Project Tachyon Developers Begin Integrating Recursive Proofs Into Zakura Common
The first release, Udon, targets faster cryptographic operations while a long-term design goal calls for more than 50,000 transactions per second.
Project Tachyon developers have begun integrating recursive-proof technology into Zakura Common, the cryptography and protocol libraries developed for the Zakura full node and other Zcash projects.
The first component, Udon, is a Rust crate that replaces Common’s pasta_curves fork and much of the arithmetic in the halo2_proofs zk-SNARK prover used by Ironwood. The release does not activate Tachyon on the Zcash network.
The work is designed to improve the performance of cryptographic operations supporting Zcash’s shielded payments, which hide transaction amounts, addresses and transaction relationships. Wallets generate the proofs, while network software verifies them.
Sean Bowe, Project Tachyon lead, said, “We're beginning to upstream Tachyon's recursive proofs into the core of Zcash's newest cryptography stack.”
Benchmark results show mobile proof generation improving by more than 14 times and desktop proof generation by more than five times. Sinsemilla hashing was more than 21 times faster, trial decryption was more than 1.5 times faster, and zk-SNARK verification improved by four to eight times.
Wallet transaction creation that previously took more than three seconds could take less than 200 milliseconds in many cases. These improvements concern the underlying software stack and do not represent a completed Zcash protocol upgrade.
Zakura’s long-term design goal is to support more than 50,000 transactions per second. At that volume, current Zcash cryptography would require more than 500 megabytes per second of node throughput, while the project estimates that Tachyon could reduce the requirement to 100 megabytes per second.
That target remains well above current activity. Zcash processed 9,089 transactions in the 24 hours ending Sept. 29 at 7:43 a.m. ET (11:43 UTC), including shielded transactions. The network produced 1,137 blocks during the period against a 75-second target block interval.
The integration remains ongoing. Udon is the first step toward incorporating recursive proofs into Zakura Common, while the 50,000-transactions-per-second figure remains a design target rather than demonstrated production throughput.
