Zcash's Zebra removes the waiting. The stopwatch is still on trial.

The Zcash Foundation introduced Zebra Ándale on 31 October, an alpha release intended to shorten delays between transactions, mining work and block handling. Node and mining-pool operators are being asked to test it alongside the stable release.

Version 7.1.0-alpha.0 replaces several timer-driven waits with responses to arriving work and adds mining-pool support. The release notes describe faster block submission and relay, plus extra notifications and metrics. These changes address infrastructure delays; they do not announce a change to Zcash's validation rules.

The Foundation reports substantial speed gains in its own benchmarks. It also explains that prepared test cases and its live comparison dashboard measure different conditions, so their numbers should not be treated as interchangeable or as a guaranteed improvement for every operator.

The GitHub release is explicitly a prerelease. Operators can switch back to 7.0.0 without resynchronising because the state format is retained, but the notes flag stricter configuration checks. The practical next step is testing and feedback ahead of a stable 7.1.0, rather than presenting the alpha as a finished network-wide upgrade.