On August 29, the Zakura team dropped Zakura Common — an open-source suite of cryptographic and protocol libraries built for the Zcash (ZEC) ecosystem. According to the devs, in some scenarios, this upgrade cuts the time it takes to prep a private transaction in your wallet from over three seconds to less than 200 milliseconds.

What’s Zakura Common?

Zakura Common is a library pack designed to speed up privacy-related operations on Zcash. The team says that new releases of Zakura and wallets that integrate these libraries (like Vizor Wallet) will see instant performance gains as soon as they update.

Performance Gains

The devs are touting major speed boosts across the board: up to 14x faster proving, up to 21x faster hashing, about 1.5x faster trial decryption, and 4–8x faster verification. Put together, these upgrades mean prepping a private transaction can now take just a fraction of a second in certain use cases.

Impact on the Zcash Ecosystem

If these numbers hold up in real-world wallets and services, Zcash users could see a much snappier experience when sending private transactions. The catch? You’ll need to use wallets and products that switch over to Zakura Common to get the speed boost.