zakura

Introducing Zakura

Zakura is a new full node implementation for the Zcash network, built for scale. It is free and open-source software. Today, we're releasing 1.0.0.

What's Zakura?

Forked from Zebra, Zakura is a consensus-compatible Zcash full node. Its initial release already supports Ironwood (NU6.3), which activates later this month; our teams are largely responsible for Ironwood's implementation and coordination.

Zakura is a collaboration between Valar Group and Project Tachyon. Our teams are building the next generation of Zcash's protocol, and Zakura will be ground zero for integrating it into the real network.

This first release brings major improvements over existing Zcash node software:

  • Performance: Blockchain sync is nearly 5× faster than Zebra.
  • Pruning and snapshots: Native block pruning with configurable retention cuts disk usage substantially. We also publish snapshots (~11 GB pruned) that let you bootstrap a node 680× faster than syncing over the standard P2P network.
  • zcashd compatibility: A compatibility mode reproduces the legacy zcashd RPC interface, so existing wallets and integrations keep working.
  • Experimental P2P layer: We are building a new P2P transport layer for Zakura nodes, currently off by default. The goals: sub-500ms worst-case block propagation, mempool aggregation (used in Tachyon), and a future-proofed gossip protocol with strict DoS resistance built in.
Full node sync time comparison: Zebra 20 hours 46 minutes, Zakura block sync 4 hours 20 minutes, Zakura archive snapshot 37 minutes 9 seconds, and Zakura pruned snapshot 1 minute 50 seconds.
Zakura block sync finishes in 4h 20m versus Zebra's 20h 46m in this run; snapshots reduce bootstrap time further, down to 37m 9s for archive and 1m 50s for pruned.
Full node sync speed comparison showing Zakura reaching the benchmark height much sooner than Zebra.
Zakura syncs mainnet from the network far faster than Zebra in this trace, reaching the chain tip while Zebra is still in the sandblasting range.

Why fork?

Our dream is for Zcash to support the world's payments. Mastercard and Visa handle more than 50k transactions per second; that's our floor. With Zcash's existing cryptography, that volume would demand over 500MB/s of throughput from the node. The current stack won't get us there.

The cryptography our teams are developing closes much of that gap. Tachyon's recursive proofs bring the requirement down to 100MB/s, and Valar Group is developing PIR solutions that let wallet software support unbounded TPS, up from the 1 TPS ceiling of today's stack.

But cryptography is only part of the solution. We need consensus node software capable of high-performance networking at this scale. That's why we're building Zakura.

Maintainers

Zakura is maintained by Sean Bowe and Dev Ojha, veteran protocol engineers.

  • Sean Bowe is a cofounder of Zcash and the cryptographic engineer leading Project Tachyon. Hired in 2015 at Electric Coin Co., the company that launched Zcash the following year, he has been responsible for the network's zk-SNARK cryptography implementations at launch and in every network upgrade in the decade since, coauthoring several academic papers to support that work.
  • Dev Ojha is a legendary cryptographic engineer who cofounded Osmosis and now leads Valar Group, bringing frontier PIR-based cryptography (among other things) to Zcash. His team is largely responsible for the major engineering and performance work in this initial Zakura release.

Both Project Tachyon and Valar Group are funded by private ZEC donations.