Developers of the privacy blockchain Zcash have released a new set of cryptographic tools that they say can reduce the time a wallet spends creating a private transaction from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some cases.
The software, called Zakura Common, comes from the team behind Zakura, the new Zcash node launched in July as part of a broader push to make the privacy-focused blockchain fast enough for everyday payments.
Private Zcash transactions hide the sender, receiver and amount being transferred. To prove that such a hidden transaction still follows the network’s rules, the user’s wallet has to perform a substantial amount of cryptographic work before the payment can even be sent.
That calculation is among the reasons a Zcash transaction can feel slow before the network itself has done anything.
But Zakura says its new code makes that step more than 14 times faster on mobile devices and more than five times faster on desktop computers. Hashing is more than 21 times faster, and the work nodes do to check private transactions is between four and eight times faster.
“Shielded wallets that use Zakura Common, and full nodes like Zakura itself, all benefit,” Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe said in an X post.
The changes do not require an upgrade to Zcash itself. Wallet developers can adopt the open-source libraries on the network as it exists today. At the same time, Zakura has already moved to the new stack in version 1.3.0 and Vizor Wallet is among the first to pick it up.
Zcash’s scaling problem is not only about how quickly the blockchain can produce blocks. When Zakura launched in July, its developers laid out a goal of eventually supporting more than 50,000 private transactions per second, roughly the scale of major card networks. They additionally put today’s wallet software at a ceiling of about one transaction per second.
CoinDesk reported at the time that the plan involved attacking several bottlenecks at once, including how quickly nodes check transactions to how much data wallets have to download.
However, the new cryptography stack attacks another one: how long the user’s own device spends constructing the private payment in the first place.
Wallets should also sync faster under the new libraries, Zakura said, while full nodes benefit from quicker transaction checks and fewer orphaned blocks. The team said its software can already handle the 25-second block times proposed for Zcash’s next major upgrade, NU7.