Zakura has introduced Zakura Common, an open-source cryptography toolkit designed to make shielded Zcash transactions significantly faster by reducing the amount of work performed by wallets.

Released on August 31, the toolkit can bring shielded transaction creation down from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some cases, Zakura said. Mobile proof generation is reportedly more than 14 times faster, potentially removing a major delay for users making private ZEC payments.

The performance gains also apply to desktop devices. Zakura said transaction creation is more than five times faster, while Sinsemilla hashing has improved by more than 21 times. Trial decryption is over 1.5 times faster, and zk-SNARK verification is now four to eight times quicker.

Wallet teams can add the libraries without waiting for a Zcash protocol upgrade or changing the network’s consensus rules. Zakura intends to integrate the stack into its upcoming 1.3.0 node release, and Vizor Wallet is among the first projects to adopt the technology.

Reducing the Cost of Zcash Privacy

Shielded transactions are a core privacy feature of Zcash, hiding the sender, recipient and amount involved in a payment. The trade-off is that wallets must perform extensive cryptographic calculations before a transaction can be sent to the network.

Those calculations happen locally on the user’s device. As a result, users can experience a delay before broadcasting a shielded transaction even when the blockchain itself is functioning normally.

Zakura Common is focused on reducing this client-side workload. Rather than changing block production or consensus rules, the toolkit improves the cryptographic processes used by wallets, allowing the changes to work on the existing Zcash network.

Zakura also expects its libraries to improve wallet synchronization. Its node software is designed to provide faster transaction verification, reduce orphan rates and accelerate transaction propagation. The performance claims are based on Zakura’s own benchmark testing.

Zakura Targets Larger-Scale Zcash Performance

Zakura is an independent Zcash node implementation led by co-founder Sean Bowe and Dev Ojha. Its software is separate from the node implementation maintained by the Zcash Foundation.

The project is being used to test broader scaling improvements, with Project Tachyon also transitioning to the new technology stack.

The team argues that Zcash scaling involves more than increasing block speed. Transaction verification, blockchain synchronization and client-side proof generation can all become bottlenecks as network usage grows.

Zakura has set a long-term goal of supporting more than 50,000 private transactions per second, roughly matching the scale of major card-payment systems. That compares with an estimated ceiling of about one transaction per second for current wallet software.

The team also said its implementation can already handle the 25-second block intervals proposed under NU7, the next major Zcash upgrade.

ZEC gained about 5% after Zakura Common was announced, reaching roughly $839, before retreating during a wider market decline on Monday. Zakura is encouraging wallet developers to integrate its open-source libraries, which are available for use without requiring changes to the current Zcash network.