Zcash developers have integrated Udon, a core component of the Project Tachyon scaling plan, into Zakura Common, a shared cryptographic library widely used across the Zcash ecosystem. The stated goal is to support a long-term push toward more than 50,000 private transactions per second.
Udon has already been released as software. The Tachyon upgrade itself, however, has not been activated on the Zcash mainnet. The report says more development work and security review are still required, and a launch is not expected in the near term.
Udon moves Tachyon logic into Common ahead of the full upgrade
Udon is part of the Tachyon upgrade effort. It was developed by the team led by Project Tachyon head Sean Bowe together with Valar Group, where Dev Ojha is based. Zakura Common handles the complex mathematical operations behind creating and verifying private transactions.
When a Zcash wallet makes a private transaction, it must prove the transfer is valid without revealing the sender, the recipient, or the amount. Network nodes then verify those proofs. Earlier optimization work on Common reduced single-transaction creation time from more than 3 seconds to less than 200 milliseconds.
According to the report, Udon matters because it brings computation logic needed for Tachyon directly into Common ahead of the full network upgrade. That gives developers a way to keep building on code that has already been accelerated. At this stage, though, Udon is only a software release and should not be read as Tachyon going live on mainnet.
Tachyon is built around aggregated proofs
Bowe and Ojha have set a long-term target of more than 50,000 private transactions per second. The report says that, with current cryptographic technology, hitting that throughput directly would require each Zcash node to receive more than 500 megabytes of data every second, a burden the network could not realistically absorb.
Tachyon's proposed answer is aggregated proofs. Instead of attaching separate verification proofs to each transaction, multiple transactions would be bundled under a single proof. That would sharply reduce the amount of data nodes need to receive and inspect. If many transactions share one proof, node workload no longer rises linearly with transaction count.
There is a tradeoff. Building those aggregated proofs requires more memory. The report says Bowe's team chose to construct Tachyon on top of the code in Common that had already been sped up, creating a technical feedback loop between the two efforts.
Current usage remains far below the long-term target
On-chain data cited from ZecStats shows how wide the gap still is. For the week ending Sept. 21, the Zcash network averaged about 11,700 transactions per day involving private funds, which works out to roughly one transaction every 7 seconds. For the week ending Sept. 28, that figure fell further to about 6,200 per day.
The distance between current real-world activity and a 50,000 TPS target spans several orders of magnitude. The report frames Tachyon as an infrastructure investment for future demand rather than a response to immediate traffic pressure.
Focus has shifted after Ironwood
The report says that after the Ironwood upgrade in July 2025, Zcash shifted its focus from fixing the Orchard private pool vulnerability to improving performance. Udon's integration into Common signals that Tachyon has moved from proof-of-concept work into active development.
That still leaves a full development cycle and security review before any mainnet activation. For a privacy-focused public blockchain operating under pressure from both regulation and low usage, Zcash is choosing to strengthen privacy and scaling through technical upgrades instead of moving toward a more transparent compliance model. Whether that path can draw institutions and developers back, the source report says, will be a key variable in Tachyon's success.