Zakura Common Seeks to Strengthen Privacy Across Zcash Wallets

Zakura has launched Zakura Common, an open-source cryptography toolkit aimed at making shielded Zcash transactions faster by improving the cryptographic work handled by wallets.

The toolkit, released August 31, can reduce shielded transaction creation from more than three seconds to below 200 milliseconds in certain cases, according to Zakura. The team said mobile proof generation is now more than 14 times faster, helping address a major source of delay for users sending private ZEC.

Zakura also reported substantial improvements on desktop devices, where transaction creation is more than five times faster. Sinsemilla hashing has accelerated by more than 21 times, trial decryption is over 1.5 times faster, and zk-SNARK verification has improved by four to eight times.

The new libraries can be adopted by wallets without a Zcash consensus change or network upgrade. Zakura plans to integrate them into its upcoming 1.3.0 node release, while Vizor Wallet is among the first projects to adopt the technology.

Fixing the Wallet Bottleneck

Shielded Zcash transactions hide the sender, recipient and amount of a payment. To create a valid shielded transaction, a wallet must complete significant cryptographic calculations on the user’s device before the transaction can be broadcast.

This client-side workload can make private payments feel slow even when the Zcash blockchain itself is not experiencing any delay.

Zakura Common focuses on reducing that processing burden. The toolkit does not alter block production or consensus rules, allowing wallet developers to improve transaction-generation times without changing the underlying network.

Zakura said wallets using the libraries could also synchronize faster. Full nodes running its implementation may see quicker transaction validation, lower orphan rates and faster propagation across the network. The reported performance improvements are based on Zakura’s own benchmarks.

A Broader Scaling Strategy

Zakura is a separate Zcash node implementation led by co-founder Sean Bowe and Dev Ojha. It operates independently from the implementation maintained by the Zcash Foundation.

The new stack is also being tested through Project Tachyon as part of a broader effort to improve Zcash performance.

The project argues that scaling Zcash requires addressing several bottlenecks, including node verification, wallet synchronization, blockchain data requirements and client-side proof generation, rather than focusing solely on block-production speed.

Zakura’s long-term target is to support more than 50,000 private transactions per second, putting its ambition roughly on par with major card-payment networks. The team contrasts this with the approximately one-transaction-per-second limit it attributes to current wallet software.

Zakura also said its software is already capable of supporting the 25-second block interval proposed for NU7, which is positioned as Zcash’s next major upgrade.

ZEC climbed roughly 5% to around $839 following the announcement before retreating during a broader market sell-off. Zakura is now encouraging wallet developers to adopt its publicly available cryptography libraries, which can run on the existing Zcash network without requiring a protocol-level change.