Is there anything built into the Zcash network that ensures it doesnt get congested over time and take hours to settle like bitcoin? I know bitcoin writes everything to the ledger every time and that builds up to a super long ledger which is why its so slow to settle. Did Zcash change something regarding that when we forked off?
You may be referring to the target block times. Bitcoin is 600 seconds (10 min) I believe and Zcash is now 75 seconds, originally 150 secs reduced in the Blossom upgrade.
Also, Zcash is a reference implementation of bitcoin, not a fork. It doesn’t share any tx history.