It went live at 02:34 UTC. Zcash's ninth network upgrade activated at block 3,543,405 on Friday, November 6, cutting the target block time from 75 seconds to 25, CoinPaprika and crypto.news reported, citing the ZIP 259 specification and the block record. Early blocks averaged about 39 seconds while difficulty adjusted. "NU7 has successfully activated on mainnet. A new era of Zcash is here," the project's X account posted. Miners now keep 40% of transaction fees, down from all of them, and the other 60% goes into a reserve scheduled to feed block rewards from around February 2031; the halving schedule and the 21 million cap are unchanged. Capacity for simple private payments rose from about 3 to more than 6 per second, per CoinDesk figures cited by CoinPaprika. The cost is Sprout, the original 2016 privacy pool. With its transaction type disabled, about 12,224 ZEC still inside cannot be spent even with valid keys. Co-founder Sean Bowe has outlined a possible recovery path, but nothing is approved. ZEC traded near $1,258 at CoinPaprika's 13:00 UTC publication, down 4.7% in 24 hours, and Zcash ETFs lost $11 million on Thursday, per SoSoValue. See what each level from $500 to $5,000 would take by your date with our Zcash price target calculator.