Zcash Upgrade Puts Approximately 12,226 Sprout ZEC Beyond Spending

What happened: Zcash’s NU7 upgrade was scheduled to activate at block 3,543,405, around 9:30 p.m. Eastern on November 5, removing support for the transaction format needed to spend coins in its original Sprout privacy pool. The supplied pre-activation reporting identified approximately 12,226 ZEC remaining there, valued at roughly $16 million, after holdings declined from approximately 22,263 ZEC over the preceding week; only about 40 ZEC moved out on Wednesday. Co-founder Sean Bowe proposed a future recovery mechanism using ownership proofs, but it had not been approved, and the supplied material does not independently confirm activation or the final stranded balance.

Why it matters: This was a planned protocol deprecation supported through a coinholder vote, so its implications differ from the exchange theft and bank collapse elsewhere in today’s digest. Nevertheless, the reported remaining balance shows that self-custody also requires attention to protocol changes: holding keys does not itself preserve spending capability when the network removes a transaction format. Any future recovery proposal therefore deserves scrutiny as a separate governance decision, without assuming that the approximately 12,226 ZEC identified before activation will become recoverable.

Source: CoinDesk