Zakura Common Boosts Zcash Private Transaction Speed by Over 14x

The Zakura Common cryptography libraries for Zcash have been released, significantly speeding up private transaction construction. According to benchmarks, mobile proof generation is now more than 14 times faster, desktop generation more than five times faster, Sinsemilla hashing more than 21 times faster, and zk-SNARK verification between four and eight times faster. This means users can now wait under 200 milliseconds for a wallet to create a transaction, down from over three seconds.

The improvements do not require an upgrade to Zcash itself, allowing wallets to adopt the open-source libraries on the existing network. The team behind Zakura has moved to the new stack in version 1.3.0, and Vizor Wallet is among the first to integrate it. This release extends the scaling goal outlined when Zakura launched, targeting more than 50,000 private transactions per second.

Sean Bowe, Zcash co-founder, notes that shielded wallets using Zakura Common and full nodes like Zakura itself all benefit from these improvements. The software can already handle proposed 25-second block times for the next major upgrade, NU7. Following the release, the price of ZEC briefly rose about 5% to near $839.