Zakura Common Takes Aim at Zcash’s Wallet Privacy Weakness

In the latest Zcash development, Zakura introduced Zakura Common on August 31, an open-source cryptography toolkit designed to speed up the creation of shielded Zcash transactions. According to the team, the software can reduce transaction-generation times from more than three seconds to below 200 milliseconds in certain cases.

Zakura said its new stack makes mobile proof generation more than 14 times faster, targeting a major source of delay for users sending private ZEC.

On desktop devices, transaction creation is reportedly more than five times faster. The team also cited improvements of over 21 times for Sinsemilla hashing, more than 1.5 times faster trial decryption and a four- to eightfold increase in zk-SNARK verification speeds.

Wallet developers can integrate the libraries without requiring a Zcash network upgrade or changes to consensus rules. Zakura plans to use the technology in its upcoming 1.3.0 node release, while Vizor Wallet is among the first wallet projects to implement the new stack.

Shielded Zcash transactions are designed to conceal the sender, recipient and transaction amount. Before such a payment reaches the network, however, the wallet must carry out significant cryptographic calculations to demonstrate that the concealed transaction complies with Zcash’s rules.

Most of this work takes place locally on the user’s device before the transaction is submitted to the blockchain.

This wallet-side computation can make shielded payments feel slow even though the underlying network has not yet processed the transaction. Zakura Common is specifically designed to reduce that bottleneck, rather than attempting to speed up block production or alter consensus. The improvements therefore do not require changes to the Zcash network itself.

Zakura also said wallets using the new libraries could synchronize more quickly. Full nodes running its software are expected to benefit from faster transaction validation, fewer orphaned transactions and quicker propagation across the network. The performance numbers, however, are based on benchmarks conducted by Zakura.

Part of a Broader Zcash Scaling Effort

Zakura is an independent Zcash node implementation led by Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe alongside Dev Ojha. Its node software operates separately from the existing implementation maintained by the Zcash Foundation.

The project is being used as an early environment for testing broader scaling improvements, with Project Tachyon also adopting the new technology stack.

Zcash’s scaling limitations extend beyond block-processing speed. The time required for nodes to verify transactions, the amount of blockchain data wallets need to download and the computational workload involved in generating proofs on user devices are separate challenges. Zakura’s approach seeks to address several of these areas simultaneously.

The project has set a longer-term goal of supporting more than 50,000 private transactions per second, roughly comparable to the scale of major card-payment networks. That compares with the approximately one-transaction-per-second limit attributed to current wallet software.

Zakura said its software is already capable of supporting the 25-second block intervals proposed under NU7, which is described as Zcash’s next major network upgrade.

ZEC climbed roughly 5% to around $839 following the announcement before giving up some gains during Monday morning’s broader market decline. Zakura is encouraging wallet developers to adopt its cryptographic libraries, which are publicly available and compatible with the existing Zcash network.

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