Zcash Developers Start Integrating Tachyon Code Into Faster Payment Software

Zcash developers are beginning to integrate Project Tachyon technology into Zakura Common as they work toward a long-term goal of processing more than 50,000 private payments per second.

The team behind the privacy-focused blockchain is moving an early component of its proposed scaling upgrade into software already used by Zcash projects, laying groundwork for significantly higher private-transaction capacity.

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

On Monday, Udon was released into Zakura Common, a shared cryptography library used by Zakura and other Zcash projects, according to Project Tachyon lead Sean Bowe. Common performs some of the computational work required to generate and verify proofs for private transactions. Bowe’s team works with Dev Ojha’s Valar Group on the development of Zakura.

In a private Zcash transaction, a wallet must prove that a payment is valid without revealing the identities of the sender and recipient or the amount transferred. Network computers then verify the cryptographic proof.

Previous improvements to Common reduced the time required to generate a single proof from more than three seconds to below 200 milliseconds in some tests, CoinDesk reported in August.

A much larger volume of private payments, however, would place considerably greater demands on the computers processing those proofs.

Udon moves some of the computations required for Tachyon’s proposed scaling upgrade into Common. This allows developers to build the new system on top of cryptographic code that has already undergone performance improvements. Udon is currently available as software, but the Tachyon upgrade itself has not been activated on Zcash.

Zcash’s 50,000-Payment Target

Bowe and Ojha have set a long-term target of more than 50,000 private payments per second. They estimate that processing transactions at that scale using today’s cryptography would require each Zcash node to handle more than 500 megabytes of data every second.

Tachyon is designed to address that challenge by combining proofs from multiple payments, reducing the amount of information that individual nodes would need to receive and verify.

Instead of requiring network computers to independently process large numbers of proofs, multiple transactions could share a combined proof. Generating that proof requires additional memory, which is why Bowe’s team is building Tachyon with code that has already been optimized within Common.

Zcash Still Far From Tachyon’s Target

The network remains far below the proposed 50,000-payments-per-second target.

ZecStats data showed Zcash averaged roughly 11,700 transactions involving shielded funds per day during the seven days ending Sept. 21. That works out to approximately one transaction every seven seconds.

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

For now, the release of Udon represents an early software step toward Tachyon’s broader scaling goals rather than the activation of the upgrade itself.

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