Zcash (ZEC) Jumps 14% Ahead of NU7 Upgrade to 25-Second Blocks

By Nodora News · 4 November 2026

Zcash (ZEC) rose about 14% to near $1,290 on Nov 4 as traders positioned for the NU7 network upgrade, which cuts block times from 75 to 25 seconds.

Zcash (ZEC) climbed about 14% in 24 hours on Wednesday, Nov 4, trading near $1,290 on OKX and outpacing every other top-25 cryptocurrency. The privacy coin, now the 10th-largest crypto asset with a market value of roughly $22 billion according to CoinGecko, is rallying in the final hours before NU7, a network upgrade that makes Zcash blocks three times faster and starts setting aside part of every transaction fee for future miners.

Key takeaways

• ZEC rose about 14.5% in 24 hours to roughly $1,291 on OKX, up from about $1,128.
• The NU7 upgrade activates at block 3,543,405, which the Zcash Foundation planned for around Nov 5. Estimates from chain data point to the early hours of Nov 6 UTC.
• NU7 cuts the target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds and sends 60% of transaction fees into a reserve for future block rewards.
• Separately, Zcash's grants committee dropped a disputed plan to redirect about 98,000 ZEC toward future mining rewards.
• Any ZEC still sitting in the old Sprout pool becomes unspendable once NU7 goes live.

What happened to the Zcash price

The move built through the European and Asian sessions. Binance's ZEC/USDT pair reached about $1,294 at 08:10 UTC, according to TokenPost, which also counted around $1.07 million in short liquidations across Binance, Bybit and OKX in a single hour. A short liquidation happens when traders betting on a price drop are forced out of their positions, and the buying that follows can push the price up faster.

There is no single confirmed trigger. The rally lines up with three things happening at once: traders positioning before NU7, a broad crypto bounce after the US midterm results weighed on the dollar, and the end of an awkward funding fight inside the Zcash community.

Derivatives data points to growing speculation. CoinGlass figures cited by FXStreet put ZEC open interest, the total value of open futures contracts, at about 2.17 million ZEC on Wednesday, up from 1.96 million on Sunday. Not everyone is buying, though: a ZEC-focused exchange-traded fund saw outflows of roughly $3.6 million on each of two straight days earlier this week.

What the Zcash NU7 upgrade changes

NU7 is a hard fork, meaning every node must run new software to stay on the main chain. The Zcash Foundation released Zebra 7.0.0 as the first stable node software that supports NU7 on mainnet and says all operators must upgrade before block 3,543,405. The main changes are:

• Faster blocks: the target time between blocks falls from 75 seconds to 25 seconds under ZIP 218, so first confirmations should arrive about three times sooner.
• Same issuance: block rewards are divided by three, so the amount of new ZEC created each day stays the same. The 21 million coin cap and the halving schedule are unchanged.
• Fee reserve: under ZIP 235, 60% of each block's transaction fees go into the Network Sustainability Mechanism, a reserve that will top up miner rewards in the future. Miners keep the other 40%.
• More shielded capacity: the Foundation says throughput in the Orchard shielded pool rises from about 2.9 to 6.6 transactions per second, while new per-block limits make it harder to spam light wallets.
• Sprout shutdown: old version 4 transactions become invalid. Because transfers out of the original Sprout pool only work in that format, any funds left there become unspendable. The pool held about 22,300 ZEC in late October.

Zebra 7.0.0 also patches seven security flaws, five rated high severity. The Foundation says none of them put users' coins at risk; they could have let an attacker crash or slow down nodes.

The grants committee U-turn

The upgrade isn't the only Zcash story this week. Zcash Community Grants (ZCG), the five-member committee that funds developers and community projects, said on Nov 3 that it would not go ahead with a plan it floated on Oct 29. That proposal would have moved 36,200 ZEC from its roughly 91,500 ZEC treasury into the miner reserve and cut its expected income until the 2028 halving from about 109,000 ZEC to 47,000. Altogether, about 98,000 ZEC would have ended up going to future block rewards.

ZCG receives 8% of all newly issued ZEC, around 144 coins a day, and critics have questioned why the money keeps flowing in. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox and cryptographer Sean Bowe back a rival draft that would end the 8% stream after NU7 and have ZCG send 50,000 ZEC to the reserve, while developer Daira-Emma Hopwood has proposed keeping the funding but refocusing grants on adoption. None of these plans has been adopted, so ZCG's daily payments continue for now.

Zcash market reaction and the wider crypto market

Prices on OKX at the time of writing:

• ZEC: about $1,291.60, up 14.5% in 24 hours (range $1,126.82 to $1,295.61)
• BTC: about $78,470, up 2.5%
• ETH: about $2,326, up 3.2%

Monero (XMR), the other large privacy coin, gained about 3% over the same period on CoinGecko, so ZEC's move stands well apart from its closest peer. ZEC's 24-hour trading volume topped $1.1 billion. Even after Wednesday's jump, the coin is roughly flat over seven days and still below its Sept 26 peak near $1,698. The wider market is recovering from Bitcoin's dip to a seven-week low earlier in the week, which we covered in our report on how the US midterms hit the crypto CLARITY Act.

You can follow ZEC and other top coins live on the Nodora charts page.

What to watch next for Zcash

• Activation timing: NU7 is tied to a block height, not a clock time, so the exact moment depends on how fast miners find blocks. A clean switch would remove a technical risk; any chain split or extended exchange pause would add one.
• Exchange deposits and withdrawals: exchanges often pause a coin's transfers for a few hours around a hard fork. Holders moving ZEC should check their exchange's status page and leave a buffer.
• Wallet updates: users should update their wallet apps before activation. The Zodl wallet, formerly Zashi, has said users need version 3.19.0.
• Sell-the-news risk: upgrades are scheduled well in advance, and prices sometimes fade once they go live.
• Funding debate: the fight over ZCG's 8% share is far from settled, and the competing proposals could resurface in Zcash's governance process.

This article is for information only and is not financial advice.

#Zcash #ZEC #NU7 #Privacy coins #Network upgrade

This article is general information, not financial advice.