Zcash after the NU7 upgrade: ZEC climbs 7 percent while the market falls

Zcash is moving against the market on Friday. At 3:51 pm CET on November 6, 2026, one ZEC cost $1,374.92 according to CoinGecko, roughly €1,234, which is 7.3 percent more than 24 hours earlier. Over the same period Bitcoin lost 3.8 percent and Ether 5.3 percent. The backdrop is the NU7 network upgrade, which activated overnight at block 3,543,405 and cuts the block time from 75 to 25 seconds. Zcash (ZEC) ranks tenth among cryptocurrencies with a market capitalization of $23.4 billion. The upgrade changes more than speed. Part of every transaction fee now flows into a reserve, and the network's oldest private pool, Sprout, has been closed since activation. The sections below cover the numbers behind it, where the price is finding support and what investors in Germany should consider when buying and storing ZEC. NU7 at block 3,543,405: the Zcash upgrade has been live since 02:34 UTC On Zcash, a network upgrade is a hard fork. From a fixed block height new consensus rules apply, and nodes running old software can no longer follow the new blocks. NU7 stands for "Network Upgrade 7", the seventh such step since the network launched in 2016. According to CoinDesk, block 3,543,405 was mined at 02:34 UTC on November 6, which is 03:34 German time. By 04:59 UTC another 225 blocks had followed at an average interval of about 39 seconds. That is still above the new target because mining difficulty first has to adjust to the shorter block time. The activation height had been fixed since late October; the November 5 date was only an estimate, since the moment a block height is reached depends on actual block production. The technical basis is set out in ZIP 218 from the Zcash developers. A ZIP (Zcash Improvement Proposal) is a public document that records every change to the protocol rules. Besides the new block time, it also sets a cap on private transactions per block. Zcash fee reserve: 60 percent of transaction fees stay in the pot The second major change concerns miners' income. Until now they received transaction fees in full. Since NU7, CoinDesk reports, only 40 percent goes to the miner who finds the block and 60 percent goes into a reserve. From around February 2031 this pot is meant to fund future block rewards. Citing the Zcash Foundation, the news site CoinCentral gives block 8,939,664 as the starting point for redistribution. The mechanism has a name, the Network Sustainability Mechanism, and a clear purpose. The maximum supply of 21 million ZEC stays untouched even as issuance of new coins keeps falling over the years.