Key highlights:

  • Zcash has unveiled a node client for faster syncing and legacy compatibility as the network prepares for its Ironwood upgrade
  • Zcash’s developers have their sights on achieving 50,000 transactions per second
  • ZEC price is down nearly 5% over the last day as traders take profit after a strong rally

Developers of privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash have launched Zakura, a full node client to support processing private transactions at payment-network scale. The latest release marks the first live component on a broader effort to modernize the privacy-focused blockchain infrastructure while maintaining its zero-knowledge privacy guarantees.

Zakura aims to remove infrastructure bottlenecks

Developed by Zcash cryptography pioneer Sean Bowe and Valar Group founder Dev Ojha, Zakura is an independently maintained fork of the Zcash Foundation’s Zebra node software. Zakura reduces storage requirements for running a node by pruning unnecessary historical blockchain data, allowing users to download compressed snapshots instead of syncing the entire chain. 

According to the development team, the approach allows a new node to become operational in under two minutes, making synchronization 680 times faster than downloading the blockchain block by block. A full node verifies every transaction and block on a blockchain, making it critical to network security.

The Zakura release forms part of a broader roadmap targeted at increasing Zcash’s transaction capacity. In a blog post, the developers stated that their target is to process a minimum of 50,000 transactions per second, akin to the capacity of Visa and Mastercard. 

They noted that Zcash’s current privacy technology would require nodes to verify more than 500 megabytes of proof data every second to reach that scale. To address the challenge, Sean Bowe’s Project Tachyon is developing recursive zero-knowledge proofs, combining thousands of transaction proofs into a single proof that nodes verify during consensus. 

Valar Group is also developing private information retrieval technology that would allow wallets to obtain only their own transaction data. Meanwhile, Zakura will introduce an “experimental fast block propagation layer” to distribute mined blocks across the network in under half a second.

Zakura supports Zcash’s upcoming Ironwood network upgrade scheduled for late July. Ironwood follows an emergency patch rolled out in mid-June after developers identified and fixed a flaw that could allow counterfeit ZEC to be created.

ZEC price falters Despite Zakura’s rollout

Despite the slew of technical improvements, the ZEC price failed to match the enthusiasm, falling by nearly 5% over the last day. The privacy coin is trading at $537.64 with daily trading volumes surging by 15% to sit at $409 million.

 

Several reasons account for ZEC’s price decline, with analysts pointing to profit-taking after the privacy coin climbed to a recent high near $586. Zooming out, ZEC rallied over 64% in the last 90 days, but the rejection near key resistance triggered fresh selling pressure.

While a confirmation of the first Zcash ETF is tipped to trigger a price spurt, market-wide caution is adding bearish pressure. The broader cryptocurrency market is off to a slow start this week, with global market capitalization shedding 1% over the last day.

Meanwhile, fellow privacy-focused coin Monero is up by nearly 1% in the last 24 hours to trade at $336. Both Monero and Zcash are jostling for the “crypto privacy throne” amid a frenetic race to improve their core offerings.