The Zcash community proposes shortening the block time from 25 seconds to 20 seconds, planned to be included in the NU7.1 upgrade.

Zcash developer ValarDragon has proposed cutting the network's target block interval from 25 seconds to 20 seconds under ZIP 218, aiming to include the change in the NU7.1 upgrade to reduce wait times for first confirmations, payments, and cross-chain swaps. The plan would keep the 2 MB block size cap and proportionally adjust shielded transaction operations and block rewards so daily issuance and privacy-transaction throughput stay roughly unchanged. Stress tests simulating 80 miners across 12 regions put the orphan block rate at about 1.9% to 3.3% with 20-second blocks. The proposal matters because faster blocks could improve Zcash's usability for payments and interoperability without altering its monetary schedule, though the higher orphan rate bears watching. Next, the community will weigh the trade-off between latency gains and stale-block risk as it decides whether to fold the change into NU7.1.