# Zakura Common: High Performance Zcash Cryptography

Announcement dated 2026-08-29 releasing Zakura Common
(https://github.com/zakura-core/common), a large collection of accelerated
cryptography and protocol libraries for the Zcash ecosystem, developed for
the Zakura full node and intended to improve wallet performance as well.

What the announcement says:

- The optimizations in this release are among the most significant in
  Zcash's history. Headline benchmark results (team benchmark hardware):
  - Mobile proof generation is more than 14x faster (desktop more than 5x).
  - Sinsemilla hashing is more than 21x faster.
  - Trial decryption is more than 1.5x faster.
  - zk-SNARK verification is between 4x and 8x faster.
- Scaling context: users today spend over three seconds waiting for their
  wallets to create a transaction; with Zakura Common's optimized
  cryptography that wait drops below 200ms in many cases. Wallets using the
  new stack sync much faster, and full nodes running Zakura benefit from
  reduced orphan rates and faster transaction propagation. The network can
  already handle the 25-second block times proposed for NU7, and these
  optimizations allow scaling further.
- None of the improvements require a network upgrade, and everything is
  publicly available today under the standard MIT / Apache 2.0 dual
  license. Zakura has completely switched to this new stack in its
  upcoming 1.3.0 release, and Tachyon (https://tachyon.z.cash/) has too;
  separate announcements will cover this.
- The root of the work is the Zakura Common monorepo
  https://github.com/zakura-core/common, which contains modified forks of
  `librustzcash` and several other crates commonly used in the Zcash
  ecosystem. Some of the performance improvements derive from well-known
  techniques in the broader cryptography and compiler worlds; others stem
  from novel ideas the team developed for Zcash (described at
  https://zakura.com/engineering/).
- The results are not all from one big optimization: each headline
  component did substantially improve, but per Amdahl's law, once one
  component is optimized some other serial process becomes the bottleneck.
  Much of the effort was spent on constant factor improvements to things
  that would normally be considered asymptotically efficient.
- A separate repository, https://github.com/zakura-core/wallet-libraries,
  contains Rust crates useful for shielded wallets or other integrations.
  Zakura, being a full node, does not depend on these libraries. They
  integrate directly with the Zakura Common stack and inherit many of its
  performance benefits; longer term this repository will contain the
  team's private information retrieval (PIR) work.
- Next steps: Zakura Common speeds up full nodes and wallets significantly
  compared to the legacy `librustzcash` stack, and the team invites wallets
  to switch to these libraries to get the performance benefits on today's
  Zcash network. The Zakura 1.3.0 release is forthcoming, will switch to
  Zakura Common, and will be announced separately.

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