Zcash NU7 Upgrade on November 5, 2026: What You Must Do With Your ZEC

On November 5, 2026, the Zcash network activates the NU7 upgrade. If you hold ZEC, the most important answer is also the least dramatic one: you do not need to move your coins, swap them or pull them off an exchange. The only people who have to act are those who run infrastructure themselves, meaning a full node, an indexer or a block explorer. The rest of this article explains why that is the case, which four dates matter between now and then, and where German rules on tax and custody still come into play. The timeline has been firm since September 17, 2026. That evening at 22:42 UTC, Zcash core developer Sean Bowe, who posts in the forum under the name ebfull, published the dates in the Zcash Community Forum. He describes unanimous agreement among the organisations and development teams involved, naming ZF, Tachyon, Valar, ZODL and SL. Before that there was a vote result but no calendar. Since then there is both. What is NU7 and why is Zcash activating the upgrade on November 5, 2026? NU7 is a network upgrade, or in technical terms a hard fork. A hard fork is a rule change that older software no longer understands: anyone who does not update their node stops following the same ch...