Updated Nov 9, 2026, 6:35 a.m. EST. Published Nov 9, 2026, 5:52 a.m. EST.
2 min read
Summary
- Zcash creators have suggested bringing down the target duration between blocks from 25 seconds to 20, which would accelerate payment verifications merely days after an update dropped the interval down from 75 seconds.
- Preliminary blockchain figures and tests indicate that quicker blocks might prevent a dramatic surge in abandoned mining computational effort, though changes in network observation complicate direct analysis and sandbox trials do not assure mainnet results.
- This adjustment would maintain the daily confidential transaction volume, the coin emission timeline, and the hard cap of 21 million tokens, though it lacks formal approval or a set activation schedule.
Zcash software engineers are already pitching yet another velocity enhancement, only three days after the blockchain finalized an update that accelerated its block creation by a factor of three.
Contributors Dev Ojha and Evan Forbes published a blueprint on Sunday seeking to lower the block generation interval from 25 seconds to 20. Prior to Friday’s NU7 rollout, Zcash minted a fresh block approximately once every 75 seconds.
Blocks represent collections of transactions bundled into the decentralized ledger. The briefer the duration between them, the faster a transaction obtains its initial validation.
With this proposed adjustment, a buyer purchasing items with ZEC at a retail store could anticipate their first verification in roughly 20 seconds instead of 25, while a trading platform demanding three validations could see its expected wait drop from 75 seconds down to 60 seconds.
Actual waiting durations fluctuate since miners solve blocks at unpredictable intervals.
The initiative comes on the heels of promising initial outcomes from NU7, which creators previously feared might cause a higher volume of miners to waste electrical power on competing blocks.
When two miners solve blocks almost simultaneously, the network ultimately validates one and discards the other. These abandoned blocks, referred to as orphans, signify that the unsuccessful miner expended electricity on labor yielding zero compensation. Accelerated blocks amplify that hazard because operators possess less time to become aware of rival discoveries.
Even so, the observed Zcash orphan frequency rested at a mere 0.69% during the 24-hour window ending early Monday, according to metrics from ZecBlock’s mining tracker, contrasted with roughly 0.66% prior to NU7.
“The orphan frequency has performed better than I expected!” Ojha posted on Monday.
The percentage spanning the entire timeframe post-NU7 remains elevated at 1.29%, showing declining metrics following an initial spike. Furthermore, ZecBlock expanded its monitoring infrastructure from a single node up to ten shortly prior to the upgrade, implying it can now spot certain competing blocks that previously escaped notice. Consequently, the metrics cannot supply a precise before-and-after comparison.
Engineers separately evaluated the suggested 20-second blocks across a test network consisting of 80 miners dispersed across 12 geographic zones to observe the frequency of discarded competing blocks. Between 1.9% and 3.3% were lost, contingent upon the software utilized, compared against 4.68% during earlier stress tests that assisted in determining if 25-second blocks were secure.
Those findings imply Zcash could reduce validation windows further without a severe escalation in wasted mining effort, though modeled evaluations do not guarantee identical performance on the live blockchain.
This modification would not elevate the total volume of confidential transactions Zcash can process daily. Developers intend to accommodate fewer transactions per block to offset the higher rate of block generation, ensuring user wallets won’t need to parse extra data.
The adjustment would preserve Zcash’s emission timeline and the 21 million coin supply cap.
Ojha and Forbes desire this suggestion to be evaluated during the upcoming community vote and potentially integrated into NU7.1, an upcoming network patch. It has not received official endorsement nor been assigned an activation timeframe.
Read More: Zcash activates major upgrade, targeting three times faster payments
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/11/09/zcash-developers-want-20-second-blocks-just-days-after-major-speed-upgrade.
