Zcash falls almost 8 percent: why developers want 20-second blocks

Zcash is falling much harder than the rest of the crypto market on Monday. The price of Zcash (ZEC) stands at around $1,165 in the evening, roughly €1,041, and 7.9 percent below the previous day. According to CoinGecko, no other coin among the 25 largest cryptocurrencies is falling more. At the same time, a new proposal from the developers is on the table: with the next small network upgrade, NU7.1, the block time is to drop from 25 to 20 seconds.

The two are not causally linked. The decline follows the broad sell-off in ether and XRP and meets a futures market in which many traders had bet on rising prices. The proposal, by contrast, is a draft that the community still has to vote on. If you hold Zcash or want to buy it, you should know both threads, because they play out over different time frames.

Zcash price on Monday: $1,165 and a daily low at $1,164

According to CoinGecko, Zcash traded at $1,165.20 at around 19:50 on Monday evening. The high over the past 24 hours was $1,266.72 and the low $1,163.94, so the price ended the evening almost at the bottom of the daily range. Over seven days it is down 5.1 percent. Zcash is around 63 percent below its all-time high of $3,191.93 from October 2016.

A report from TokenPost captures the sharpest part of the move: by 18:26, Zcash had fallen 3.72 percent within four hours on the Binance spot market, to $1,171. In the hour before, long positions worth $1.54 million were forcibly closed across Binance, Bybit and OKX, against only around $50,000 in shorts. A liquidation is the automatic closure of a leveraged position once the posted collateral no longer covers the loss. The total is modest, but the split shows the direction: it was mainly leveraged buyers who were hit.

By comparison, bitcoin slipped only 1.7 percent over the same period to around $74,600. The Fear and Greed Index from alternative.me, a sentiment gauge from 0 (extreme fear) to 100 (extreme greed), stands at 29, in fear territory.

Block time of 20 instead of 25 seconds: what the NU7.1 proposal sets out

The block time is the average interval at which a new block is added to the blockchain. Only with that block is a payment considered confirmed once. With the NU7 upgrade, which activated on November 6 at block 3,543,405, this interval on Zcash fell from 75 to 25 seconds; we explained the switch in our article on the NU7 block time.

At 21:56 on Sunday evening, the developer ValarDragon proposed the next step in the Zcash community forum. He sees it as a continuation of ZIP 218, the Zcash Improvement Proposal that introduced the 25 seconds. A ZIP is a formal change request for the protocol, comparable to a draft bill. The key points of the draft:

• The target block time falls from 25 to 20 seconds.
• The caps on shielded actions per block are scaled by a factor of 4/5: the shared budget and the Orchard and Ironwood actions from 330 to 264, Sapling inputs and outputs from 300 to 240.
• The maximum block size of 2 MB stays.
• The default expiry of a transaction rises from 120 to 150 blocks, so that it stays the same in minutes.

The developers want to bring the proposal to the next vote and earmark it for NU7.1. The draft gives no date for the upgrade. It describes NU7.1 as a very small, low-risk upgrade.

Why shorter blocks: payments at the till and swaps via NEAR Intents

The reasoning in the forum is simple. Every transaction waits for the next block, even when blocks are almost empty. That slows down payments at the shop till, exchange deposits and swaps between blockchains. NEAR Intents is named explicitly: market makers there only trade once a payment has at least one confirmation. Five seconds less waiting per block adds up when several confirmations are needed.

In the discussion, one participant asked whether 20 seconds was really the best figure, or whether 17 or 21 seconds would fit better. ValarDragon replied that the block time is only part of the solution. Sub-second confirmations would need other approaches; after the 20 seconds, a doubling of the block size should come next. Another participant raised a change of consensus mechanism, but considered it hard to push through without a split.

Orphaned blocks: why the orphan rate decides the block time

The price of shorter blocks is the orphan rate. An orphaned block arises when two miners find a valid block almost simultaneously and the network settles on only one of them. The other drops out and its computing work is lost. The shorter the block time, the more often this happens, because a new block has not yet reached the whole network before the next one is found. If the rate rises too far, well-connected large miners gain an advantage and security suffers.

So the developers measured it. On a test network with 80 miners at twelve locations worldwide, including New York, Singapore, London and Bangalore, full 2 MB blocks at 20-second intervals produced an orphan rate of 1.9 percent when all nodes ran the Zakura software. With a mix of Zakura and Zebra-Andele, the rate was 3.3 percent. For the 25 seconds, a measured rate of 4.68 percent was considered acceptable in May. According to the draft, the new interval therefore meets the same security threshold as the old one. ValarDragon also writes that the actual orphan rate on mainnet has been lower since NU7 than before the upgrade.

The load remains low. According to figures from the discussion, Zcash processes around 80 kilobytes per second at peak times; with 20-second blocks it would be about 100 kilobytes.

Issuance and halving: the block reward falls, the daily amount stays

One point matters most for holders: the number of new ZEC per day is not meant to change. Because 20 percent more blocks are produced, the reward per block falls to four-fifths. Counted in blocks, the halving, the regular halving of the block reward, moves from 5,040,000 to 6,300,000 blocks. In calendar time it therefore stays on the same date. The window over which the network readjusts mining difficulty is also stretched from 102 to 128 blocks, so that it stays the same length in minutes.

The proposal does not, then, expand supply. Monday's price drop cannot be derived from the draft; the evidence for it lies in the market.

Open interest at OKX: new positions opened into the decline

Open interest measures the total value of all open futures contracts on a coin. If it rises while the price falls, traders are opening new positions into the move. If it falls, positions are being closed or liquidated. For the perpetual ZEC-USDT contract at OKX, 25 hourly readings from 19:00 on Sunday to 19:00 on Monday give the following picture:

• Open interest fell from $185.8 million to $154.4 million. In ZEC terms it dropped from 146,744 to a low of 123,767 ZEC at 16:00.
• It then climbed back to 132,250 ZEC by 19:00, even though the price fell from $1,226 to $1,167 over those three hours.
• The ratio of accounts with long positions to accounts with short positions rose from 1.05 to 1.36.
• The funding rate, the balancing payment between the long and short sides every eight hours, was most recently plus 0.01 percent. On Sunday afternoon it was still negative at minus 0.028 percent.

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on November 9, 2026. It is based on OKX's public market data on open interest, account ratio, funding and hourly prices for the ZEC-USDT perpetual.

The figures match the picture from the liquidations. On Sunday and Monday morning, positions were reduced. Since the afternoon, new ones have been added, and more and more accounts are betting on a recovery. If the price keeps falling, it is exactly this side that is in the firing line. The ratio counts accounts, though, not capital: a few large short positions can outweigh many small long accounts.

Ether, XRP and Zcash: the sell-off ahead of the US inflation data

Zcash is not falling alone. According to CoinGecko, ether is down 4.9 percent to around $2,125, XRP 5.6 percent to $1.09 and Solana 3.4 percent. At 14:30 on Tuesday, the US Labor Department publishes consumer prices for October. If they come in higher than expected, the prospect of rate cuts by the Federal Reserve fades and risk assets come under pressure. Many traders reduce their risk ahead of such dates.

The decline is also the second within a few days. Over the weekend, after the NU7 launch, Zcash had already given back some of its gains. Fund-flow figures for November are not yet reliable, so we do not cite them here as a cause.

Buying Zcash in Germany: MiCA exchange, holding period and shielded addresses

If you want to use the decline as an entry point, check the trading venue first. In the EU, crypto exchanges may only offer their services with authorisation under the MiCA regulation, the European market rules for crypto assets. Not every exchange lists Zcash, because some providers avoid privacy coins on account of anti-money-laundering rules. Our crypto exchange comparison shows which platforms trade ZEC and at what fees.

Zcash has two types of address. Transparent addresses work as they do on Bitcoin, and every payment is publicly visible. Shielded addresses hide the sender, recipient and amount using zero-knowledge proofs. Before you move ZEC from an exchange to your own wallet, it is worth checking the provider's help pages to see which address type it pays out to.

For tax purposes in Germany, Zcash is treated the same as other cryptocurrencies. Under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act, a gain is tax-free if more than one year passes between purchase and sale. Below that, gains from private disposals remain tax-free only as long as they stay below the €1,000 exemption limit in total for the year. Losses from a sale within the holding period can be offset against such gains. If you sell at a loss now, you will need a clean record of all purchases and sales for your tax return.

Leverage and liquidation: the levels at $1,120 and $1,050

At $1,163.94, the daily low is only just below the current price. The next levels come from the daily candles of the past 45 days on the OKX spot market. On November 3, Zcash turned higher at $1,121.60, and on November 2 the low was $1,127.68. The area around $1,120 is therefore the first zone where buyers have recently stepped in. Below that lies the lowest level of the entire period: on October 18, Zcash fell as far as $1,048.53. On the upside, the daily high at $1,266.72 marks the area Zcash would have to reclaim to make up Monday's decline. cryptoticker.io also compiled these levels itself on November 9, 2026, from OKX daily prices.

If you trade with leverage, you should know your position's liquidation price and not place it near these levels. At ten times leverage, a decline of around ten percent is enough to wipe out the collateral. Ahead of a date like the inflation data in particular, prices often jump in both directions before one prevails. Low leverage and a firmly set stop-loss protect against a forced closure at the worst possible moment.

Zcash below $1,200: before November 10, protection comes first

All told, a market-wide decline meets a futures market that is filling up with long positions again. The proposal for 20-second blocks changes nothing about issuance and still has to pass the vote. Three steps help put it in context:

1. Before buying, check whether your exchange holds a MiCA licence and lists Zcash at all. Our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges offers an overview.
2. Use leverage sparingly ahead of Tuesday's US inflation data and know your liquidation price. The comparison of perp DEX providers shows which platforms offer which safeguards for perpetuals.
3. Record purchases and sales with date and price, so that the holding period and exemption limit can be proven later. Crypto tax software helps with this.

(As of November 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)