Zcash developers are introducing a new cryptographic stack that could dramatically reduce the time required to create private transactions, with Zakura reporting that some operations can now be completed in less than 200 milliseconds.
The technology, called Zakura Common, is designed to address the processing burden placed on wallets when users send shielded ZEC. According to the Zakura team, mobile proof generation is now more than 14 times faster, while desktop transaction creation has improved by more than fivefold.
Shielded transactions are a core privacy feature of Zcash, concealing the sender, recipient and amount involved in a payment. Before the transaction reaches the blockchain, however, the wallet must generate cryptographic proofs showing that the hidden payment complies with network rules.
That process can take several seconds and can make private payments feel slow even before the Zcash network begins processing them.
Zakura said the new stack can reduce transaction-generation times from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some cases. It also reported hashing performance gains of more than 21 times, while node-side verification of private transactions is now between four and eight times faster.
Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe said in an X post that both shielded wallets using Zakura Common and full nodes running Zakura can benefit from the improvements.
No Zcash Network Upgrade Required
The new cryptographic libraries can be adopted without changing Zcash’s consensus rules or upgrading the underlying network. Wallet developers can integrate the open-source tools into applications running on the current Zcash protocol.
Zakura has incorporated the technology into version 1.3.0 of its node software, while Vizor Wallet is among the first wallets to adopt the new stack.
The development is part of a wider effort to address Zcash’s scaling limitations. Increasing block-production speed alone would not resolve all of the network’s performance constraints. Wallet synchronization, transaction verification and the amount of data clients need to process can also limit throughput.
When Zakura launched its node in July, the team outlined a long-term target of more than 50,000 private transactions per second, roughly matching the scale of major payment networks. Current wallet software was described as having a ceiling of around one transaction per second.
Zakura Common focuses on another critical bottleneck: the amount of time a user’s device spends building a private transaction.
Zakura said the new libraries could also accelerate wallet synchronization. Full nodes may benefit from faster transaction verification and fewer orphaned blocks, while the software is already designed to handle the 25-second block intervals proposed under NU7, Zcash’s next major upgrade.
Zakura Expands Its Zcash Scaling Work
Zakura is an independent Zcash node project led by co-founder Sean Bowe in collaboration with Dev Ojha. Its implementation operates separately from the software maintained by the Zcash Foundation.
The project is being used as a testing environment for broader Zcash scaling initiatives, including Project Tachyon, which has also moved to the new technology stack.
ZEC initially climbed about 5% to around $839 following the release before giving back some of those gains during a wider market decline on Monday.
