Zcash developer Zakura has released Common, a new suite of cryptography and protocol libraries designed to improve performance across Zcash wallets and full nodes.
The release delivers major gains in proof generation, hashing, trial decryption and verification. Proof generation is now more than 14 times faster on mobile devices and over five times faster on desktop.
Introducing Zakura Common.We just shipped 14x faster proving, 21x faster hashing, 1.5x faster trial decryption, and 4-8x faster verification.New releases of Zakura and wallets that use Zakura Common (such as @vizorwallet) will benefit immediately.https://t.co/WE2zfLLJ9S
— Zakura (@ZakuraZcash) August 29, 2026
The performance improvements have also attracted attention from crypto industry figures. Helius CEO Mert described the release as an “insane engineering feat,” highlighting the 14x reduction in latency delivered in a single release.
Beyond proof generation, Sinsemilla hashing is now more than 21 times faster, while trial decryption has improved by over 1.5 times. zk-SNARK verification is also four to eight times faster.
Faster Zcash Wallets and Full Nodes
The new libraries are designed to improve the experience for both Zcash wallets and full nodes. Zakura said users can sometimes wait more than three seconds for a wallet to create a transaction. With Common, that time could fall below 200 milliseconds in many cases.
Wallets that adopt the libraries should also synchronize faster. Zakura full nodes can benefit from faster transaction propagation and fewer orphaned blocks.
Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe said the release delivers significant performance improvements across the network.
“Shielded wallets that use Zakura Common, and full nodes like Zakura itself, all benefit from these massive performance improvements.”
Zakura Common Requires No Zcash Network Upgrade
A key feature of Zakura Common is that it does not require a Zcash network upgrade. The libraries are open source, allowing developers to include them in new versions of Zakura and compatible wallets.
This approach enables the performance improvements to reach users without changing Zcash’s underlying network rules.
ZEC Price Climbs 5%
The release comes as Zcash is experiencing strong market activity. The native $ZEC token recently moved above $800 for the first time since January 2018.
$ZEC is trading around $838.38 after rising 5%, while an earlier update placed the token at $838.60.
