Zcash NU7 on November 5: What to Check Before the Upgrade
Zcash's NU7 upgrade brings 25-second blocks around November 5. What changes, the Sprout deadline, who bought ZEC this year, and the number the video watches.
Key takeaways
- Zcash's NU7 upgrade activates at block 3,543,405, expected around November 5, and cuts block time from about 75 seconds to 25 seconds.
- Daily new ZEC supply stays at about 1,800 coins because the block reward drops to about 0.52 ZEC.
- Coins still in the old Sprout pool cannot be moved after NU7 goes live, so early holders should check their wallets first.
- According to the video, much of this year's ZEC rally came from one ETF, one company and futures traders.
- The shielded pool, about 4.96 million ZEC, is the number the video says will show whether NU7 brings lasting demand.
Zcash’s NU7 upgrade is expected to activate around November 5. It cuts block time from about 75 seconds to 25 seconds, so payments confirm roughly three times faster, while daily new supply stays the same. Of the ZEC that voted, 99.9% backed the faster blocks. Yet ZEC fell about 25% from its late-September high by the time the video was recorded.
For holders, two things matter. Anyone with coins from Zcash’s early years has a deadline, because NU7 switches off the old Sprout pool. And the video argues that a faster network does not automatically mean more people want to own ZEC. It points to one number, the shielded pool, as the real test.
What does the Zcash NU7 upgrade change?
NU7 changes how often Zcash adds a new block, the bundle of payments the network confirms at once. Today a block arrives about every 75 seconds, so a payment waits around that long for its first confirmation. After NU7, that drops to 25 seconds.
Faster blocks do not mean more coins. The reward for each block falls to a third, about 0.52 ZEC. The network keeps issuing about 1,800 new ZEC per day, the same as before.
When the video was recorded, the team had not yet agreed on the exact block for the switch, and the video said its readiness list still showed bugs being fixed. Developers have since set activation at block 3,543,405, which is expected to arrive around November 5. For a closer look at the block-time change and exchange preparations, see our earlier piece on Zcash NU7 and Gemini’s move to Zakura.
Do early Zcash holders need to move coins out of Sprout?
Yes. If any of your ZEC still sits in Sprout, the video says to move it before the upgrade. Sprout is Zcash’s oldest private pool, and NU7 switches it off. Once the upgrade goes live, anything left in Sprout cannot be moved. The video adds that there is no promise this will ever change.
More than 22,000 ZEC still sits in Sprout. Most holders will never have touched it. The risk falls mainly on people who got coins in Zcash’s early years and haven’t moved them since. Our guide to what the Sprout switch-off means for old ZEC covers this in more detail.
Do Zcash holders support NU7?
Zcash holders who voted backed the faster blocks: 99.9% of the ZEC that voted supported 25-second blocks. About 2.4 million ZEC took part, and only coins held in a shielded pool could vote. A separate vote to keep Zcash’s halvings, the points where the reward for new coins gets cut in half, passed with 98.9%.
The video’s point is that the plan itself is not in dispute. With broad agreement on the technology, the open question is the price.
Who bought Zcash in 2026?
According to the video, a large part of this year’s rally came from one fund, one company and a lot of futures traders.
| Buyer | What the video says |
|---|---|
| Grayscale Zcash ETF (ZCSH) | Lets people own ZEC through a brokerage account. Only about $306 million of new money actually came in, and about $100 million of that was Grayscale’s parent company swapping its coins for shares. |
| Cypherpunk Technologies | A Nasdaq company backed by the Winklevoss twins. It held roughly $500 million worth of ZEC at the time of a podcast interview, runs about 18% of Zcash’s mining power, keeps the coins it mines, and has said it wants to own 5% of all ZEC. |
| Futures traders | On one recent day, about $6.8 billion in futures traded against about $540 million of actual ZEC, more than 12 times as much. |
Futures are contracts that bet on where the price goes, usually made with borrowed money. You don’t need to own a single coin to place one. In a clip shown in the video, Cypherpunk’s chief investment officer said the company has held all the Zcash it mined and intends to keep doing so. The video adds that plenty of other miners sell what they mine.
Why has ZEC fallen before the upgrade?
According to the video, money has been leaving Zcash. At the time of recording, ZEC was around $1,263. At the end of September it touched about $1,697, which the video calls its highest price since 2016. That is roughly 25% gone in under a month.
The video points to two signs:
- Grayscale’s Zcash ETF has seen outflows, with its worst week at about $94 million.
- Weekly transactions on the network are down by more than half from the late-September peak.
The host describes a familiar pattern. Investors wait for a breakout, buy near the top, then sit on unrealized losses for months or years.
Where would new demand for Zcash come from?
The video says demand for any coin comes from two places: people need it to use the network, or people want to hold it. On Zcash, the first source is small. The video says a normal payment costs about 12 cents in fees, and the whole network brought in about $2,000 in fees on October 18. Meanwhile, more than $2 million worth of new ZEC is created every day. So, the video argues, fees are never going to move the price. Any demand NU7 creates has to come from people wanting to hold more.
Faster blocks also only help if exchanges credit deposits faster, and each exchange decides that for itself. According to the video, almost none have announced plans tied to the upgrade so far. The closest is Gemini, the exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins. Gemini switched to new Zcash software called Zakura, which caught up with the whole network in a little over 6 hours. The old software took close to a day.
The twins have also filed for their own Zcash ETF with a 0.25% fee, a tenth of the 2.5% Grayscale charges. Our article on the Winklevoss Zcash ETF and what a fund can’t give you explains that filing.
What risks does the video flag?
The video names two risks beyond price. The first is a flaw found earlier this year in Zcash’s Orchard private pool, before the July Ironwood upgrade. According to the video, the Winklevoss ETF filing says there is no way to prove for certain that nobody used the flaw before it was fixed. For a coin people hold for privacy, the video calls that a serious issue. We covered the background in Zcash counterfeit bugs and whether fake ZEC could exist.
The second is new EU rules that bar exchanges there from handling privacy coins like Zcash from July 2027. The rules cover exchanges, not people holding coins in their own wallets. Still, anyone in Europe will have fewer places to trade ZEC.
What is the shielded pool, and why does it matter?
The shielded pool is where Zcash users hide amounts and senders, and the video treats its size as the clearest measure of real use. On Zcash, coins can sit in the open, like on Bitcoin, or move into the shielded pool. Privacy is the reason Zcash exists, so shielded coins are the ones people actually use for that purpose.
The pool holds about 4.96 million ZEC, around 29% of all coins, up about 1% over the last month. The video says the pool is still below its June level. It also says private use barely moved while, in its words, the price more than tripled, an ETF arrived and futures trading took off. Other reporting does not back up the June comparison. One report put shielded supply up about 16% since July, from about 4.3 million to about 4.96 million ZEC. Another had shielded holdings at the end of August up about 10% on the end of June. So shielded holdings have grown this year, just far less than the price.
That is the test the video sets for NU7. If faster payments lead more people to keep ZEC shielded, price and real use start moving together. If the pool stays flat, the host says, it is just a faster network for the same traders.
A pre-upgrade checklist for Zcash holders
These checks draw on the facts above. The first comes from the video. The rest are Bullrunners’ own.
- Check for Sprout coins. If you have ZEC from Zcash’s early years, confirm none of it sits in the Sprout pool. Anything left there after the upgrade can’t be moved.
- Track the activation block. NU7 activates at block 3,543,405, which is expected around November 5.
- Check your exchange. See whether your exchange has announced any NU7 plans, since each one decides how quickly it credits deposits.
- Know your jurisdiction. If you are in the EU, exchanges there are barred from handling privacy coins from July 2027.
What to watch after November 5
The first thing to confirm is that the upgrade activates at block 3,543,405 as planned. After that, the video names one number to track: the shielded pool. If ZEC held in the pool climbs from about 4.96 million coins, the video says, that would be a sign faster payments are bringing real use. If it stays flat, the upgrade will have made Zcash faster without making it more widely used.
Two other things are worth checking, though the video does not raise them. One is whether more exchanges announce faster deposit crediting. The other is how flows into Grayscale’s Zcash ETF develop. The Winklevoss Zcash ETF has only been filed, so whether it launches at all comes first.
Frequently asked questions
When is the Zcash NU7 upgrade?
NU7 activates at block 3,543,405, which developers set in late October. That block is expected to arrive around November 5. The exact day is an estimate based on block timing.
Does NU7 increase the supply of Zcash?
No. Blocks come three times as often, but the reward per block drops to about 0.52 ZEC, so roughly 1,800 new ZEC are still created each day.
What happens to Zcash left in the Sprout pool after NU7?
NU7 switches off Sprout, Zcash's oldest private pool, and coins left there can't be moved once the upgrade is live. More than 22,000 ZEC still sits in Sprout, and the video says there is no promise that will change.
Why has the Zcash price fallen before the upgrade?
At the time of recording, ZEC was around $1,263, about 25% below its late-September high of about $1,697. The video points to outflows from Grayscale's Zcash ETF, traders leaving, and weekly transactions falling by more than half from the peak.
What is the Zcash shielded pool?
The shielded pool holds ZEC whose amounts and senders are hidden. It holds about 4.96 million coins, around 29% of supply, and the video treats its size as the test of whether NU7 brings lasting demand.
Full video transcript
From the video's captions, lightly formatted. Captions can mishear names and numbers, so check figures against the article above.
On November 5th, Zcash is set to make its whole network three times [music] faster, and a lot of Zcash holders are counting on that date to bring the buyers back. It's already running a test version of the network, and it got there ahead of schedule. The people who own the coin want it, too. Of all the Zcash that voted on it, 99.9% said yes, and one big exchange has already changed the software it runs Zcash on just to get ready for it. So, you'd think Zcash would be flying, but at the time I'm recording this video, it's down about 25% since late September, and money has been leaving the Zcash ETF.
And here's the strange part. There's one number that tells you whether this upgrade brings in real buyers or just another round of trading. [music] And while the price more than tripled this year, that number barely moved. So, can a faster network actually make people want to own more Zcash? Well, my research team and I dug into what the upgrade changes, who's been buying Zcash this year, and who's been selling it, and we're getting into it in this video. Let's run it.
All right, bull runners, welcome back to the channel. So, the upgrade is called NU7, and the big change is how often Zcash adds new payments to its network. Right now, Zcash bundles payments into a new block about every 75 seconds. So, your payment isn't confirmed until it lands in one of those blocks. So, today, you wait about 75 seconds for your first confirmation.
NU7 cuts that to 25 seconds. So, the same payment confirms three times faster. Now, faster blocks won't print more Zcash. The reward for each block drops to a third, to about 0.52 Zcash. So, the same amount of new Zcash still comes out every day, about 1,800 coins.
The network gets faster, and the supply stays where it's at. Now, November 5th is the target, and it can still move. The team behind Zcash still have to agree on the exact block it switches to, and their own readiness list still shows bugs being fixed. And if you've held Zcash for a long time, and you got in early, there's one thing you need to check before November 5th. NU7 switches off Zcash's oldest private pool called Sprout, where more than 22,000 Zcash still sits in there.
Once the upgrade goes live, anything left in Sprout can't be moved, and there's no promise that will ever change. Most people will never touch Sprout, but if you have coins from Zcash's early years, move them first. So, NU7 makes Zcash faster. Whether that makes anyone want to own more is a different question. And the people who own the most Zcash have already had their say.
Zcash holders backed the 25-second blocks with 99.9% of the vote. So, they already voted to keep the Zcash halvings, the points where the reward for new coins get cut in half, and that got 98.9%. When nearly everyone holding a coin agrees on the plan, the only thing left to argue about is the price. And the price has been going the wrong way. Now, to see why, you have to look at who was buying Zcash in the first place.
In September, Grayscale Zcash ETF, ZCSH, topped $1 million in assets. It's a fund that lets people own Zcash through a normal brokerage account without ever touching the coin. But less of that was new money than it looks. Only about $306 million had actually come in, and about a hundred million of that was Grayscale's own parent company swapping its coins for shares. The other big buyer is Cypherpunk Technologies, a Nasdaq company backed by the Winklevoss twins.
When this podcast was recorded, it owned about 500 million of Zcash. It also runs about 18% of the computing power that mines new coins. And its chief investment officer was asked what they do with the coins they mine. Listen to this.
Yeah, so far we've held all of the Zcash we've mined, and we we intend to continue to do so.
And plenty of other Zcash miners have been selling what they mine. So, every coin Cypherpunk keeps is one that never reaches the market. And the company has said it wants to own 5% of all the Zcash. And a lot of the action was never in the coin at all. On one recent day, about $6.8 billion dollars futures traded against about 540 million of actual Zcash.
Futures are bets on where the price goes, usually made with borrowed money, and you don't need to own a single coin to place one. So, more than 12 times as much money was betting on the price as buying the coin. So, a big part of this year's run came from one fund, one company, and a lot of traders betting on the price. And over the last few weeks, a lot of that money has been heading for the exit. At the time I'm recording this video, Zcash is around 1,263.
At the end of September, it touched about 1,697, its highest price since 2016. That's about 25% gone in under a month. So, this is why investors lose money in the markets. They always wait for a project to break out, and they buy the peak, and they're left holding in unrealized losses for months or even years for recovery. Money has been leaving Zcash's Grayscale ETF, too, and its worst week was about 94 million dollars out.
Even the network itself has gone quiet. Weekly transactions on Zcash are down by more than half from the peak in late September. That's what makes this so frustrating. If you bought it in September, the upgrade is on schedule, and the people who own the coin are behind it. Everything about the network went right, and the price went the other way.
So, if the money is leaving before the upgrade, what's supposed to bring it back after? Well, that depends on where demand for the coin actually comes from. There are really only two places. People need the coin to use the network, or people want to hold it. On Zcash, the first one is tiny, and normal payment costs about 12 cents in fees.
And the whole network brought in about $2,000 in fees on October 18th. Meanwhile, more than 2 million dollars worth of new Zcash gets created every single day. So, fees are never going to move the price. Whatever demand N U 7 brings has to come from people wanting to hold more Zcash. And faster blocks only help if exchanges actually let your coins show up faster.
Each exchange decides that for itself, and so far, almost none have announced plans tied to the upgrade. The closest thing to one is Gemini, the exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins, and the one I mentioned at the start. It switched its Zcash software ahead of the faster blocks. The new software, called Sakura, caught up with the whole network in a little over 6 hours. The old one took close to a day.
And the twins aren't stopping there. They filed for their own Zcash ETF with a 0.25% fee, a tenth of what Grayscale charges. But the same filing also points to a real risk. Earlier this year, a flaw was found private pools. The Winklevoss filing says there's no way to prove for certain that nobody used it before it was fixed.
And for a coin people hold for privacy, that's definitely a big deal. And new EU rules bar exchanges there from handling privacy coins like Zcash from 2027. So, for anyone in Europe, there'll be fewer places to trade it. So, here's the number I mentioned at the start of this video. On Zcash, you can keep your coins out in the open, like on Bitcoin, or you can move them into to what's called the shielded pool, where nobody can see the amounts or who sent what.
That's the whole reason Zcash exists. So, the coins in that pool is the Zcash that people are actually using for privacy. And right now, that's about 4.96 million coins, around 29% of all the coins. And over the last month, it's up about 1%, and it's still below where it was in June, months before the run even started. And that's the part that doesn't add up.
The price more than tripled, the ETF arrived, and futures trading took off. And through all of it, the amount of Zcash people actually use privately barely moved. That's the real test for NU7. If faster payments get more people keeping their Zcash in that pool, the price and real use start moving together, and that's demand that sticks. If the pool stays flat, it's just a faster network for the same traders.
So, can NU7 create real demand for Zcash? Well, it can't do it on its own. The demand that lasts only shows up if people start using Zcash for what it's actually built for. So, what does all this mean if you're holding Zcash or any other altcoins right now? Well, it means holding Zcash into a big date can be dangerous.
A date on the calendar feels like a sure thing. That's exactly when people put in more money than they meant to because it feels like the upgrade will do the work for them on the price chart. Then the date comes, the price doesn't do what you hoped for, and you're sitting on a coin you bought for a reason that never showed up in the price because nobody knows what Zcash does after November 5th on the price chart. What you can decide is how much of your money is riding on it before the date gets here. And that's hard to judge on your own because when you're excited about a coin, holding a little more always feels like the right call.
So, that's where my research team comes in. When you click the link in the description below and you watch that free briefing, it'll explain the strategy that we've been leveraging to help our clients secure, grow, and scale their portfolios during any market conditions. And if it makes sense, you can book a strategy call with an expert on my team. On that call, they'll go through what you hold, you don't reveal your private keys, you keep full self-custody of your crypto. We're not a hedge fund here, but we break down our SGS protocol.
And if it makes sense for where you're at, then you can implement it right away. Then you work one-on-one with an expert on my team together to identify the top DeFi opportunities, the top day trading strategies, the top altcoin picks, and everything in between. So, make sure to check out the first link in the description that says, "Get your free crypto portfolio review." If you're watching this on mobile, tap more, it's right at the top, watch the short video, fill in the quick form, it takes less than a minute, and pick a time that works best for you. Now, everyone is watching November 5th. Whether it worked will show up later in how much Zcash people moved into the shielded pool.
So, as always, I will see you on the next video. I'll see you at the top. You know what to do. Stay bullish.
All right.
[music]
Woo! Woo!
[music]
Woo! Woo!
Education and commentary only, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile and you can lose money. Do your own research and speak to a qualified advisor before making investment decisions. Figures and quotes are as reported in the video on October 26, 2026 and may have changed since.
