Those rebuilding Zcash have a dream: to match global payments giants Visa and Mastercard by handling tens of thousands of payments every second while preserving full verifiability and strong privacy guarantees.
The first piece of that plan is Zakura, a new full node software released Wednesday at version 1.0.0. It is maintained by Sean Bowe, a founding member of Zcash's zero-knowledge cryptography, and Dev Ojha, the Osmosis cofounder who now leads Valar Group. Both teams are funded by private ZEC donations rather than by a company or a foundation.
"Our dream is to support the world's payments. Mastercard and Visa handle more than 50k transactions per second; that's our floor. With Zcash's existing cryptography, that volume would demand over 500 MB/s of throughput from the node,” a blog post said. “The current stack won't get us there. The cryptography our teams are developing closes much of that gap.”
A full node is the program that keeps a complete copy of a blockchain, the Zcash ledger, in this case, and independently checks every transaction against the network's rules. Zakura is a fork of Zebra, the Zcash Foundation's node software – meaning it started from the Foundation's official code and was rebuilt from there.
Consensus rules are the shared rulebook every node enforces, the thing that decides which blocks and transactions the whole network accepts as valid. If a node applies different rules, it forks off and stops following the same chain as everyone else.
Zakura can also prune, a term for deleting old blockchain data a node no longer needs, and cut disk usage substantially. That shrinks the chain enough that the team publishes ready-made copies of it, about 11 gigabytes with the old data stripped, which a new node can download instead of pulling the whole history from other nodes one block at a time.
That takes a node from nothing to running in under two minutes, which the team says is “680 times faster.”
A compatibility mode further reproduces the interface of zcashd, the original client that reaches end of life on July 18, so wallets and exchange integrations built against it will keep working as is.
The reason for building all this is arithmetic.
Mastercard and Visa process more than 50,000 transactions per second, and the team calls that figure '“its floor, not its target.” Zcash's current cryptography would require a node to take in and verify more than 500 megabytes of data every second to keep up, because every private transaction carries a proof, and proofs are large.
That is roughly a full DVD of data arriving every ten seconds, continuously, and no current Zcash software runs anywhere near that. But the missing piece is the reason each bottleneck exists.
Bowe's Project Tachyon is tackling this by working on recursive proofs, in which one proof attests to the validity of thousands of others, dramatically reducing the amount of data that must be checked at consensus.
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