Zcash private transactions set to drop wait times to under 200 milliseconds

Three seconds doesn’t sound like a long time until you’re staring at a loading screen every time you want to send a private transaction. Zakura, the developer behind a Zcash full node client, just released an open-source library called Zakura Common that compresses shielded transaction creation from over three seconds to under 200 milliseconds. The upgrade does not require a hard fork, a consensus change, or anything that would force the Zcash network to coordinate a synchronized update. Compatible wallets can simply integrate the new library and start serving faster transactions immediately. The numbers behind the speed boost Mobile proof generation, the computation-heavy step that makes shielded transactions possible on phones, is now more than 14 times faster. Desktop performance improved by over five times. Sinsemilla hashing, a core cryptographic operation used in Zcash’s Orchard protocol, saw a 21-fold improvement. Trial decryption, the process wallets use to scan the blockchain and identify incoming payments, got 1.5 times faster. And zk-SNARK verification, the zero-knowledge proof system that underpins Zcash’s privacy guarantees, now runs four to eight times quicker. The li...