# Introducing Zakura (2026-07-15)

Zakura's launch announcement, marking the project's public debut alongside
its first release, 1.0.0.

What it establishes:

- Zakura is a new full node implementation for the
  [Zcash](https://z.cash/) network, built for scale. It is free and
  open-source software, developed at https://github.com/zakura-core/zakura,
  and version 1.0.0 is released
  (https://github.com/zakura-core/zakura/releases/tag/v1.0.0).
- Zakura is forked from [Zebra](https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra)
  and is a consensus-compatible Zcash full node. Its initial release
  already supports Ironwood (NU6.3), which activates later in July 2026;
  the announcement states that the teams behind Zakura are largely
  responsible for Ironwood's implementation and coordination.
- Zakura is a collaboration between Valar Group (https://valargroup.dev/)
  and Project Tachyon (https://tachyon.z.cash/). The teams are building the next generation
  of cryptography and protocol design for Zcash, and the announcement
  describes Zakura as ground zero for integrating that work into the
  real Zcash network.
- Improvements claimed for the first release: blockchain sync nearly 5×
  faster than Zebra; native block pruning with configurable retention
  that substantially cuts disk usage; published snapshots
  (https://zakura.com/snapshots/), around 11 GB pruned, that let a node
  bootstrap 680× faster than syncing over the standard P2P network; a
  zcashd compatibility mode (https://zakura.com/zcashd/) that reproduces
  the legacy zcashd RPC interface so existing wallets and integrations
  keep working; and an experimental P2P transport layer, currently off
  by default, targeting sub-500ms worst-case block propagation, mempool
  aggregation (used in Tachyon), and a future-proofed gossip protocol
  with strict DoS resistance built in.
- The announcement includes two sync charts: a full node sync time chart
  comparing Zebra at 20h 46m, Zakura block sync at 4h 20m, Zakura archive
  snapshot restore at 37m 9s, and Zakura pruned snapshot restore at 1m
  50s; and a full node sync speed chart showing Zakura reaching the
  chain tip while Zebra is still in the sandblasting range.
- Why the fork exists: the teams' stated goal is for Zcash to support
  the world's payments, taking Mastercard and Visa's more than 50k
  transactions per second as the floor. With Zcash's existing
  cryptography, that volume would demand over 500MB/s of throughput from
  the node, which the announcement says the current stack cannot
  deliver. The teams' cryptography closes much of that gap: Tachyon's
  recursive proofs bring the requirement down to 100MB/s, and Valar
  Group is developing private information retrieval (PIR) solutions that
  let wallet software support unbounded transactions per second, up from
  the 1 TPS ceiling of the current stack. Cryptography is only part of
  the solution: the announcement presents Zakura as the consensus node
  software capable of high-performance networking at this scale.
- Maintainers: Sean Bowe, 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. And Dev Ojha, who
  cofounded Osmosis and now leads Valar Group, bringing frontier
  PIR-based cryptography to Zcash. Dev's team is largely responsible for
  the major engineering and performance work in the initial Zakura
  release. Both Project Tachyon and Valar Group are funded by private
  ZEC donations.

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Canonical HTML version: https://zakura.com/announcements/introducing-zakura/