Zcash Wants 20-Second Blocks After NU7
Developers want to push Zcash’s block time down further after the recent NU7 upgrade. Early data suggests the orphan rate is staying limited for now.
Key Takeaways
- Zcash developers are proposing to cut block time from 25 to 20 seconds, just three days after the NU7 upgrade.
- Faster blocks should confirm payments more quickly; with three confirmations, the expected wait drops from 75 to 60 seconds.
- Early data after NU7 shows the orphan rate staying close to its old level, while NU7.1 has not yet been approved.
Zcash developers want to lower block time even further, just three days after the network completed a major speed upgrade. Dev Ojha and Evan Forbes proposed on Sunday to reduce the target time between blocks from 25 seconds to 20 seconds. Before Friday, Zcash was still producing a new block about every 75 seconds.
Faster Confirmations
Blocks are bundles of transactions that are added to the blockchain. The shorter the time between two blocks, the faster a payment gets its first confirmation. Under the new proposal, a customer paying with ZEC in a store could see that first confirmation after about 20 seconds instead of 25 seconds.
That difference could also matter for exchanges. If a platform requires three confirmations, the expected wait drops from 75 to 60 seconds. The actual time can still vary, because miners find blocks at unpredictable times.
Early Data Looks Fine
The new move follows early numbers after NU7, the upgrade that went live on November 6. That change brought the target block time down from 75 to 25 seconds and was meant to speed up confirmations. According to the first data, the number of orphan blocks stayed close to the level seen before the upgrade.
That mattered because developers were worried that faster blocks would cause more work to be lost in competing blocks. When two miners find a block at nearly the same time, the network eventually accepts one version and discards the other. That costs the losing miner electricity without any reward.
According to ZecBlock, the observed orphan rate in the 24 hours up to Monday morning was 0.69%, compared with about 0.66% before NU7. Across the full period since the upgrade, that figure is higher at 1.29%, although the measurements are not exactly comparable because the monitoring network was expanded from one to ten nodes shortly before the upgrade.
What This Means for Zcash
The proposed change could further improve the user experience for ZEC payments, without the network having to process more transactions per day. Developers actually want to reduce the number of transactions per block to handle the faster blocks, so wallets do not have to process more data.
The change also does not affect the issuance schedule or the maximum supply of 21 million coins. Ojha and Forbes want to bring the proposal into the next community poll and possibly include it in NU7.1, but that upgrade has not been approved yet and does not have an activation date.