Zcash NU7: developers name block 3,543,405, yet the activation height is in no document

The documented position: the Zcash project's official upgrade page answers the most important question about Zcash this Wednesday in a single sentence: "The activation height for NU7 has not yet been set." That is notable, because October 20 was the day on which, according to the public schedule, the developers intended to decide on precisely that height. The deadline has passed and the number is still missing. Our own assessment follows in a separate section below.

Meanwhile a specific block number is circulating, and the price has risen sharply. On the Kraken exchange one ZEC traded at $1,277.14 over the course of October 21, after a daily low of $1,133.43 — a gap of 12.7 percent between the low and the current level within 24 hours. The number named as the activation height is block 3,543,405. It appears in a proposal, not in the project documents, and that difference decides whether November 5 is a date or a goal.

What the Zcash upgrade page says today

The page z.cash/upgrade/nu7 is where the project records the status of every upgrade. There, NU7 is described as "planned to be the ninth major network upgrade for Zcash", and above the whole section sits the note that the activation height has not yet been set. Under "Current Status" the page links to four things: a draft ZIP for the deployment, feature-branch testnets, an accelerated NU7 proposal from Shielded Labs, and the index of candidate NU7 ZIPs.

Since October 21 a specific number has been in circulation. According to a report by Cointelegraph, developers agreed on block 3,543,405 at a ZIP editors' meeting, proposed in a pull request by Sean Bowe and expected around November 5. The report says the upgrade's specifications must first be finalised before the proposal is adopted, and that an activation date is not confirmed. That is exactly the point here: an understanding reached in a meeting and an open pull request are a different thing from a number that sits in the deployment ZIP and ships in the node software.

Activation height means the block number from which the new consensus rules apply. With Zcash it is the actual commitment: a calendar date is only an estimate derived from the block number and the average block time. As long as the height is not in the deployment ZIP and built into the node software, there is no binding point in time, only a target.

For comparison: for the last anchored upgrade, NU6.3, the ZIP index names a specific number, mainnet block height 3,428,143. That is what a fixed date looks like. The equivalent number for NU7 is still missing from the ZIP index.

NU7 at a glance: 25 seconds between blocks instead of 75

The largest single piece of NU7 in substance is ZIP 218. The draft, written by Dev Ojha and Evan Forbes and filed on March 13, 2026, calls for a change in the so-called block target spacing from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. Block target spacing is the time between two blocks that the network's difficulty adjustment works towards.

For users that primarily means shorter waiting times. The draft's abstract states that user-visible latency falls by a factor of three, and it expressly names the case of someone needing only one or two confirmations, for instance for small payments. ZIP 218 also introduces caps on actions per shielded pool, separately for Sapling, Orchard and Ironwood.

Alongside it, the project index lists four further ZIPs for NU7: ZIP 235 removes 60 percent of transaction fees from circulation, ZIP 237 arranges issuance so that the halving schedule is preserved, ZIP 2003 bans version 4 transactions, and ZIP 2008 updates an address list for the funding streams. Which of these ZIPs actually end up in NU7 is settled by ZIP 259.

All six NU7 ZIPs sit at "Draft": the count from October 21

On October 21, 2026 we pulled the ZIP index on zips.z.cash and noted the status recorded there for every ZIP the project itself lists for NU7. The basis was the five NU7 ZIPs from the "NU7 ZIPs" list plus deployment ZIP 259, so six entries checked. The result is uniform:

• ZIP 218, 25-second block spacing: Draft
• ZIP 235, 60 percent of fees out of circulation: Draft
• ZIP 237, halving-preserving issuance: Draft
• ZIP 2003, banning version 4 transactions: Draft
• ZIP 2008, updating the address list: Draft
• ZIP 259, deployment of NU7: Draft

None of the six entries carries the status "Proposed" or "Final". The ZIP process describes Draft expressly as "works-in-progress" that have yet to become "Proposed" or else be withdrawn, rejected or superseded. The two revisions NU7 would make to existing ZIPs also sit at Draft there: revision 2 of ZIP 207 on the funding streams and revision 3 of ZIP 214 on the development fund.

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on October 21, 2026. It says nothing about whether NU7 is coming or not, and it is no substitute for an announcement by the developers. It only shows what was recorded in the project documents the day after the deadline.

Why ZIP 2003 is decisive for old Sprout balances

Of all the NU7 building blocks, ZIP 2003 is the one that can touch balances directly. It bans version 4 transactions. Old holdings in the long-superseded Sprout pool, Zcash's first shielded pool, can only be moved using such older transaction formats. If that format disappears, moving those balances becomes awkward at the very least.

How serious this is for you depends on where your ZEC sit. If you hold them on an exchange, pools are no concern of yours: the operator manages the keys there, and the switch happens without any action from you. If, on the other hand, you have been running your own wallet with shielded holdings for years and never migrated them, do not let the time until activation slip away. We described that case in more detail back in September in our article on the Zcash NU7 upgrade.

How to check which pool your ZEC sit in

You can tell which pool applies from the address format your balance is tied to. Addresses starting with zc belong to the old Sprout pool. Addresses starting with zs belong to Sapling. Unified addresses, which start with u1, cover the more modern pools, Orchard among them. Transparent addresses start with t and behave as they do with Bitcoin, that is without shielding.

If you find an address of the first kind in your wallet with a remaining balance, that is the holding at issue. The way forward is open in both directions: you can move it into a unified address in the same wallet or, if you want to retire the wallet anyway, transfer it to current software. A move between your own addresses stays a move, not a sale.

Either way the precondition is that you hold the keys yourself. If you want to switch to a device for that, the common models and how they differ are set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

Zcash price: $1,277 and a daily range of $163

The price figures diverge depending on the data source and the measurement window, and in this case that is not a rounding error but the consequence of a very deep daily low. Kraken reports a price of $1,277.14 for ZEC/USD, with a daily high of $1,296.00 and a daily low of $1,133.43. Against the level 24 hours earlier, $1,256.46, that gives a gain of 1.7 percent; against the daily low it is 12.7 percent. Daily turnover there came to around 23,259 ZEC.

CoinGecko arrives at $1,277.80 for October 21 and reports a 24-hour gain of 12.37 percent and 3.66 percent over the week. The spread of 1.7 to 12.4 percent for the same day is explained by the point in time each source compares against. In euro terms ZEC stood at €1,136.54 on Kraken at the same moment. That places Zcash tenth among the largest cryptocurrencies, with a market value of $21.7 billion.

Worth noting for context: the price is well below where it stood at the end of September. Our article of October 13 described the slide from $1,315 to $1,185 ahead of the decision that was then still expected. Since then the price has fallen below $1,100 and come back above it. The levels that now decide the question are the daily low at $1,133 on the downside and the daily high at $1,296 on the upside.

The switch from zcashd to Zebra concerns node operators only

One point on the upgrade page is regularly read more broadly than it is meant. It states that NU7 is not supported by the old reference software zcashd and that a switch to the Zebra node is necessary, an independent Zcash implementation by the Zcash Foundation written in the Rust programming language. That is addressed at people who run a full node themselves.

For ASIC miners the page expressly records that no separate step is needed: they do not validate the consensus rules themselves and depend on the mining pool, which has to update its nodes. And anyone simply holding ZEC in a wallet or with a provider runs no node and has nothing to do about software.

Holding period and tax: what a move between pools triggers

When moving your own holdings, investors in Germany regularly face the question of the one-year period. Under German income tax law, selling cryptocurrencies after a holding period of more than a year is tax-free; within the year, the taxation of private disposals applies, with an exemption threshold of €1,000 per year.

A transfer between two addresses that both belong to you is not a disposal. The holding period continues to run and the acquisition data stay the same. What matters is that you can evidence it: if you pull holdings from an old wallet into a new one, record the date, the amount and both addresses so the period remains traceable if questioned. The tools in our overview of tax tools and portfolio trackers help with that, recognising transfers as such rather than booking them as a sale. For larger amounts or an unclear history, a visit to a tax adviser remains the safe route.

Buying in Germany: MiCA licensing and the ban from July 2027

Anyone wanting to buy or sell ZEC here will find the coin at a good many providers, but not at all of them. Shielded cryptocurrencies are on a timetable of their own in Europe: the EU anti-money-laundering regulation provides for restrictions on anonymity-enhancing crypto assets from July 2027, which we wrote about in our article on Zcash trading and the EU framework. Some exchanges have already removed privacy coins from their European offering ahead of that.

In practice that means: before placing an order, check whether your provider still lists ZEC for customers in Germany at all, and whether it holds a licence under the EU regulation on markets in crypto assets. Which trading venues meet that and what they charge in fees is set out in our overview of the best crypto exchanges. If you work with leveraged products on ZEC, keep in mind as well that a price covering 15 percent between low and high in a single day triggers liquidations very quickly where collateral is thin.

Our assessment: a draft ZIP is not yet a date

From this newsroom's point of view, the picture is less clear-cut than the October 21 headlines putting a fixed height front and centre suggest. The evidence is in the open: the project's upgrade page lists the activation height as not set on October 21, and all six NU7 ZIPs sit at Draft, including deployment ZIP 259, which is meant to define the upgrade's scope. A date that appears in no document as a block height is a goal, not a commitment.

Against that, the technical groundwork is well advanced: according to reports by Cryptobriefing and Cryptotimes, the testnet has been running NU7 since October 4 at block 4,465,026, and a coinholder vote has backed the roadmap. So anyone expecting the height to be set in the coming days has good reason to. What we will not do is infer a decision from today's price gain. In either direction, a total loss remains possible with crypto assets; this text weighs the evidence and recommends neither buying nor selling.

Zcash NU7: without a set height, November 5 remains a target

Fifteen days before the stated target date the number exists as a proposal; it is not in the deployment ZIP. That changes nothing about what there is to do on your side, only how much time you probably have for it.

1. Classify your holdings. Look in your wallet to see whether an address beginning with zc still carries a remaining balance. Only that old Sprout holding is genuinely affected by ZIP 2003. If you want to hold keys yourself, the hardware wallet comparison helps with choosing a device.
2. Review your trading venue. Establish whether your provider lists ZEC for German customers and is licensed under the EU regulation before you move anything. The terms side by side are in the exchange overview.
3. Document the periods. For every transfer, record the date, the amount and both addresses so the one-year period stays provable. A tax tool handles that on an ongoing basis.

(As of October 21, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)