance did not change. The subsidy dropped from 1.5625 ZEC to about 0.52083333 ZEC per block, by the same factor. Daily issuance stays about the same. The 21 million cap stays. You just get faster first confirmations. The important part is the Network Sustainability Mechanism. 40% of fees go to miners now. 60% goes into a public reserve. That reserve is not burned. It comes back as block rewards starting around Feb 2031. This is Zcash planning for a problem every proof of work chain has. Halvings cut the subsidy, fees have to replace it, and if fees are not enough, security drops. NU7 starts building that future security budget today, without touching the cap or the halving schedule. Whether it works depends on one thing: real fee activity over the next few years. If usage stays low, the reserve stays small. If usage grows, miners have a second income stream waiting for them. Shielded capacity went up too, with guardrails. Orchard throughput, about 2.9 to 6.6 TPS. Worst case sync bandwidth for light wallets, down about 37%. Per block limits across Orchard, Sapling and Ironwood keep one bad actor from overloading nodes and wallets. More capacity, but not unlimited capacity. That trade off is deliberate. And the cost is real. Version 4 transactions are now invalid. Sprout only used version 4, so about 12,224 ZEC in Sprout is now unspendable. Not burned, not redistributed. Recorded, but cannot move. That is what a hard protocol upgrade looks like in practice. Progress for the chain, loss for the legacy pool. My view is simple. Privacy is the headline for Zcash, but it was never the whole problem. Speed, sync cost, validation cost, and long term miner pay matter just as much. NU7 addresses all four at once, and it does it without breaking the monetary policy. The fee reserve is the part to watch. If it grows, Zcash has solved a piece of the long term security puzzle. If it does not, we will know in the next few years. For now, this is a solid upgrade. Faster, cheaper to sync, and thinking ahead to 2031. Source: Zcash NU7, Nov 5 2026