Zcash developers have started integrating code from Project Tachyon into Zakura Common as they work toward a long-term capacity target of more than 50,000 private payments per second.

The developers behind the privacy-focused blockchain are moving an early piece of the proposed scaling technology into software already used by Zcash projects. The effort is intended to create a foundation for handling a much larger volume of private transactions.

The component is called Udon and was originally developed as part of Project Tachyon, Zcash’s proposed scaling upgrade.

Project Tachyon lead Sean Bowe said Udon was released on Monday in Zakura Common, a shared cryptography library used by Zakura and other Zcash projects. Common performs some of the computationally intensive work involved in generating and verifying proofs for private transactions. Bowe’s team develops Zakura together with Dev Ojha’s Valar Group.

A shielded Zcash payment requires a wallet to prove that a transaction is valid without revealing the sender, recipient or amount. Network computers then verify the proof.

Earlier performance improvements to Common reduced proof-generation time from more than three seconds to less than 200 milliseconds in some tests, according to CoinDesk’s August report.

However, significantly increasing the number of private transactions would create a much larger computational workload for the computers processing those proofs.

Udon moves some of the calculations required by Tachyon into Common, giving developers a faster foundation on which to build the proposed scaling system. The Udon code is now available, but Tachyon has not been activated on Zcash.

Tachyon Aims for More Than 50,000 Payments Per Second

Bowe and Ojha have established a long-term target of processing more than 50,000 payments each second. At that scale, they estimate that current cryptographic methods could require each Zcash node to receive more than 500 megabytes of data every second.

Tachyon is designed to reduce that burden by combining proofs from multiple private payments. Instead of requiring nodes to receive and verify a separate proof for every transaction, several payments could be represented through a single combined proof.

Generating these combined proofs requires more memory, which is why Bowe’s team is building Tachyon with cryptographic code that has already undergone performance improvements within Common.

Zcash Activity Remains Well Below the Target

The network is still far from the transaction volume envisioned by the Tachyon project.

ZecStats data showed that Zcash averaged around 11,700 transactions involving shielded funds per day in the seven days through Sept. 21. That is equivalent to roughly one transaction every seven seconds.

The average declined to about 6,200 shielded transactions per day during the seven days through Sept. 28.

The release of Udon is therefore an early step toward Tachyon’s broader scaling objective. While the new component is now part of the shared software library, the proposed Tachyon upgrade itself remains inactive on Zcash.