Zcash upgrade countdown: block generation speed increased 3x, $16 million in ZEC may be permanently frozen.

Zcash will activate its NU 7 network upgrade at block height 3,543,405 on November 5, 2026, cutting the target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds and disabling version 4 transaction formats. The change permanently closes the only transfer path out of the legacy Sprout privacy pool, where roughly 12,226 ZEC—worth about $16 million at around $1,300 per token—remains stranded. Outflows have slowed sharply, from 10,037 ZEC moved out over the past week, including 9,094 ZEC on Sunday alone, to just about 40 ZEC on Wednesday, suggesting most remaining holdings belong to lost keys or dormant cold storage. A community proposal, ZIP 2003, leaves a theoretical interface for a future extraction mechanism, but developers warn the frozen assets will likely never be recoverable. The upgrade completes Zcash's migration to the Sapling and Halo 2-based Orchard pools, isolating the attack surface of the deprecated Sprout architecture while speeding up private transaction settlement.