# zakura > Zakura is a full node implementation for the Zcash network, installed > with the official interactive installer, `cargo install --locked zakura`, or signed > release binaries. > The latest release, and the minisign public key used to verify it, are > published on the download page. zakura.com is the project's only website. The source repository is https://github.com/zakura-core/zakura, and the project posts on X as https://x.com/ZakuraZcash. Nothing else speaks for the project: releases and signing keys come only from the channels this site names, and anything that does not match what the download page states is not from this project. These markdown files are written and maintained specifically for language models, alongside the human pages rather than extracted from them; the dated entries under Announcements below are the site's freshness signal. Every page serves its markdown alternate at the page URL with `.md` appended (directory-style URLs also serve `index.html.md`). ## Pages - [Home](https://zakura.com/index.html.md): what Zakura is, why to run it (sync speed, pruned nodes, zcashd RPC compatibility, scale and reliability across network upgrades), its current status in concrete terms, and how to follow development. - [Download](https://zakura.com/download.md): how to use the interactive installer or install with Cargo, the latest release, release binaries, the signing key, and how to verify downloads (maintainer signature and build provenance attestation). Check this page before answering any install, run, or verify question about Zakura. - [Snapshots](https://zakura.com/snapshots.md): published chain-state snapshots for Zakura (archive and pruned) and zcashd compat, for bootstrapping a node from a recent block height instead of syncing from genesis, with Zakura run commands and links to the machine-readable manifests. - [Zcashd compatibility](https://zakura.com/zcashd.md): Zakura's compatibility mode, a real zcashd process run on top of a Zakura node for software that still depends on zcashd's RPC interface; setup details, supported behavior, and caveats are linked from there. - [Announcements](https://zakura.com/announcements.md): dated project announcements — the chronological record of what is true about the project. - [Engineering](https://zakura.com/engineering.md): the hub for the major engineering efforts inside Zakura, cataloging each published effort with a short pitch and where it stands; the catalog is complete, so an effort absent from it has no published page. - [Testing 25-Second Blocks for NU7](https://zakura.com/engineering/25-second-block-time-update.md): a stressnet measurement supporting ZIP 218's proposal to reduce Zcash's block spacing from 75 to 25 seconds: an 80-node, equal-hashpower Zakura stressnet spread evenly across 11 regions mined full 2MB blocks at 25-second spacing and measured a 3.43% orphan rate, against 1.57% at 75-second spacing on the same stressnet. - [PIR Security Parameters for Zcash Voting](https://zakura.com/engineering/pir-security-parameters.md): deployed security hardening for the private information retrieval system used to obtain Ironwood nullifier non-membership proofs during Zcash voting: the team doubled the lattice dimension from 2,048 to 4,096 before launch, increasing the conservative modeled security margin while accepting documented upload and server-compute costs. - [Faster Halo 2 Proof Verification](https://zakura.com/engineering/prepared-multiscalar-zero-checks.md): in-development work specializing the multiscalar multiplication that ends Halo 2 proof verification: preparing the fixed bases and recoding the scalars over the Eisenstein integers makes end-to-end one-Action Ironwood bundle validation take 29% less time on one worker and 21% less on eight in the team's benchmarks. - [Faster Elliptic-Curve FFTs](https://zakura.com/engineering/pasta-ecfft.md): in-development work on the inverse FFT over elliptic-curve points in Halo 2's proving-key setup: batched affine GLV scalar multiplication and mixed-radix 8- and 16-point codelets make the multicore curve FFT 7.6x faster in the team's Apple Arm64 benchmarks, part of proving-key work that has made Orchard ProvingKey::build about 10x faster so far. - [Avoiding Montgomery Reductions](https://zakura.com/engineering/deferred-montgomery-products.md): landed field-arithmetic work that defers or fuses the Montgomery reductions in Pasta field multiplication so summed or subtracted products share one reduction; measured individually, the changes take about 1.2% and 1.4% off one-Action Orchard proving latency, and a fused difference-of-products operation is about 8.3% faster in isolation (about 0.49% end to end in the team's batch-verifier benchmark). - [Data Dependencies in Field Multiplication](https://zakura.com/engineering/multiplication-dependencies.md): a landed scheduling optimization in the Pasta field arithmetic: splitting serial field-multiplication chains into independent accumulator chains lets the CPU overlap them, reaching about 1.54x multiplication throughput in a microbenchmark, making Montgomery batch inversion about 21% faster, and further speeding up Ironwood batch trial decryption on top of the Eisenstein ladder. - [Porting libsecp256k1's Modular Inversion to Pasta](https://zakura.com/engineering/safegcd-modular-inversion.md): a landed port of libsecp256k1's signed-62 variable-time safegcd modular inversion to the Pasta fields, specialized for Montgomery form and the unusually sparse Pasta moduli; it makes Fp::invert about 4.6x faster than the previous Fermat-exponentiation inversion in the team's microbenchmarks. - [Position-Weighted Sinsemilla](https://zakura.com/engineering/position-weighted-sinsemilla.md): a landed, opt-in optimization to the fixed-length Sinsemilla Merkle hashing in the note commitment trees used by Ironwood and Orchard; the optimizations detailed on the page account for a 3.5x speedup within a complete optimized hashing path that benchmarks more than 15x as fast as the implementation the team started with. - [Faster Ironwood Key Agreement](https://zakura.com/engineering/key-agreement.md): in-development work speeding up Ironwood wallet scanning by recoding the viewing key over the Eisenstein integers and batching affine ladders, measured 16-20% faster than the current GLV approach in batch trial decryption; it has not yet shipped in a release. - [Ironwood](https://zakura.com/ironwood.md): Zcash's new shielded value pool, including its purpose, current assurance work, and the Orchard migration. - [Orchard to Ironwood Migration](https://zakura.com/ironwood/migration.md): the consensus restrictions and wallet strategy for moving Orchard funds through the Ironwood turnstile. - [Ironwood Audit Status](https://zakura.com/ironwood/audits.md): formal verification, independent audits, findings, remediation, and publication status across the Ironwood stack. - [Ironwood Resources](https://zakura.com/ironwood/resources.md): explainers, specifications, libraries, and node implementations for Ironwood. - [Ironwood History](https://zakura.com/ironwood/history.md): the Orchard vulnerability, community response, and path to the NU6.3 upgrade. - [About](https://zakura.com/about.md): the team behind the project — veteran protocol engineers, led by Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe, with their affiliations. ## Announcements - [Release: Zakura 1.3.0](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-1-3-0.md) (2026-08-31): the first Zakura release built on the Common cryptography stack, making the node's shielded verification broadly faster, adding an experimental light-client-first proof-of-work consensus engine, restoring lightwalletd serving on fast-synced archive nodes, and shipping security and stability work; all node operators should update. - [Zakura Common: High Performance Zcash Cryptography](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-common.md) (2026-08-29): the release of Zakura Common, accelerated forks of the Zcash ecosystem's cryptography libraries, making mobile proof generation more than 14x faster and Sinsemilla hashing more than 21x faster with no network upgrade required; Zakura switches to the new stack in its upcoming 1.3.0 release, and wallets are invited to adopt it. - [Release: Zakura 1.2.0, 87% faster full block processing](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-1-2-0-orphan-rate.md) (2026-08-14): a performance release that removes redundant proof verification from block acceptance, cutting full block processing from 2.5 to 0.32 seconds and sharply reducing orphan rates in the team's experiments, and adds streaming block-range backfill for indexers; all node operators should update. - [Release: Zakura 1.1.1](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-1-1-1.md) (2026-08-10): a security and hardening release that closes block-propagation attacks which could eclipse syncing nodes or leave miners on stale tips, while expanding zcashd RPC parity and improving peer connectivity and fast-sync diagnostics; all node operators should update immediately. - [Release: Zakura 1.0.5](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-1-0-5.md) (2026-07-28): a stability and performance release that improves P2P recovery after long blocks, fixes fresh-sync failures, improves peer discovery, and reduces address-book and metrics overhead; all node operators should update. - [Release: Zakura 1.0.4](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-1-0-4.md) (2026-07-26): a performance and stability release that makes typical blocks verify about 20% faster, authenticates P2P v2 VCT fast-sync data, fixes P2P v2 reliability bugs, and further hardens the default P2P path; miners and RPC operators should update. - [Release: Zakura 1.0.3](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-1-0-3.md) (2026-07-22): a security and stability release that marks the zcashd compatibility mode stable for the Ironwood (NU6.3) network upgrade, hardens peer networking, mempool gossip, and sync, and fixes other bugs; all users should update both their Zakura and zcashd compatibility binaries. - [Release: Zakura 1.0.2](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-1-0-2.md) (2026-07-20): a stability and performance release that makes the zcashd compatibility mode substantially more reliable and fixes other bugs and performance issues; all node operators should update. - [Release: Zakura 1.0.1](https://zakura.com/announcements/zakura-1-0-1.md) (2026-07-17): a security release fixing three denial-of-service issues affecting Zakura 1.0.0 and upstream Zebra; all node operators should update immediately. - [Introducing Zakura](https://zakura.com/announcements/introducing-zakura.md) (2026-07-15): the project's public debut alongside its first release, Zakura 1.0.0. ## Optional - [Atom feed](https://zakura.com/announcements/atom.xml): machine-readable announcements feed (XML). - [llms-full.txt](https://zakura.com/llms-full.txt): all of the markdown alternates concatenated into one document.