Zcash developers integrate Tachyon code into Zakura Common software
The Udon Rust crate brings recursive proof cryptography into Zcash's production stack, targeting tens of thousands of shielded transactions per second
Zcash’s development team took a concrete step toward making shielded transactions genuinely fast on September 28, 2026, releasing a Rust crate called Udon and beginning the upstream merge of Project Tachyon’s recursive proof code into Zakura Common, the optimized cryptographic stack that powers Zcash full nodes.
What Tachyon and Udon actually do
Project Tachyon, led by cryptographer Sean Bowe, has been building proof-carrying data architecture for Zcash. PCD is a technique that bundles a validity proof alongside each piece of data moving through a system, allowing validators to verify correctness incrementally rather than all at once.
The Udon crate is the practical delivery vehicle for that work. It enhances the Pasta curve and Halo 2 arithmetic implementations that Zcash already relies on, specifically tuning them for the recursive proving requirements that Tachyon introduces. The crate slots into the Ironwood-compatible production environment inside Zakura Common.
Valar Group is working alongside Tachyon on the broader transaction aggregation strategy, and the two efforts share a longer-term objective: decouple Zcash’s shielded protocol from the wallet layer entirely.
The target the team has publicly set for the full Tachyon-enabled system is more than 50,000 shielded transactions per second.
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Zakura’s head start
The integration has a solid foundation to build on. Zakura launched version 1.0 on July 15, 2026. Transaction construction times fell from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds. Mobile proof generation improved by more than 14 times. Desktop performance came in at more than five times faster than the previous stack.
Following performance improvements tied to Zakura Common, ZEC posted a roughly 5% price increase in late August 2026.
The September 28 Udon release extends that momentum. Where Zakura 1.0 addressed speed at the node and wallet level, Tachyon integration targets the deeper constraint: how many transactions the network can process in aggregate while keeping each one provably private.
Why this matters for the privacy coin landscape
Bounded validator state growth is a particular selling point for institutional participants. PCD architecture addresses that directly. Validators no longer need to maintain unbounded state because the proof structure itself carries the necessary verification data forward.
By decoupling the shielded protocol from the wallet layer now, the team is creating a cleaner upgrade path for the moment when post-quantum cryptography standards firm up.