Zcash developers begin moving Tachyon code into faster private-payment software
Zcash developers have moved Udon, a component of Project Tachyon, into Zakura Common — the shared cryptography library used to create and verify private transactions. Udon integrates some Tachyon calculations into existing Common code, but it does not yet deliver Tachyon’s target performance and the full upgrade still needs more development and a security review.
Why It Matters
Integrating Tachyon code into Zakura Common lays groundwork for scaling private Zcash payments, an important step if shielded transactions grow substantially. The change is preparatory rather than final: the network would still require further engineering and auditing before any high-throughput behavior could be activated.
Key Facts
- Component released: Udon moved into Zakura Common (released Sep. 29, 2026)
- Project: Project Tachyon (proposed Zcash scaling upgrade)
- Developers: Project Tachyon leader Sean Bowe and Valar Group developer Dev Ojha jointly work on Zakura
- Earlier performance improvement: Common optimizations reduced private-transaction creation time from >3 seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some tests
- Long-term throughput target: More than 50,000 private payments per second (project target)
Zcash’s development teams have started folding parts of Project Tachyon into Zakura Common by releasing Udon, a component that relocates some of Tachyon’s computational work into the shared cryptography library. Zakura Common is used across Zcash projects to build and verify the cryptographic proofs that let wallets show payments are valid without revealing sender, recipient, or amounts. The move is intended to let developers reuse and extend code that has already been optimized.
Udon itself does not yet demonstrate the high-throughput performance Tachyon aims for. Instead, it brings specific calculations into Common so future work on Tachyon can leverage faster, consolidated implementations. According to the development leads, the proposed Tachyon design would combine proofs from many payments so nodes have less data to receive and validate, shifting some of the memory and computation burden into creating a shared proof.
The team has set an ambitious long-term goal of handling over 50,000 private payments per second. They estimate that at that volume, nodes using current cryptography would need to ingest more than 500 megabytes of data every second — a scale Tachyon is intended to reduce by combining proofs. Earlier work on Common has already produced substantial speedups: tests cited by the developers showed private-transaction creation times falling from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some cases.
Despite those improvements, Zcash remains far from the projected throughput. On-chain statistics for shielded activity showed an average of about 11,700 transactions involving shielded funds per day in the seven days through Sept. 21 (roughly one every seven seconds), with that average dropping to about 6,200 per day in the seven days through Sept. 28. Udon’s release is a preparatory integration; Tachyon still needs further development work and a security review before any upgrade could be activated on the live network.
Keep Reading
Goldman Sachs brings $100 billion Treasury fund into crypto’s institutional plumbing
Near Intents blocks $50 million in Bitget hacker swaps, here's what happened
Blockchain.com targets $500 million IPO this year at up to $6 billion valuation
