A cryptographic upgrade for the privacy coin Zcash could reduce the wait time for creating a private transaction from more than 3 seconds to within 200 milliseconds. According to an official announcement from the development team Zakura, Zakura Common, this open-source cryptographic library, rewrites and accelerates the existing encryption components in the Zcash ecosystem and can be adopted without upgrading the Zcash network itself. After the news was released, ZEC briefly rose by about 5%.
Mobile proving is 14x faster; transactions drop from 3 seconds to 200 milliseconds
Based on benchmark tests published by Zakura, Zakura Common makes the most time-consuming “zero-knowledge proof generation” over 14x faster on mobile devices and over 5x faster on desktop computers; Sinsemilla hashing is over 21x faster, trial decryption is over 1.5x faster, and zk-SNARK verification is 4 to 8x faster. Overall, private transactions that previously took more than 3 seconds to produce can now, “in many cases, be done in under 200 milliseconds, almost unnoticeably.” Zakura emphasized that these improvements “do not require any network upgrades, and are available publicly today,” and they are released as open source under both MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses, allowing wallet developers to adopt them directly on the existing network.
To expand Tachyon and pave the way, proving that speed is key to the privacy coin experience
For privacy coins, the speed at which proofs are generated directly determines the user experience of an action wallet—using a threshold in the past, where it took a few seconds on a phone to submit a shielded transaction. Zakura, led by cryptographer Sean Bowe, who has long built the proving system for Zcash, has already switched its full-node client and version 1.3.0 to this new component, and Zcash’s long-term scaling plan Tachyon has also moved to the new stack. Tachyon aims to raise the throughput of Zcash privacy transactions to tens of thousands per second, matching the processing scale of mainstream payment card networks; and faster, more resource-efficient underlying cryptography is the prerequisite to achieve this goal.
In this article, Zcash privacy transactions were compressed from 3 seconds to 200 milliseconds—no network upgrade required. First appeared on .