Zcash News: ZEC Surges 12% as Developer Floats Cheaper 'Dynamic Fee' Plan

A key Zcash developer has published the first detailed blueprint for a dynamic fee market, opening a community discussion about how the decade-old network should price transactions as ZEC’s price, user activity and institutional interest climb.

The Monday proposal, released by Shielded Labs, lays out a shift away from Zcash’s historically static fee model — originally 10,000 ‘zatoshi,’ later cut to 1,000 — which worked during low demand but eventually contributed to “sandblasting” spam episodes that clogged wallets and congested the chain.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW Don't miss another story. Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today . See all newsletters Sign me up By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy .

An earlier ZIP-317 proposal’s move to action-based accounting fixed the abuse vector, but retained predictable, low fees that don’t adjust to usage.

Action-based accounting treated every Zcash transaction component — such as spends, outputs, JoinSplits, Orchard actions — as a single uniform “action,” letting fees scale with activity rather than byte size.

Developers say that with ZEC’s recent resurgence, new retail onboarding and the emergence of Zcash digital-asset treasuries, the status quo is becoming less tenable.

It said some users have started to report rising transaction costs in ZEC terms, and edge-case scenarios — like large sets of tiny user transactions costing double-digit ZEC to shield — show how fee rigidity breaks down when token prices climb.

The proposed mechanism introduces a simple, stateless dynamic fee design built around “comparables,” or the median fee per action observed over the prior 50 blocks, padded with synthetic transactions to simulate always-on congestion.

The median becomes the standard fee, bucketed into powers of ten to reduce linkability and avoid leaking user information. Under stress, a temporary priority lane opens at 10× the standard fee, giving users a way to compete for block space without redesigning the protocol.

The system is designed to roll out in phases. First is off-chain for monitoring, then as wallet policy, and only later — if approved — as a simple consensus change with expiry-height limits and power-of-ten fee rules.

That avoids the complexity and fork risk of EIP-1559-style mechanisms while keeping Zcash’s privacy constraints intact.

Other ideas floated include using mining difficulty as a long-term heuristic for USD-denominated fees to tune prices based on mempool pressure.

ZEC traded around $395 on Tuesday, up more than 12% in 24 hours as traders digested the first concrete roadmap for fee reform since ZIP-317.