Zcash developers deployed Udon, a new component of Project Tachyon, into the Zakura Common cryptography library on Monday. The integration moves specific scaling calculations into optimized existing software, preparing the privacy-focused network to handle significantly higher volumes of shielded payments.
Zakura Common serves as a shared library handling the complex mathematical operations required to create and verify private transactions—allowing a Zcash wallet to validate a payment without revealing sender, receiver, or amount.
Earlier enhancements to Zakura Common slashed proof creation times from over three seconds to under 200 milliseconds for a single proof, making private payments materially faster.
Sean Bowe, Project Tachyon leader, confirmed Udon's release. He develops Zakura jointly with Valar Group's Dev Ojha. Bowe and Ojha set a long-term target of more than 50,000 private payments per second for Zcash.
Achieving that volume requires substantial efficiency gains. At 50,000 transactions per second, today's cryptographic methods would force each Zcash node to process over 500 megabytes of data every second. Tachyon solves this by combining proofs from multiple payments into a single aggregated proof, reducing the data each node must receive and verify.
Creating combined proofs demands more memory. Bowe's team leverages the faster code in Zakura Common to manage this increased load.
Udon is live as software, but the full Tachyon upgrade has not yet been activated on the Zcash network. Implementation will follow further development and testing.
Current shielded transaction volume remains far below the target. ZecStats data shows the network averaged about 11,700 shielded transactions daily in the seven days ending Sept. 21—roughly one transaction every seven seconds. Daily shielded volume fell to approximately 6,200 in the seven days through Sept. 28.
