Zcash developers have settled on the exact activation height for NU7: a proposal filed by developer Sean Bowe sets the switch at block 3,543,405, agreed at a meeting of Zcash Improvement Proposal editors. The upgrade has been running on the Zcash testnet since early October.

NU7 cuts block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, so three confirmations drop from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds.

The upgrade also removes 60% of each block's fees from circulation, to be paid back to miners starting around February 2031, and fully shuts down Sprout, Zcash's original privacy pool. Any ZEC still held in Sprout at activation becomes unspendable.

The proposal had two approvals but was not yet merged into the deployment specification as of Wednesday morning, and node software still needs to include the chosen height before the upgrade can activate.