Tomorrow. The NU7 mainnet decision lands October 20; developers finalize the activation height for November 5. ZEC at ~$1,140, down 29% from September’s peak. FXEmpire sees a 40% crash setup to $680; ZCSH ETFs logged a third straight week of outflows. The market is pricing doubt. The builders are pricing November.
Zakura proposed per-swap viewing keys for NEAR Intents swaps: each ZEC swap gets its own key, so a cracked address exposes one trade, not your entire history. Quantum defense at the swap layer. Separately, the Sprout freeze is getting real coverage: 22,309 ZEC becomes unspendable after NU7. ZIP 2003 blocks v4 transactions. The funds aren’t burned, but moving them requires a future upgrade nobody’s built yet.
Today’s the day. Developers from ZF, ZODL, Zakura, and Shielded Labs review testnet performance and decide whether to set the NU7 mainnet activation height for November 5. ZEC at ~$1,140; down 20.9% over 30 days. ZCSH ETFs bled another $10.45M yesterday. Three straight days of withdrawals. The decision hasn’t landed yet. The selling hasn’t stopped.
While developers deliberate, ZEC is trading blows with Hyperliquid for the #10 spot. $560M separates them. ZEC’s trading volume runs higher at $715M vs HYPE’s $541M; more active interest in the privacy coin even as its market cap trails. A privacy protocol fighting for top-10 on the same day it decides whether to ship its biggest upgrade in years.
Zcon7 registration closed today. The conference starts in seven days in Cancún: panels, governance debates, technical workshops. If the activation height gets set today, Zcon7 becomes the last gathering before mainnet. October 28 is Zcash’s 10th birthday. NU7 on November 5. The next two weeks hold a decade of decisions.
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Sean Bowe’s PR #1405 sets NU7 mainnet at block 3,543,405; two approvals, not yet merged, but the height is locked. ZEC rallied 12% to ~$1,276, best single-day move since the Oct 12 squeeze. The market spent weeks pricing uncertainty. Now it’s pricing a date: November 5.
Builder spotlight. Before NU7 ships, every wallet and node has to align on new crate versions. That work is happening now, quietly, across a dozen repos. Zebra PR #11784 bumped to pre.2 NU7 librustzcash releases: zcash_primitives, zcash_proofs, zcash_transparent, zcash_keys all updated. Zallet and Ledger’s zcash-utils followed. This is the unsexy infrastructure that determines whether Nov 5 goes smooth or sideways.
Zcon7 starts in six days in Cancún. Theme: ¡Vamos! With the activation height now confirmed, it becomes the last community gathering before mainnet. October 28 is Zcash’s 10th birthday. Ten years of shielded transactions; fifteen days to the biggest upgrade since Orchard.
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ZEC held its gains overnight, trading around $1,300–$1,356 after yesterday’s 12% pop. Shorts got punished: $3.41M liquidated, 77% from short positions. Meanwhile, Grayscale quietly expanded in-kind transfers yesterday — investors can now swap ZEC directly for shares across 10 Grayscale funds. Institutional plumbing, tightening.
Fourteen days. That’s how long anyone with ZEC in the Sprout pool has before NU7 freezes it permanently. The number: 22,309 ZEC, roughly $29M at today’s prices, sitting in Zcash’s oldest shielded pool since 2016. CryptoSlate, CoinMarketCap, FinanceFeeds all ran the story this week. Keys stay valid. Balances don’t move. A future upgrade could restore access, but no one’s promised one.
There’s a strange symmetry. On one side, Grayscale is widening the on-ramp: in-kind ZEC swaps across ten funds, reduced custody friction, more institutional surface area. On the other, the oldest privacy pool goes dark in two weeks. Zcon7 opens in five days with both stories in the room. Zcash at ten is shedding its first skin while growing a new one.
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ZEC cooled to ~$1,228 after two days of gains. Open interest fell 12%, traders de-leveraging ahead of NU7. Yesterday’s big ship: Zebra 7.0.0, the first stable release with NU7 mainnet support. Every node operator must upgrade before block 3,543,405 or fall off the consensus chain.
CoinDesk’s October ‘State of Encrypted Money’ led with the coinholder vote: 2.375M ZEC voted 106-to-1 to keep halvings. Largest governance turnout in Zcash history, roughly double February’s participation. Deeper in the stack: Nym Research is quantifying network-level anonymity for Zcash transactions, and Zakura formally verified the ZK properties of its Ironwood prover — 21x faster mobile proofs with cryptographic guarantees intact.
Zcon7 in four days. Zcash turns ten in five. The network that launched Groth16 into production, pioneered shielded transactions, and just ran the largest privacy-coin governance vote ever is about to ship 25-second blocks. Not bad for a decade.
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ZCSH ETF pulled in $41.1M last week after three weeks of $143.4M in withdrawals — highest weekly inflows since mid-September. ZEC sits around $1,200–$1,256, quietly recovering while BTC fell 2%. And a leadership change: David Campbell is the new Zcash Foundation Executive Director, bringing four years as ECC’s COO. Alex Bornstein stays through January.
Thursday’s ZCG meeting approved two grants, declined seven. Konclave — removing the viewing key from the coordinator — got the nod. So did Zcash Bolivia, bringing privacy education to two universities. The FROST co-signing grant stays open. Seven others cut. ZCG is spending selectively; that’s the right posture nine days before a major upgrade.
On GitHub: librustzcash PR #3190 merged, citing ZIP 229 for v6 transaction IDs. Slipstream and zkool2 both migrated to stable NU7 mainnet crate releases. Zebra’s OSS-Fuzz issue from the librustzcash bump got fixed.
Zcon7 starts tomorrow in Cancún. Zcash turns ten in few days. Ten days to NU7 mainnet. The community gathers with a new ED, a confirmed activation height, and the largest governance turnout in its history behind it. Shielded Labs’ new EPOCH team is forming around post-quantum cryptography. New ED, new decade, new block time. The next few days set the tone.
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ZEC up 3.6% to ~$1,250 as Zcon7 opens in Cancún. Zcash turns ten tomorrow. But the headline isn’t the birthday. It’s the fight over who gets paid.
Sean Bowe dropped a ZIP draft this morning: end ZCG’s 8% block subsidy, redirect it to the NSM reserve. His argument: ZCG holds $125M in its treasury — the program was never designed to manage that much money. ZODL’s Josh Swihart fired back: cutting only ZCG is a ‘half measure.’ Retire the entire dev fund or don’t touch it. Co-founders clashing on the eve of the 10th anniversary?
A forum poll asks whether ZCG governance is ‘suspiciously centralised.’ The grant defends itself: adult workers face real banking restrictions. Privacy money for people banks won’t serve. On the forum, user @emersonian called the budget reasonable, while supporters argued sex workers facing debanking are a legitimate use case for shielded transactions.
Shielded pool: 4.89M ZEC, 29% of supply. ZCSH ETF: $41.1M in weekly inflows but October still net negative at -$63.97M across 17 sessions. ZCG treasury: 91,453 ZEC (~$125M). That number is the argument.
Zcon7 runs through Wednesday. New ED David Campbell’s first conference. NU7 mainnet in nine days. The governance debate will dominate every hallway conversation in Cancún this week.
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Ten years ago today, block zero. Zcash launched on October 28, 2016 with a promise that financial privacy was a right, not a feature. A decade later ZEC sits at $1,356, up 7% on the day, market cap $22.9B, rank #9. Zcon7 Day 2 is underway in Cancún — fewer talks, more structured debate. Fitting for what’s unfolding.
The builder to watch today is the one who built the thing being celebrated. Sean Bowe wrote the Sapling proving circuit that made shielded transactions practical. He co-founded the protocol. He now leads Project Tachyon — targeting 50,000 private TPS through recursive proofs and aggressive state pruning. And two days before the birthday, he dropped the most divisive draft ZIP of the year: end ZCG’s 8% block subsidy, redirect it to the Network Sustainability Mechanism. The man celebrating the protocol’s birthday is simultaneously trying to rewrite who gets paid to build on it.
The debate has four lanes now. Bowe wants to end the ZCG stream while preserving its $125M treasury. Tyler Winklevoss went further: “end the USAID of Zcash.” Swihart wants both funding streams dissolved — “no half measures.” And community contributor @dismad proposed a 10-year phase-out to zero by 2036. ZCG spends ~$6.1M/year against $68.3M in annual inflows at current prices. The math alone makes the case for cuts; the question is how deep and how fast.
Shielded pool: 4.96M ZEC, 29.2% of supply. Ironwood holds 4.12M of that. ZCSH ETF logged six consecutive inflow sessions, assets at $754.9M. The 10th birthday stat that matters: 52.7% of non-coinbase transactions now touch shielded pools, up from 27.4% last quarter. The privacy feature went from niche to majority behavior in one year.
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The birthday hangover hit. ZEC pulled back to $1,247, down ~5% from yesterday’s $1,356 peak. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Euronext suspended CoinShares’ Zcash ETP on its debut day — not regulation, not compliance, but because the Central Securities Depository can’t settle it yet. A physically-backed ZEC product got built before the plumbing to clear it. That would have been Europe’s fourth Zcash ETP; 21Shares, Virtune, and Valor still trade fine. No timeline for resumption.
Zcon7 closes today in Cancún. The ZSA panel — “Do You Support ZSAs?” with Anoma’s Adrian Brink and ZF’s Arya — was the design choice that defined this Zcon: not another presentation, but an actual argument about whether custom assets belong on a privacy chain. The funding debate that dominated the forum all week was in the room too. When you put the people behind the proposals in the same physical space, the dynamics change. If you’re in Cancún, what are you noticing?
The ZCG funding fight now has mainstream coverage — The Block, CryptoSlate, CCN all ran it this week. The numbers again: ZCG holds $125M, spends ~$6.1M/year, receives ~$68.3M/year at current prices. Four proposals on the table: Bowe (end 8% stream), Winklevoss (“end the USAID of Zcash”), Swihart (dissolve both streams), Dismad (phase out by 2036). None have a ZIP number yet. The debate is loud; the code is quiet.
ZCSH ETF: $2.07M net inflow yesterday, seventh consecutive positive session. Cumulative inflows at $211M, net assets $757M. The US wrapper keeps attracting capital even as the European wrapper stumbles. NU7 activates in 7 days at block 3,543,405. Shielded pool steady at 29.2% of supply.
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The Zcash Daily — Monday, October 19, 2026
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Builder spotlight. Before NU7 ships, every wallet and node has to align on new crate versions. That work is happening now, quietly, across a dozen repos. 
The Zcash Daily — Thursday, October 29, 2026
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