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Zcash's Network Upgrade 7 now has an activation point: block 3,543,405, expected around November 5, according to CoinDesk. Developer Sean Bowe filed the proposal on October 20 as GitHub pull request #1405, ZIP editors, the group that signs off on consensus rule changes, agreed the height at a meeting, and the request carries two approvals. Two steps remained as of 08:00 UTC Wednesday: merging the height into the deployment spec, ZIP-0259, which still listed it as undecided, and shipping node software that includes it. The changes are now fixed in outline. Blocks shorten from 75 seconds to 25, so an exchange waiting for three confirmations goes from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds, and 60% of the fees in each block are pulled from circulation and paid out to miners starting around February 2031, with the existing halving schedule kept. Holders have one deadline to note. Sprout, Zcash's original privacy pool, shuts down completely at activation, and any coins still sitting in it become unspendable, so they need to be moved before the upgrade.

October 20 is the day Zcash developers were due to decide whether Network Upgrade 7 goes to mainnet and at what block height, and no outcome had been announced as of Tuesday morning, according to 24/7 Wall St. Engineers are targeting November 5 for activation but may push it back if testing turns up problems; the upgrade has run on testnet since October 4 at block 4,465,026. The block time question we left open on October 14 now has a clear answer: the target drops from 75 seconds to 25, roughly tripling confirmation speed, with the block subsidy cut by three and halving intervals stretched by the same factor so daily issuance stays level. The fee change is the bigger shift for miners. NU7 would hold back 60% of transaction fees until a February 2031 release, leaving miners the other 40%, though the developers have not said how much ZEC that withholds per day, and subsidies, not fees, still drive most new supply. Holders backed both rules in a coinholder vote in which about 2.4 million ZEC, roughly 66% of the eligible pool, took part: 98.9% supported keeping the halving schedule and 96.6% the 2031 release date. ZEC traded near $1,135, down 7.3% on the week, 21.5% on the month and 64.5% below its record, while Grayscale's ZCSH lost $10.45 million on Monday per SoSoValue data reported by Bitcoin.com News.

Blocks have been arriving roughly every 8 minutes 45 seconds, well inside the 10-minute target, and the network has now caught up with it. Difficulty rose 5.92% at block 971,712 on Friday, October 16, from 132.72 trillion to 140.58 trillion, the highest reading since March 5, according to Bitcoin.com News citing mempool.space. That made it the 10th increase in 21 adjustments this year and the third largest. Hashrate stands above 1 zettahash per second, 1,024.96 EH/s at the time of writing per HashrateIndex, and the fast blocks are already pushing the next estimate up: a further 14.24% around October 28, though only a few dozen of the epoch's 2,016 blocks had been mined when that figure was taken, so it can still swing a long way. Revenue is heading the opposite way. Hashprice, a miner's earnings per petahash per day, was $36.75 on October 16 against $37.56 on September 16, after twice topping $41 in the past month, including October 2. Higher difficulty on flat-to-lower hashprice squeezes every operator, and older machines on expensive power feel it first. Add Binance Pool's November 10 shutdown, and a chunk of hashrate has to find a new pool in the same weeks the cost of each coin climbs.

The share Binance would not disclose when it announced the pool closure is now on the record. CoinDesk, citing Hashrate Index, puts Binance Pool at about 2.3% of network hashrate in December 2025, roughly 26 EH/s, against about 9.2 EH/s now, under 1% and eleventh in the latest table. That is a drop of around 65% in ten months, which reframes the shutdown from a strategic exit to the closing of something that had already emptied out. The pool launched in April 2020 and stops accepting work at 07:00 UTC on November 10, with identity checks for pending final payouts due by 23:59 UTC the same day and pool pages removed permanently on November 24. The concentration number is the one to keep. Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool now hold about 64.2% of hashrate between them, up from 61.4% in December when ViaBTC held the third slot instead of F2Pool. Binance Pool's 9.2 EH/s has to land somewhere in the next four weeks, and on current form most of it lands with the three pools that already control nearly two thirds of the network.

Binance is closing Binance Pool after six years. Stratum addresses stop accepting work at 07:00 UTC on November 10, pending KYC checks must clear by 23:59 UTC the same day, and the dashboard stays read-only until 07:00 UTC on November 24 before going offline entirely. Cloud Mining, Pool Savings, the Transaction Accelerator, Telegram hashrate alerts and the pool API all go with it. Work submitted before the cutoff still earns under existing rules, but hashrate pointed at a dead endpoint afterwards earns nothing, and The Crypto Times notes final payouts are not automatic and run through compliance review, so miners should pull Pool Savings balances and export earnings records well before the date. Binance gave no reason beyond a routine product review and has not disclosed what share of network hashrate the pool carried. The context is that pools keep exiting: SBI Crypto closed its bitcoin pool on July 31 after about five years, and Binance separately said on October 9 that Brazilian users lose access to the pool and seven other products from October 27. Every closure concentrates hashrate into fewer pools, which is a slower problem than a price drop and a harder one to reverse.

Network Upgrade 7 activated on the Zcash public testnet at block 4,465,026, mined at 18:21:45 UTC on October 4, and the final go or no-go call on mainnet deployment is set for October 20, with November 5 as the target activation date. The headline change is the target block interval, which most reporting puts at a cut from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. Worth flagging that the coverage is not unanimous on the direction of that change, with at least one outlet describing longer block times while contradicting itself later in the same piece, and KuCoin's roundup notes the Zcash Foundation had not clarified it at the time of writing. We are treating 75 to 25 as the likely figure rather than a settled one, and the NU7 specification is where it gets confirmed. Either way this is a consensus-level parameter, which means node operators and miners have to adopt it rather than opt in gradually, and a change to how often blocks arrive touches per-block reward accounting and confirmation assumptions across every service that quotes a number of confirmations.

Bitcoin trades at $82,820.52 as of 11:52 p.m. EDT Saturday, up 0.33% on $5.91 billion of volume, with a market cap near $1.66 trillion. CoinDesk attributes part of the steadier tape to a slowdown in aggressive miner selling, which removes a source of persistent supply after a week that saw roughly $1.12 billion in liquidations and open interest fall about $4 billion. Worth noting the page quotes its own 24-hour move two different ways, 0.33% in the header against 0.58% in its market context section, so treat the exact change as approximate. Bitcoin is moving broadly in line with the CoinDesk 20 index, meaning there is no crypto-specific divergence to read into this. September CPI lands Wednesday, October 14.

Public miners took roughly 75 EH/s of realized hashrate offline through the first half of 2026, and Miner Weekly puts the hardware behind it at about $1.5 billion using an assumed acquisition price of $20 per TH/s, a figure that counts the machines alone and excludes buildings, electrical work, cooling and installation. The accounting has already caught up: about $1.1 billion in impairments and held-for-sale markdowns across the 12 companies tracked by TheEnergyMag, with IREN and Core Scientific accounting for almost 89% of that total and IREN alone carrying some $695 million between January and June. Worth separating the two stories inside that number. Core Scientific attributed its markdown to mining economics rather than any AI conversion, which means not all of the idle hardware represents a strategic pivot. Some of it is just unprofitable. Directly reported HPC and AI revenue did rise 52% quarter over quarter, and TeraWulf booked about $53 million in HPC leasing revenue in the half against $131 million in cash interest paid.

Fees accounted for just 0.67% of total block rewards Saturday morning, meaning the fixed block subsidy is doing effectively all the work in miner revenue. The rise in spot price matched the difficulty adjustment, which kept dollar hashprice above midweek lows rather than improving it. A fee market this thin is the structural issue that keeps surfacing in every halving cycle discussion, and it leaves miner economics entirely dependent on price rather than network usage.

Friday's record push to $1,023 triggered a rush of hashpower, briefly sending network solrate past 30 GSol/s for the first time, according to The Block. The catch is that miner revenue came in about 3% lower than when ZEC traded below $900, because the new competition arrived faster than rewards could keep pace. Falling profitability during a price rally is an unusual combination, and it is worth watching for what it means for network security incentives if it persists.

Bitdeer completed a $100 million all-cash purchase of 200 acres in Milam County, Texas, near its Rockdale facility, a site carrying 563 megawatts of grid capacity with an expansion target of 742 megawatts for mining and AI data centers. Owning the land outright rather than leasing is the notable part, since it removes a recurring cost as oil above $92 drives up grid expenses and compresses margins. Moving the other direction, Hyperscale Data shares hit an all-time low as it winds down Bitcoin mining in Michigan to chase an AI infrastructure deal it says could generate over $1.2 billion.

Bitcoin miners that have spent the past year repositioning their power and data center assets toward AI computing sold off broadly on Monday, with Bitdeer and Keel Infrastructure, formerly Bitfarms, leading the decline after quarterly results. Separately, Bitcoin's 20-day rolling correlation with the software index IGV has turned negative for the first time since May 2024, with IGV down about 1% this year against Bitcoin's 29% decline.

Officers in Perak arrested two men and seized 73 mining rigs after tracing an operation that had been drawing electricity through illegal connections at three properties in Tronoh. The bust follows a string of similar raids across Terengganu and Kuala Lumpur this year, part of a national utility-led crackdown that has pulled tens of thousands of machines out of circulation since 2022.

A coordinated raid across four properties in Iskandar Puteri and Johor Bahru Utara netted three arrests and 71 mining machines, with investigators alleging the group rented the homes specifically to run rigs on stolen electricity. Police described a structured operation with a manager and two technicians, part of a broader pattern of illegal mining tied to Malaysia's cheap, easily tapped power grid.

A deep dive into Malaysia's four-year enforcement campaign notes that tens of thousands of seized rigs and hundreds of arrests haven't slowed the flow of used mining hardware into the country's power grid. Older machines pushed out of profitability elsewhere keep landing in jurisdictions where electricity theft still pencils out, even as better detection tools turn up more cases.

Police in Teluk Intan seized 75 mining machines and a dozen networking devices after a joint operation with the national utility uncovered an illegal setup drawing power through unauthorized connections. Officials say further inspection confirmed clear signs of electricity theft at the site, one more entry in a growing 2026 tally.

Officials expanded their enforcement approach against illegal mining operations that tap unauthorized electricity connections, tamper with meters, and disrupt supply systems in the process. The Home Ministry's latest tally covers more than 3,000 raids and 629 arrests since 2022, using a mix of intelligence gathering and technology to identify hotspots before they can scale up.