How Many Transactions per Block?

It’s a simple question, but I am unable to find the maximum number of transactions that can be included in one ZCash Block.

The data on this page helps, but it just gives me actual TX from the past 24 hours:

https://bitinfocharts.com/zcash/

This tells me there were about 11.6 TX/Block, or one about every 13 seconds. What is the max TX that can go into one block?

Thanks in advance if you can tell me!

EDITED - Thanks to @garethtdavies for the help! It looks like 25 TX per secondis a safe bet.

EDIT 2 - correction :stuck_out_tongue:

Check the first post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/zec/comments/662iq4/noob_question_whats_zcash_network_transactions/?st=JGWQXK4K&sh=3add5e26

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That’s way too low. Numbers ranged from 6.67 and 26.67 transactions per second - not transactions per block (and there are 150 seconds per block interval) so at the low end that’s circa 1000 transactions per block.

I am not sure how Sapling affects the average tx size for shielded tx or how any changes to the equihash parameters further improve this number.

This is the most no of tx in a block so far at 780. https://zcha.in/blocks/00000004693f6d089cc05a708c7fe24ceb2c8bc3055b39b6990709517ea1091e

Yes, I corrected that - oops. That implies we can see 4000 TX/block.

When Visa is processing 25,000 TX a second, it’s a big difference from ZCash. I’m trying to get my head wrapped around what happens when/if there is some type of mass or wide(er)spread adoption of ZCash as money.

Let’s assume:

  • Sapling is deployed and everyone is using Sapling z-addresses (the “ideal future”).
  • The average transaction is two inputs and two outputs (combining two notes to pay one person with change).

For a Sapling v4 transaction, this gives an average size of 29 + 2 * 384 + 2 * 948 + 64 = 2757 bytes. At the current 2MB block size, that is around 725 transactions per block.

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Thx @str4d :slight_smile:

So what happens when there are more TX/day than blocks to confirm them? My math tells me there’s a limit of about 417,000 TX/day. There were nearly twice that for ETH yesterday.

My thinking on this question is the fact that one coin doesn’t necessarily have to absorb all possible crypto transactions. There can be 4 or 5 or more cryptos just like there are multiple credit cards.

Hasn’t ZcashCo somewhere mentioned the possibility of upgrading to segwit and the lightning network?