Zcash Slashes Private Transaction Speed 14x, From 3s to 200ms

Developers of the privacy blockchain Zcash have released cryptographic tools that cut 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 Zcash node launched in July as part of a push to make the privacy-focused network fast enough for everyday payments.

Why Proof Generation Was So Slow

Private Zcash transactions hide the sender, receiver and amount transferred. To prove a hidden transaction still follows network rules, a wallet must generate a zero-knowledge proof, a substantial piece of cryptographic work, before the payment can be sent. That step is a major reason Zcash transactions have felt slow before the network itself processes anything.

Zakura Common changes that math. The team says the new stack makes proof generation more than 14 times faster on mobile and more than five times faster on desktop. Hashing, which converts transaction data into a fixed-length code, runs more than 21 times faster, and the work full nodes do to verify private transactions is four to eight times quicker.

“Shielded wallets that use Zakura Common, and full nodes like Zakura itself, all benefit,” Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe said in a post on X.

No Network Upgrade Required

The improvements require no change to the Zcash protocol. Wallet developers can adopt the open-source libraries on the network as it exists today. Zakura has already moved to the new stack in version 1.3.0, and Vizor Wallet is among the first outside wallets to adopt it.

The release addresses one piece of a larger scaling effort. When Zakura launched in July, its developers set a goal of supporting more than 50,000 private transactions per second, roughly the throughput of major card networks, while putting today’s wallet software at a ceiling of about one transaction per second. Earlier plans targeted bottlenecks like how quickly nodes check transactions and how much data wallets download. This release attacks a different one: how long a device spends constructing the private payment itself.

What’s Next for Zcash Scaling

A few additional gains came with the release:

• Wallets should sync faster under the new libraries
• Full nodes get quicker transaction checks and fewer orphaned blocks
• The software already handles the 25-second block times proposed for NU7, Zcash’s next upgrade

Zakura is led by Bowe, a longtime zero-knowledge cryptography researcher who has worked on Zcash’s proving system since before launch, alongside Dev Ojha. Its node software runs separately from the Zcash Foundation’s existing implementation and serves as a testing ground for broader scaling work, including Project Tachyon, which has also adopted the new stack.

Conclusion: A Fast Path to Payments

ZEC rose about 5% to near $839 following the release, though prices slipped Monday morning alongside a broader market pullback. The speed gains alone don’t solve Zcash’s scaling challenge, but they remove one of the most visible delays users encounter and mark a concrete step toward processing private payments at the speed of major card networks.