Zakura Speeds Up Zcash Transactions by Over 14x with New Cryptography Libraries

The team behind Zakura, a Zcash node launched in July, has made significant strides in improving the speed of private transactions. The release of Zakura Common, a collection of cryptography libraries, cuts the time wallets spend constructing private transactions by more than 14 times on mobile devices and over five times faster on desktops.

The optimization is part of a broader effort to make Zcash's privacy-focused blockchain fast enough for everyday payments. Private Zcash transactions hide sender, receiver, and amount information, requiring substantial cryptographic work before a payment can be sent.

According to the project's announcement, Zakura Common makes mobile proof generation 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 who once waited more than three seconds can now wait under 200 milliseconds in many cases.

The improvements do not require an upgrade to Zcash itself, allowing wallet developers to adopt the open-source libraries on the existing network. The team behind Zakura has already moved to the new stack in version 1.3.0, and other projects like Tachyon scaling effort have followed suit.