On August 29, the Zakura team introduced an open set of cryptographic and protocol libraries for the Zcash ecosystem. According to the developers, Zakura Common can reduce the preparation time for private transactions in a wallet from over three seconds to less than 200 ms in certain scenarios.
Introducing Zakura Common.
We just shipped 14x faster proving, 21x faster hashing, 1.5x faster trial decryption, and 4-8x faster verification.
New releases of Zakura and wallets that use Zakura Common (such as @vizorwallet) will benefit immediately.https://t.co/WE2zfLLJ9S
— Zakura (@ZakuraZcash) August 29, 2026
This refers to the computations a user’s device performs before sending a transaction to the network, not the transaction’s confirmation on the blockchain.
These optimizations do not require an update to the Zcash protocol. The libraries are available under a dual MIT/Apache 2.0 license and can be used by wallet developers on the existing network.
Proof Generation and Libraries
According to Zakura’s internal tests, individual components of the new stack demonstrated the following speed improvements:
- proof generation — more than 14 times faster on mobile devices and over five times faster on desktops;
- Sinsemilla hashing — more than 21 times faster;
- trial decryption — more than 1.5 times faster;
- zk-SNARK verification — 4-8 times faster.
The developers attribute the results not to a single major optimization but to changes across several components. Some are based on known approaches from cryptography and compiler development, while others were specifically developed for Zcash.
The main development is compiled in the monorepository zakura-core/common, which contains modified versions of librustzcash and several other Rust libraries.
Separately, the team is developing zakura-core/wallet-libraries — a set of components for private wallets and third-party integrations. In the future, they plan to add PIR (Private Information Retrieval) tools, which allow data requests without revealing to the server which specific element the user is interested in.
In the initial announcement, Zakura 1.3.0 was mentioned as the upcoming version. On the same day, August 29, the developers released version 1.3.0.
In the announcement, the team also mentioned Zakura’s transition to Zakura Common and encouraged third-party wallet developers to use the new stack instead of the previous librustzcash libraries. According to Zakura, the Tachyon project has also transitioned to it.
Scaling Zcash
The Zakura team claims that the network based on its nodes already handles the proposed 25-second target interval between blocks for NU7. The corresponding ZIP 218 proposes reducing the target interval from the current 75 seconds to 25 seconds. While maintaining a comparable level of rollback protection, the actual delay reduction may be slightly less than threefold.
The proposal also includes limits on the number of operations in the Sapling and Orchard private pools. According to the authors’ calculations, this will reduce the maximum data volume for synchronizing lightweight wallets by 37% — from 271 MB to 169 MB per day, and the number of trial decryptions from 4.8 million to 2.3 million.
The estimated throughput of Orchard will increase from 2.9 to 6.6 transactions per second.
Previously, on July 28, Zcash activated an update after discovering a critical vulnerability in Orchard. The upgrade limited the previous pool and launched the new private Ironwood pool.
