Zcash developers confirm November date for upgrade that triples payment speed

Zcash (ZEC) surged about 12% over the past 24 hours, as developers agreed on a mainnet activation block for the network’s NU7 upgrade, expected in early November. The token traded around $1,270 at last look on Wednesday, according to CoinGecko. The rally coincided with a Tuesday GitHub proposal by Zcash developer Sean Bowe setting the activation at block 3,543,405, expected around Nov. 5. The value of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency that uses advanced trustless zero-knowledge proofs is up more than 148% year to date. “Height agreed at ZIP editor meeting,” Bowe wrote, adding that the team still needed to finalize the upgrade specifications before merging the proposal. Two developers approved the changes. The Zakura NU7 dashboard also lists the upgrade as pending on mainnet at block 3,543,405, with activation expected around Nov. 5. NU7 aims to reduce Zcash’s target block time by two-thirds to 25 seconds, allowing transactions to receive confirmations more quickly. The upgrade from 75-second block time has been undergoing testing since early October.

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The PHP Foundation has acknowledged that indecision and a shortage of resources delayed a fix for a critical security flaw first identified in 2024, calling the stalled response a “structural failure.” Government agencies and other organizations worldwide took websites offline Wednesday as a precaution while PHP released emergency patches for two related critical vulnerabilities. The flaws could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute code on affected servers without logging in. PHP is a programming language widely used to power websites and web applications, including content management systems. In a blog post following the release of the patch, the foundation described how its developers first found signs of the vulnerability in 2024, but struggled to come up with a solution without disrupting the large ecosystem of software built using PHP. “Combined with the lack of a known path to remote code execution and the small team of core developers with the necessary deep knowledge of the engine occupied with many responsibilities, this decision process caused work on a fix to stall and restart repeatedly over months,” said the foundation.

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