Three seconds doesn’t sound like a long time until you’re staring at a loading screen every time you want to send a private transaction. Zakura, the developer behind a Zcash full node client, just released an open-source library called Zakura Common that compresses shielded transaction creation from over three seconds to under 200 milliseconds.
The upgrade does not require a hard fork, a consensus change, or anything that would force the Zcash network to coordinate a synchronized update. Compatible wallets can simply integrate the new library and start serving faster transactions immediately.
The numbers behind the speed boost
Mobile proof generation, the computation-heavy step that makes shielded transactions possible on phones, is now more than 14 times faster. Desktop performance improved by over five times. Sinsemilla hashing, a core cryptographic operation used in Zcash’s Orchard protocol, saw a 21-fold improvement. Trial decryption, the process wallets use to scan the blockchain and identify incoming payments, got 1.5 times faster. And zk-SNARK verification, the zero-knowledge proof system that underpins Zcash’s privacy guarantees, now runs four to eight times quicker.
The library is dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0. It will ship as part of Zakura version 1.3.0, and wallets built on Zakura’s infrastructure, such as Vizor, can integrate the improvements without waiting for broader network coordination.
