After the recent sentiment collection results (which clarified sentiment collection from earlier this year), discussions among the various orgs (ZF/Tachyon/Valar/ZODL/SL), feedback from proponents of proposals, and a discussion between Zakura and Zebra teams about timelines, there is now unanimous agreement among the orgs and engineering teams throughout the Zcash ecosystem.
New transaction formats do not appear in this network upgrade! The changes in this upgrade should not affect wallets in any significant way. Infrastructure such as full nodes, indexers and block explorers may be affected.
Checklist
I’ll use this thread as a checklist to keep people aware of what’s going on.
Code completion. September 30, 2026 - Features should be implemented and ready for inclusion in a testnet upgrade.
Testnet activation heights decided. Zakura and Zebra teams agreed at R&D Meeting to height 4465026 on Testnet.
Testnet activation. October 6, 2026 - The official Zcash testnet will upgrade to NU7.
Final mainnet activation decision. October 20, 2026 - The activation height and decision for mainnet activation, given experience with NU7 on testnet, will be set at this point. (This takes place a week before Zcon.)
Mainnet activation. November 5, 2026 - NU7 goes live on mainnet.
This divides the per-block subsidy by an additional factor of 3 relative to the post-Blossom subsidy, so that the total issuance per unit of wall clock time remains the same.
"New transaction formats do not appear in this network upgrade!"
I understand ZSAs won’t be going in yet, but does anyone know what the status is in terms of consensus around them? I personally think ZSAs would be a huge feature for zcash.
We’ll update it with the real testnet when it’s live. For now, it shows a staging testnet. The instructions let you join with Zakura and there’s a faucet available for grabbing some TAZ.
Hi everyone, I’m a new to the community.
I have recently started researching Zcash, and this thread helps me follow NU7 in real time. Thanks for the clear timeline!
I have a question about the new 25-second blocks.
Exchanges usually wait for several confirmations before crediting a deposit. Since blocks will be 3 times faster, will exchanges need to ask for more confirmations to stay just as safe?
And one more thing to make sure I understood: because NU7 disables v4 transactions, old Sprout funds (zc addresses) must be moved before Nov 5, right?
The confirmation limits are set by the exchanges so whether they want to extend them to compensate for less time is up to them (would not seeme very necessary imho).
As it’s stands correct, after nu7, sprout funds will effectively be stuck. There has always been some discussion about what to do with sprout funds after the pool is derecated, but nothing definitive ever decided.
Thanks! That makes sense. So after Nov 5, if someone finds an old wallet with Sprout funds, is there any chance of recovering them later, or would that require a new network upgrade?
After that date, sprout funds will not be able to be spent normally at all. The coming upgrade will disable them and there is relatively zero chance of them ever being reenabled normally through another upgrade. Any hope of recovery would come from some other method. like I said, discussion of such a thing has always kind of popped up here and there.
