Zcash Price Hits October Wall Ahead of Its 3x Faster Block Upgrade

• Developers proposed a specific mainnet block for activating NU7.
• The upgrade cuts block times and defers most transaction fees to future miners.
• Old Sprout shielded funds must be moved before activation or become unspendable.
• ZEC is testing the resistance that has capped every rally this month.

Zcash price climbed about 8% over the past 24 hours to $1,313.75, lifting the privacy coin‘s market value to roughly $22.23 billion after its developers settled on a concrete mainnet height for Network Upgrade 7 (NU7). The proposed block, 3,543,405, should arrive around November 5 and will bring 25-second blocks along with a new way of handling transaction fees and the retirement of Zcash’s original privacy pool, while on the chart ZEC is pressing against the $1,343 level that has rejected every rally attempt this month.

What Is Still Needed Before NU7 Goes Live

On October 20, longtime Zcash protocol developer Sean Bowe opened pull request #1405 on the project’s specification repository, proposing block 3,543,405 as the activation point after a meeting of Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) editors, the group that maintains the network’s formal rulebook. Fellow contributors ValarDragon and str4d approved it the same day, although the change still has to be merged into ZIP 259, the document that defines how NU7 is deployed, and node software must carry the new height before the network can switch over.

The date itself follows a rollout timetable published on the community forum in mid-September, and testnet already runs the new rules after the Zcash Foundation shipped the Zebra 7.0.0-rc.0 release candidate on October 2 and NU7 went live at testnet block 4,465,026 a few days later.

Triple the Blocks, Same Supply

The headline change comes from ZIP 218, which cuts the target gap between blocks from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. Zcash would produce about 3,456 blocks a day instead of 1,152, and a payment waiting for three confirmations would settle in roughly a minute and a quarter on average, compared with almost four minutes today, with the specification naming everyday payments and integrations such as NEAR Intents as the main beneficiaries.

Faster blocks would normally mean faster issuance, so NU7 trims the scheduled reward per block to a third of its current size and leaves both the total supply of new ZEC and the halving schedule where they were. ZIP 218 also caps the number of shielded actions per block to keep the cost of verifying and syncing private transactions in check, which means tripling block frequency does not triple the network’s sustainable capacity.

60% of Fees Head for a 2031 Vault

ZIP 235 creates the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), which pulls 60% of the transaction fees in every block out of circulation and leaves miners with the remaining 40%. Those coins sit in a pool that is scheduled to come back, since ZIP 237 starts paying the accumulated balance to miners as an extra block subsidy from block 8,939,664, expected around February 2031, and the deployment specification confirms that the 21 million ZEC cap stays untouched.

The design targets Zcash’s long-term security budget, because each halving cuts what miners earn from new coins and the NSM builds a reserve from present-day usage to top up their income later. How large that reserve grows depends entirely on fee volume, which stays modest on a network where individual transactions cost very little, so the mechanism only affects circulating supply in a noticeable way if activity rises considerably.

Sprout Funds Freeze at Activation

ZIP 2003 disables version 4 transactions, the format required by Sprout, the shielded pool Zcash launched with in 2016. Funds still sitting in Sprout addresses will become unspendable under the new consensus rules, so holders of old wallets need to move them to the newer Sapling or Orchard pools before activation, while version 5 and version 6 transactions remain valid and ordinary transparent and modern shielded balances are unaffected.

ZEC Stuck Below the 0.236 Fibonacci Level

ZEC rallied about 820% from its February low of $184.57 to a September peak of $1,701 before slipping out of a steep rising channel around the start of October. Since then it has traded between the 0.236 Fibonacci retracement at $1,343, measured across that entire rally, and the 0.382 level at $1,122, with the 50-day exponential moving average (EMA) at $1,190 catching every dip, including a brief wick below it last week that buyers reversed almost immediately.

Wednesday’s bounce lifted the 14-day RSI to about 55, above its own average near 45 for the first time since early October. The indicator cooled from readings above 80 in September to the low 40s without ever reaching oversold territory, a pattern typical of a market absorbing a large gain while buyers remain active underneath, although the daily candle is still open and intraday pushes through $1,343 have failed several times this month, so only a daily close above that level would change the structure.

Half the Checklist Still Open

The Zebra 7.0.0 build that runs NU7 is still a release candidate, and the Zcash Foundation has told mainnet operators to wait for a stable release carrying the activation height, with the current 6.4.x series of the Zebra node set to be retired before the switch. Nodes that miss the update would end up on an incompatible chain, and exchanges, wallets, explorers and indexers all have to adjust to a block arriving every 25 seconds, so brief deposit and withdrawal pauses around activation would not be unusual for an upgrade of this scope.

A daily close above $1,343 would end October’s run of lower highs and bring the $1,500 area into play, with $1,701 behind it, though traders who bought before the channel broke may use that zone to exit. Another rejection would point back to $1,190 and then $1,122, and a close below the range floor would expose $943, leaving the band between $764 and $792, where the 200-day EMA meets the 0.618 retracement, to decide whether the uptrend that began in April survives.

The 50-day EMA climbed steeply through August and September but has gone almost flat during October, which means the level buyers keep defending has stopped rising with price. With NU7 roughly two weeks away, the upgrade is the most likely catalyst to break the range, and any slip in the activation schedule would leave ZEC leaning on a moving average that offers less protection with each passing week.