Zcash Launches Zakura Full Node, Aims to Boost Privacy Transactions to 50,000 Per Second

BlockBeats News, July 19th. Zcash has launched a new full node client, Zakura 1.0.0, as the first live component of its effort to increase privacy transaction throughput from the current rate of about 1 transaction per second to a payment network scale. The client is maintained by Zcash's early zero-knowledge cryptography member Sean Bowe and Valar Group's leader Dev Ojha, independent of the Zcash Foundation and funded through private ZEC donations.

Zakura is based on Zcash Foundation's Zebra client development. The team provides a blockchain snapshot of about 11GB, allowing new nodes to start up in two minutes, a speed improvement of about 680 times. Its compatibility mode can also replicate the old zcashd interface, enabling wallets and exchanges to continue running after the client's maintenance was terminated on July 18th.

The team mentioned that Visa and Mastercard process over 50,000 transactions per second as their minimum target. To reduce the validation burden of large-scale privacy transactions, Sean Bowe's Tachyon project is developing recursive proofs, allowing nodes to validate thousands of other proofs through a single proof; Valar Group is developing private information retrieval technology, enabling wallets to access relevant transaction data without exposing their query content.

Zakura is also testing a fast broadcast system to propagate new blocks to all nodes within half a second. Its recent testnet is the Ironwood upgrade, scheduled to activate on the mainnet on July 28th. Ironwood will restrict inflow and outflow of funds to the Orchard privacy pool through a "turnstile" mechanism to mitigate the risk of previous zero-knowledge proof vulnerabilities that could lead to counterfeit ZEC entering circulation.