The speedup, by the numbers
Zakura's benchmarks show mobile proof generation running more than 14 times faster, desktop transaction creation more than five times faster, and Sinsemilla hashing improvements exceeding 21 times. Trial decryption is more than 1.5 times faster, and zk-SNARK verification lands between four and eight times faster. The figures are Zakura's own, so they come with the usual caveat, but the direction is clear.
Shielded Zcash transactions hide the sender, receiver, and amount, which means the user's device has to do substantial cryptographic work before anything gets broadcast. That's why the old three-second-plus creation time mattered. Cutting it to under 200 milliseconds makes private transactions feel closer to ordinary ones. Wallets using the new libraries should also sync faster, since the underlying cryptographic work is lighter.
No fork required
Zakura Common works on the existing Zcash network. No upgrade, no consensus change. The toolkit is designed to be dropped into existing wallets without altering how they interact with the chain. Zakura has also moved its own node software to the new stack in the upcoming 1.3.0 release. Full nodes running Zakura should see faster transaction checks, reduced orphan rates, and faster transaction propagation, according to the team.
Early adopters and the long game
Vizor Wallet is among the first to adopt Zakura Common. Zakura is a separate Zcash node implementation led by Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe in collaboration with Dev Ojha. It's being used as an early testing ground for broader scaling work, and Project Tachyon has also moved to the new stack.
Zakura's stated long-term target is more than 50,000 private transactions per second, compared with a described ceiling of about one transaction per second for today's wallet software. The team says its software can already handle the 25-second block times proposed for NU7, Zcash's next major upgrade.
Zakura is inviting wallets to switch to its cryptography libraries, which are publicly available for use on the current Zcash
