Zcash tool cuts private transaction time to under 200ms

Zcash developers released a new cryptography toolkit that cuts the time to build a private transaction from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some cases, CoinDesk reported. 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 blockchain fast enough for everyday payments.

The delay Zakura Common targets sits before the network ever sees a transaction. A private Zcash payment hides the sender, receiver, and amount, so the wallet has to complete a substantial amount of cryptographic work to prove the hidden transaction still follows network rules before it can even send the payment. That calculation is a big reason Zcash transfers can feel slow before the network itself has done anything.

Zakura says the new code makes that step more than 14 times faster on mobile devices and more than five times faster on desktop computers, with hashing running more than 21 times faster and node-side verification of private transactions four to eight times faster.

• Mobile transaction creation: 14x+ faster
• Desktop transaction creation: 5x+ faster
• Hashing: 21x+ faster
• Node-side verification of private transactions: 4x-8x faster
• Transaction creation time: from 3+ seconds to under 200 milliseconds

None of this requires an upgrade to Zcash itself. 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 pick it up.

The release fits a bigger goal than raw speed on one device. When Zakura launched in July, its developers set a target of eventually supporting more than 50,000 private transactions per second, roughly the scale of major card networks, against a current wallet software ceiling of about one transaction per second. CoinDesk reported at the time that hitting that number means attacking several bottlenecks at once: how fast nodes check transactions, how much data wallets have to download, and now, with this release, how long a user's own device spends constructing the payment in the first place.

Faster syncing and fewer orphaned blocks round out the gains on the node side, and the team says its software already handles the 25-second block times proposed for Zcash's next major upgrade, NU7, the same release the network recently voted on. It's one more piece of engineering work following close behind Zcash's Ironwood fix earlier this summer, part of a stretch where the network has been shipping changes faster than the headlines around ZEC's price usually suggest.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.