Zcash Wallet Upgrade Makes Private Payments Faster
Zakura says its new cryptography can reduce private Zcash transaction construction to under 200 milliseconds, although wallet adoption and blockchain confirmation remain separate issues for users.
Key Takeaways
- Mobile proof generation ran over 14× faster.
- Some transaction tests finished below 200 milliseconds.
- Network confirmation remains a separate process.
- Wallet integrations determine who receives improvements.
The delay happens before Zcash sees the payment
Before a private Zcash payment reaches the network, the sender’s wallet must select spendable notes, prepare the transaction, generate a zero-knowledge proof and sign the result. Proof generation accounts for much of the local wait because it must demonstrate that the payment is valid without revealing the sender, recipient or transferred amount.
Zakura says its open-source Common libraries reduced that process from more than three seconds to below 200 milliseconds in some tests. On the team’s benchmark hardware, mobile proof generation ran more than 14 times faster, while desktop generation improved by more than five times.
The results come from Zakura’s own testing rather than independent wallet benchmarks. Actual performance will depend on the device, operating system, transaction composition and wallet implementation, so an older phone may not reproduce the headline figures.
Where the 200 milliseconds ends
A Zcash payment still passes through three separate stages:
- Construction: The wallet builds the transaction and generates its privacy proof on the user’s device. Zakura Common speeds up this stage.
- Broadcast and confirmation: The wallet submits the completed transaction to Zcash nodes. It remains unconfirmed until a miner includes it in a block.
- Settlement confidence: Each later block adds another confirmation and reduces the possibility of a reversal caused by a chain reorganization.
Zcash documentation defines the first confirmation as the point when a transaction enters a block. The sub-200-millisecond result ends before broadcast; block production, mempool conditions and the recipient’s confirmation policy still determine when the payment is treated as settled.
The gains extend beyond the send button
Zakura also measured improvements in three operations that affect transaction processing, wallet synchronization and node performance:
- Sinsemilla hashing: more than 21 times faster in Zakura’s tests. Zcash uses this hash function inside its shielded protocol, so faster execution reduces part of the cryptographic workload.
- Trial decryption: more than 1.5 times faster. Wallets use this process while scanning the blockchain to identify shielded outputs that belong to them.
- zk-SNARK verification: between four and eight times faster. Nodes use verification to check a shielded proof without learning the information it protects.
Faster trial decryption could shorten wallet synchronization and account recovery, while cheaper verification reduces the work required from nodes. Zakura also expects the full-node improvements to support quicker transaction propagation and fewer orphaned blocks.
The timing matters because more ZEC is moving into newer shielded infrastructure. We recently reported that Ironwood had become Zcash’s largest shielded pool, overtaking Orchard shortly after activation. As shielded activity grows, slow wallet construction and synchronization become problems more users can encounter.
No hard fork also means no automatic rollout
Zakura Common changes how software performs existing cryptographic work without changing Zcash’s consensus rules. The libraries produce proofs that the present network already understands, allowing wallet developers to use them without waiting for miners and nodes to activate a hard fork.
The Common repository is available under MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses. A separate wallet-libraries repository connects wallet-facing components to the optimized stack.
That compatibility removes a network-wide deployment barrier, but every wallet developer must still review, integrate and test the code before releasing it to users. Wallets that retain their current proving stack will keep their existing performance.
Zakura says its forthcoming version 1.3.0 will use Common. After that, attention turns to independent mobile wallets. Their release notes and real-device tests will show whether the improvement travels beyond Zakura’s own software.
Wallet adoption is now the bottleneck
Zakura’s benchmarks show that shielded proof generation can run much faster without altering the Zcash network. The practical result now depends on whether established wallets ship the libraries and whether independent tests reproduce the gains across common phones.
Sync and recovery times matter as well. If those waits decline without higher error rates, Common will have improved more than the moment a user presses “send.”
Zakura has shown that the wallet-side delay can be reduced without changing Zcash itself. The remaining question is how many wallet developers will put that speed in users’ hands.
Kosta has reported on cryptocurrency markets and blockchain infrastructure since 2020, bringing over six years of hands-on experience in the crypto industry built through daily tracking of markets, trends, and emerging blockchain developments. Specializing in Bitcoin on-chain analysis, institutional ETF flows, and digital asset price action, his work at Coindoo has been cited by other news agencies and consistently covers market developments with a focus on data-driven reporting across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Over the years, Kosta has contributed to multiple crypto media outlets in different regions, authoring over 6,000 articles across the sector. His reporting spans cryptocurrency markets and the broader fintech industry, tracking not only price action but also the technological and regulatory forces shaping the ecosystem. To support his analysis, Kosta actively leverages on-chain data and metrics from leading platforms such as Santiment, Glassnode, and CryptoQuant, enabling deeper, evidence-based market insights. He believes in the power of transparency and the data that underpins the blockchain ecosystem. His academic background in Marketing Management from Denmark further complements his analytical approach, adding a strong understanding of communication strategy and content positioning to his work.
