Zcash developers are beginning to move Project Tachyon technology into Zakura Common as they pursue a long-term goal of handling more than 50,000 private payments per second.
The team behind the privacy-focused network is introducing part of its proposed scaling system into software already used by Zcash projects. The work is aimed at preparing the network to support a much larger volume of private transactions.
The component being added is Udon, which was originally developed under Project Tachyon, Zcash’s proposed scaling upgrade.
Project Tachyon lead Sean Bowe said Udon was released into Zakura Common on Monday. Common is a shared cryptography library used by Zakura and other Zcash projects and handles some of the intensive mathematical operations involved in generating and verifying private-transaction proofs. Zakura is jointly developed by Bowe’s team and Dev Ojha’s Valar Group.
For a shielded Zcash payment, the wallet must demonstrate that the transaction is valid without revealing the sender, recipient or amount. Computers supporting the network then verify the resulting proof.
Previous optimization work on Common reduced the time needed to generate a proof from more than three seconds to less than 200 milliseconds in some tests, according to CoinDesk’s August report.
Scaling private transactions to much higher levels would nevertheless place substantially more computational demands on network nodes.
Udon moves some of the calculations required by Tachyon into Common, allowing developers to build on cryptographic code that has already been optimized. The software has now been released, but Tachyon has not yet been activated on the Zcash network.
Tachyon’s 50,000-Payment Goal
Bowe and Ojha are targeting more than 50,000 payments per second over the long term. They estimate that processing transactions at that rate with current cryptographic techniques would require each Zcash node to handle more than 500 megabytes of data every second.
Tachyon is designed to reduce that workload by combining proofs from multiple private payments. Rather than requiring nodes to receive and verify a separate proof for every transaction, several payments could be represented by a shared proof.
Generating combined proofs requires additional memory, however. For that reason, Bowe’s team is using cryptographic code that has already been optimized through development work on Common.
Current Zcash Activity Remains Much Lower
Zcash is still operating far below the transaction levels envisioned by Tachyon.
ZecStats data showed an average of about 11,700 transactions involving shielded funds per day during the seven days ending Sept. 21. That amounts to approximately one such transaction every seven seconds.
The average fell further in the following week, reaching roughly 6,200 shielded transactions per day for the seven days ending Sept. 28.
The Udon release is therefore an early development milestone rather than the launch of Tachyon itself. Developers are integrating the underlying technology into the existing software stack while the proposed scaling upgrade remains inactive on the Zcash network.
