Zcash, a cryptocurrency with a focus on privacy, is on a mission to scale its network to match the transaction volumes of global payment giants like Visa and Mastercard. The latest development in this quest is Zakura, a new full node software that aims to achieve Visa-scale privacy at 50,000 transactions per second. This ambitious project is led by Sean Bowe, a founding member of Zcash's zero-knowledge cryptography, and Dev Ojha, the Osmosis co-founder who now leads Valar Group. Both teams are funded by private ZEC donations rather than by a company or a foundation.
What makes Zakura particularly fascinating is its ability to prune, or delete old blockchain data, significantly reducing disk usage. This allows new nodes to download ready-made copies of the blockchain, which are about 11 gigabytes in size, instead of pulling the entire history from other nodes one block at a time. This pruning technique makes the node 680 times faster, taking it from nothing to running in under two minutes.
Zakura also supports the Ironwood (NU6.3) upgrade, which introduces a turnstile mechanism to cap withdrawals from the Orchard shielded pool and contain any counterfeit ZEC that may have been created via a long-standing soundness bug. This upgrade is crucial in restoring reliability of the token's supply and preventing the creation of fake coins.
One thing that immediately stands out is the importance of Project Tachyon in this endeavor. This project is tackling the issue of large verification data by working on recursive proofs, in which one proof attests to the validity of thousands of others. This dramatically reduces the amount of data that must be checked at consensus, making it possible to achieve Visa-scale privacy.
However, the challenge of scaling Zcash is not limited to verification data. Wallets have a different problem, as they cannot ask a server which transactions belong to them without giving themselves away. To remove this bottleneck, Valar Group is working on private information retrieval techniques that let a wallet fetch its own data from a server without the server learning which entries were requested.
In my opinion, the Zakura project is a significant step forward in the quest to scale Zcash to match the transaction volumes of global payment giants. However, it is important to note that the project is still in its early stages and there are many challenges that need to be addressed. Nevertheless, the potential for Zcash to become a major player in the cryptocurrency space is undeniable, and I am excited to see how the project develops in the future.
