Sean Bowe

Zcash

2026-10-21 08:35:20

Zcash targets Nov. 5 for NU7 mainnet upgrade at block 3,543,405

Zcash developer Sean Bowe has submitted a proposal to set the activation height for the network’s NU7 mainnet upgrade at block 3,543,405, which is expected to fall on Nov. 5. The proposed height has already received agreement at a ZIP editors meeting, though the proposal itself has not yet been merged and still needs to be incorporated into the upgrade specification and node software. Under the current plan, NU7 would reduce Zcash’s target block interval from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. It would also temporarily remove 60% of transaction fees from circulation. The upgrade proposal includes another operational change: disabling v4 transactions. That change carries a direct consequence for users with funds still sitting in the Sprout shielded pool. Once the upgrade takes effect, those funds would no longer be spendable, meaning affected holders need to migrate them before activation. The proposal remains pending final integration, but the expected activation date and technical changes are now clearer.

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Zcash

2026-10-21 08:24:02

Zcash developers propose NU7 mainnet activation around Nov. 5 as upgrade targets faster payments

Zcash developers have agreed on a proposed activation height for the NU7 network upgrade, setting it at block 3,543,405, which is expected to arrive around Nov. 5. The proposal was filed Tuesday by Zcash developer Sean Bowe after ZIP editors, the group that approves changes to the blockchain’s rules, settled on the exact block for activation. Zakura’s public upgrade dashboard now shows that height as the planned mainnet trigger point. If activated as proposed, NU7 would reduce Zcash block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. That change would cut the wait for three confirmations on a ZEC deposit from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds, a notable shift for exchanges and payment flows that rely on confirmation thresholds. The upgrade has been running on Zcash’s testnet since early October. NU7 also changes fee handling and legacy privacy support. It would remove 60% of fees collected in each block from circulation temporarily, with those coins scheduled to be paid back to miners starting around February 2031, while keeping Zcash’s existing 50% mining reward halving schedule intact. At the same time, the upgrade would fully shut down Sprout, Zcash’s original privacy system. Any funds still held there when NU7 activates would become unspendable. As of 08:00 UTC Wednesday, the proposal had two approvals but had not yet been merged into the deployment specification, and node software still needs to include the chosen height before the upgrade can take effect.

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Sean Bowe

2026-10-09 01:25:20

Sean Bowe criticizes Justin Drake’s wording on quantum threat warnings

Sean Bowe, co-founder of Tachyon, said in a post on X that Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake’s recent warnings about quantum threats were framed too vaguely and could do damage on several fronts. Bowe argued that broad, unclear alerts can backfire on quantum advocacy itself, even though he said both quantum and AI risks are real and deserve serious attention. He said teams across the industry are trying to make careful decisions about how to respond to those risks in practical terms and how to help users deal with uncertainty. Some teams, he wrote, have strong cryptographers in-house, while others rely on trusted outside experts. Because the trade-offs are complex and hard to explain to non-cryptographers, Bowe said experts should stay calm and accept the responsibility that comes with their role. Bowe added that once the situation is clarified, people may conclude that the episode was at most an unintentional publicity move, but that a large amount of trust could still be lost. He also said Drake had acknowledged there was no new information behind this latest warning and asked him to explain why he believed that approach was the right one.

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Zcash

2026-10-02 19:59:57

Zcash community figures to join Network State event in Singapore

Techub News reported that @balajis said on X that this year’s Network State conference will include a dedicated Zcash summit. Several figures from the Zcash community are set to attend, including Zooko Wilcox of Shielded Labs, Sean Bowe of Tachyon, and Eli Ben-Sasson of StarkWare. According to the post, attendees at the venue will also receive free ZEC. The event is scheduled for Oct. 9 in Singapore. The update identifies the gathering as part of the broader Network State conference and names the Zcash-focused session as a featured component of this year’s agenda. No other program details were disclosed in the source.

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Zcash

2026-09-29 12:15:46

Zcash developers fold Tachyon code into existing software as privacy scaling work advances

Zcash developers are moving part of the proposed Tachyon scaling upgrade into software already used by the network, according to CoinDesk. The component, called Udon, was originally built as part of Project Tachyon and was released on Monday to Zakura Common, a shared cryptography library used by Zakura and other Zcash projects. Sean Bowe, who leads Project Tachyon, said the release is meant to prepare the system for a future with far more private transactions. Common handles some of the heavy mathematical work behind creating and verifying shielded payments. Zakura is being developed by Bowe’s team together with Dev Ojha’s Valar Group. CoinDesk noted that earlier improvements to Common had already reduced the time needed to create a private transaction from more than 3 seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some tests reported in August. Udon has been released as software, but the upgrade has not yet been activated on Zcash. Bowe and Ojha have set a long-term target of more than 50,000 payments per second. At that rate, they estimate current cryptography would cause each Zcash node to receive more than 500 MB of data every second.

560

Zcash

2026-08-31 05:55:20

Zcash developer Zakura releases open-source library, cuts private transaction creation to under 200 milliseconds

Zakura, a developer working on Zcash, has released an open-source cryptography library called Zakura Common that sharply reduces the time needed to create private transactions. According to the announcement cited by Techub News, the library cuts transaction creation time from more than three seconds to less than 200 milliseconds. It also boosts zero-knowledge proof generation speed on mobile devices by more than 14x. The upgrade does not require a hard fork or network-wide coordination, which means compatible wallets can integrate it directly. Zakura co-founder Sean Bowe said the library materially improves responsiveness and user experience for privacy wallets and full nodes. Zakura Common is being released under dual MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses and will ship with Zakura v1.3.0. The project is also part of the Tachyon scalability initiative. The report cited by Techub attributed the information to CryptoBriefing.

780

Zcash

2026-08-20 12:16:26

Zcash launches Tachyon testnet to rework shielded transaction scaling

Zcash is reworking how its shielded transactions scale, with an initial test version already running on a public testnet launched by Valar Group. The effort is called Tachyon and is being led by Zcash core developer Sean Bowe. According to the source item cited by CoinDesk, the project is focused on rebuilding the system’s state model rather than making a narrower adjustment to transaction handling. The stated goal is to raise transaction throughput while avoiding a drop in wallet performance. The update points to an engineering push inside the Zcash ecosystem around privacy transaction infrastructure, with Tachyon serving as the named framework for that redesign. At this stage, the available details are limited to the public testnet rollout, the leadership of the project, and its technical objective: changing the underlying state model so shielded transactions can scale better without imposing extra performance costs on wallets.

1230

Zcash

2026-07-21 06:33:28

Zcash launches Zakura node with a 50,000 TPS privacy payments target

Zcash has released version 1.0.0 of Zakura, a new full node client built to push the network toward payment-scale throughput without giving up privacy or verifiability. The software is maintained by Zcash cryptography pioneer Sean Bowe and Valar Group lead Dev Ojha, and is funded by private ZEC donations rather than a company or foundation. The team says its baseline is more than 50,000 transactions per second, in line with Visa and Mastercard, even though Zcash wallets today top out at roughly one private transaction per second. Zakura is a fork of the Zcash Foundation’s Zebra node and adds pruning, downloadable snapshots, and a compatibility mode for zcashd integrations ahead of that client’s July 18 end of life. It also ships with support for Ironwood, or NU6.3, which is expected to activate at mainnet block 3,428,143 around 8 a.m. Eastern on July 28. Alongside Zakura, the roadmap includes Bowe’s Tachyon recursive proof system to reduce consensus-layer verification overhead and Valar Group’s private information retrieval work to address wallet-side bottlenecks. Ironwood itself follows a critical Orchard vulnerability disclosed on May 29 and emergency protocol changes made in early June.

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