Zcash Wallet Proofs Get 14x Faster on Mobile With No Fork Needed

Sending a private payment in Zcash has meant waiting about three seconds while the wallet builds a proof. Zakura, the team behind the Zcash full node of the same name, published a set of cryptography libraries on 29 August that it says cuts that wait to under 200 milliseconds in many cases. The headline benchmark is proof generation more than 14 times faster on mobile hardware, and better than five times faster on desktop. The libraries are called Zakura Common. No fork, no consensus change and no validator vote is involved.

What the benchmarks claim

Four further numbers come with the release. Sinsemilla hashing, the hash function Zcash uses to build the commitment trees behind its shielded pool, runs more than 21 times faster. Trial decryption, the work a wallet does scanning the chain for payments addressed to it, gains about 1.5 times. Verification of zk-SNARKs, the compact proofs that let a shielded transaction be checked without revealing what is in it, improves by four to eight times. The code is a set of accelerated forks of librustzcash and several other Rust crates, dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0, and public from the day it was announced.

"Shielded wallets that use Zakura Common, and full nodes like Zakura itself, all benefit from these massive performance improvements," Sean Bowe said in remarks carried by Coinpedia.

Nobody has reproduced the numbers

Every figure in circulation traces to one place. Coinpedia and TronWeekly published on 29 August, CoinDesk and Crypto Briefing on 31 August, and all four carry the announcement's own benchmarks unchanged. None reports an independent measurement. None names the hardware the mobile figures were taken on. The announcement hedges its own headline claim with the phrase "in many cases", and we could not establish what falls outside that. These are the numbers Zakura measured, and no one else has checked them yet.

The price line does not hold up

ZEC rose about 5% after the announcement, on which the two outlets that give a level disagree. Coinpedia prints $838.60 and TronWeekly about $833, and neither shows the other's figure. Coinpedia goes further and calls that the highest ZEC has traded since January 2018. It does not survive a check against nine days earlier, when the token touched about $855 during the session on Grayscale's amended ETF filing. Mert, chief executive of Helius, called the work an "insane engineering feat" in comments carried by both Coinpedia and TronWeekly.

Shipping it is up to the wallets

A change that needs no fork also reaches nobody automatically. Wallet developers and node operators have to pull the code into their own releases before a user notices anything, a point TronWeekly makes and the other write-ups leave implicit. Zakura says its own node, at a forthcoming version 1.3.0, and the Tachyon scaling effort have both switched to the new stack. Crypto Briefing names Vizor as a wallet that can integrate it now, and no other outlet names a wallet at all. How many have shipped is reported nowhere. Zcash's last two news cycles were about funds, not code, and the ZCSH listing on NYSE Arca on 25 August was the second of them. This one lands in wallet software, where the wait a user actually sits through either shortens or does not.