Zcash developers have started incorporating Project Tachyon code into Zakura Common as they work toward a long-term objective of processing more than 50,000 private payments per second.
The privacy-focused blockchain’s developers are moving part of the proposed scaling technology into software already used throughout the Zcash ecosystem. The move is intended to prepare the network for substantially higher private-transaction activity in the future.
The component being integrated is Udon, which was initially created as part of Project Tachyon, Zcash’s proposed scaling upgrade.
Udon was released into Zakura Common on Monday, according to Project Tachyon lead Sean Bowe. Zakura Common is a shared cryptography library used by Zakura and other Zcash projects. It performs some of the computational work required to generate and verify private-transaction proofs. Bowe’s team develops Zakura alongside Dev Ojha’s Valar Group.
Private Zcash payments require wallets to prove that a transaction is valid without disclosing the sender, recipient or amount. Computers running the network then verify those proofs.
Earlier improvements to Common reduced proof-generation time from more than three seconds to below 200 milliseconds in some tests, according to a CoinDesk report published in August.
However, a significant increase in private-payment activity would create much greater computational demands for the network.
Udon brings some of the calculations required by Tachyon into Common, allowing developers to build on cryptographic software that has already been optimized for faster performance. The Udon software is now available, but Tachyon itself has not yet been activated on the Zcash network.
Tachyon Targets 50,000+ Payments Per Second
Bowe and Ojha have established a long-term target of more than 50,000 payments per second. At that scale, they estimate that using current cryptographic methods would require each Zcash node to process more than 500 megabytes of data every second.
Tachyon is designed to reduce that burden by combining proofs from multiple transactions. If several private payments can be represented through a shared proof, network nodes would have significantly less data to receive and verify.
The approach comes with a trade-off. Producing combined proofs requires more memory, prompting Bowe’s team to build Tachyon using cryptographic code that has already been optimized within Common.
Zcash Remains Far Below the Target
The network is still nowhere near the transaction volume envisioned by Tachyon.
ZecStats data showed that Zcash averaged approximately 11,700 transactions involving shielded funds per day during the seven days ending Sept. 21. That equates to roughly one transaction every seven seconds.
The average dropped to about 6,200 shielded transactions per day during the seven days ending Sept. 28.
The release of Udon therefore represents an early development step toward Tachyon’s scaling objective. The code has entered the shared software stack, but the proposed scaling upgrade itself remains inactive on Zcash.
