zakura

The Zcash full node client team, Zakura, has released Zakura Common, a set of cryptographic and protocol libraries for the Zcash ecosystem. Official benchmarks show that the proof generation speed on mobile has increased by over 14 times (over 5 times on desktop), Sinsemilla hash speed has increased by over 21 times, decryption trial speed has increased by over 1.5 times, and zk-SNARK verification speed has increased by 4 to 8 times; in many cases, the waiting time for wallet transaction creation can be reduced from over 3 seconds to under 200 milliseconds.This upgrade does not require a network upgrade and has been open-sourced under the MIT/Apache 2.0 dual license. Zakura 1.3.0 will switch to this technology stack.

Zcash has launched a new full node, Zakura, maintained by a team independent of the Zcash Foundation. It is released as a trimmed version of Zebra for fast synchronization and is compatible with the old zcashd client. This client will reach the end of its lifecycle. Zakura is one of the components of Zcash's scalability efforts, working alongside Project Tachyon and private information retrieval research, aiming to increase network throughput to Visa and Mastercard levels by reducing verification data and eliminating wallet performance bottlenecks.Zakura also supports the Ironwood (NU6.3) upgrade, which will be activated on July 28. This upgrade introduces a turnstile mechanism to limit withdrawals from the Orchard shielded pool and control the potential generation of counterfeit ZEC due to long-term soundness bugs.