Zcash developers are integrating part of the proposed Tachyon scaling upgrade into software already running across the network, according to CoinDesk, as the project prepares for a future with a much larger volume of private transactions.
Udon released to Zakura Common
The component is called Udon and was first developed as part of Project Tachyon. Sean Bowe, the lead of Project Tachyon, said Udon was released on Monday to Zakura Common, a shared cryptography library used by Zakura and other Zcash projects.
Common handles some of the heavy mathematical work involved in creating and verifying private transactions. Zakura is being developed by Bowe’s team together with Dev Ojha’s Valar Group.
Private payments depend on faster proof generation and verification
Zcash wallets must prove that a private payment is valid without revealing the sender, the recipient, or the amount. Computers running the network then verify that proof.
CoinDesk reported in August that earlier improvements to Common had already cut the time needed to create a private transaction from more than 3 seconds to less than 200 milliseconds in some tests.
Work targets much higher throughput
If private payments become more widely used, computers on the network will need to process more data. Udon brings some of the computation required for the proposed Tachyon scaling upgrade into Common, giving developers a way to keep building on code that has already been sped up.
Udon has been released as software, but the upgrade has not yet been activated on Zcash.
Bowe and Ojha have set a long-term goal of more than 50,000 payments per second. At that rate, they estimate that current cryptography would cause each Zcash node to receive more than 500 MB of data per second.