The Zcash network has a new node client, called Zakura, and it's the first live piece of a broader plan to push the cryptocurrency from roughly one private transaction per second to payment-network scale. The target: 50,000 transactions per second, with privacy preserved — the kind of throughput Visa handles globally.
Why the current limit matters
Zcash's privacy features, which shield sender, receiver, and amount, have historically come at a steep performance cost. The network can process only about one shielded transaction per second, making it impractical for high-volume payments. The Zakura client is designed to change that by rethinking how the node software handles the cryptographic work behind those private transfers.
What the Zakura client does
Zakura is a new node implementation written in Rust. It's not a fork or a sidechain — it's a full Zcash node that runs the same consensus rules but uses a different architecture to accelerate shielded transactions. The client is now live, meaning anyone can run it and help test the network's capacity. The developers behind the project have said the software is the first concrete step toward scaling Zcash to Visa-level volumes while keeping transactions private.
How it compares to other privacy coins
Other privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, like Monero, have also worked on scalability, but Zcash's approach relies on zero-knowledge proofs, which are computationally heavy. The Zakura client aims to make those proofs fast enough for real-world payment flows. The 50,000 transactions per second target is roughly on par with what Visa processes globally, though that figure includes both on-chain and off-chain transactions.
What comes next
The Zakura client is live, but the full scaling plan is still in development. The project will need to prove that the new node can handle that throughput reliably and securely on the mainnet. For now, the code is available for anyone to run and test.
