A new Zcash full node called Zakura is aiming to make encrypted payments run at the speed of card networks. Its builders say 50,000 transactions per second, the volume Visa and Mastercard process, is the floor. A full node is the software that stores a blockchain’s complete transaction history, verifies every payment, and enforces the network’s rules. Zakura’s 1.0.0 release went live on July 15, led by Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe and Osmosis cofounder Dev Ojha, and it syncs the Zcash chain nearly five times faster than Zebra, the reference node maintained by the Zcash Foundation. The release lands roughly two weeks before Ironwood, a mandatory network upgrade that every Zcash operator must adopt by the end of July.
Key takeaways
- Zakura 1.0.0, released July 15 by Valar Group and Project Tachyon, synced the full Zcash chain in 4 hours 20 minutes in published benchmarks. Zebra took 20 hours 46 minutes.
- Pruned snapshots of roughly 11 GB let operators start a node in under 2 minutes, a bootstrap the team says is 680 times faster than syncing from the network.
- The project treats Visa-level volume of 50,000 transactions per second as its floor and is building new cryptography to close the gap.
- Ironwood (NU6.3) activates at block 3,428,143 near the end of July. Retiring zcashd software will not support it.
Why Zcash is getting another node
Zakura arrives as zcashd, Zcash’s original node software, reaches end of life. The project is a fork of Zebra, and the Zcash Foundation publicly welcomed it, calling the engineering impressive and noting that Zebra was released under permissive licenses precisely so it could be forked.
The foundation attached one request. Pointing to a June incident as a reminder that consensus networks depend on independent verification, it encouraged operators who move to Zakura to keep a Zebra node running alongside as a second check on the chain. For businesses already integrated with Zcash, Zakura ships a compatibility mode that reproduces the legacy zcashd RPC interface, so existing wallets and exchange plumbing keep working without a rewrite.
Both Project Tachyon and Valar Group are funded by private ZEC donations rather than a corporate treasury, an unusual structure for infrastructure that wants to carry payment volume.
The 50,000 transactions per second target
Zcash’s current stack caps wallet software at about 1 transaction per second, according to the Zakura team. With today’s cryptography, Visa-scale volume would demand more than 500 megabytes per second of throughput from a node, which no consumer hardware can sustain.
Two research tracks are meant to close that gap. Project Tachyon, led by Bowe, proposes shrinking Zcash transactions by two orders of magnitude using recursive proofs. Recursive proofs are cryptographic checks that fold many transaction verifications into a single small proof, letting a node confirm large batches of activity at once. The design cuts the throughput requirement to about 100 megabytes per second and, as a side effect, delivers privacy that holds up against quantum computers. Valar Group, led by Ojha, is working on private information retrieval, a technique that lets a wallet fetch its own transaction data from a server without the server learning what was requested.
Tachyon remains a proposal. Zcash upgrades go through a community process, and no activation date exists yet. Zakura is the part that ships today: faster sync, native block pruning with configurable retention, and an experimental peer-to-peer layer targeting worst-case block propagation under 500 milliseconds.
What it means for operators and the market
Every Zcash operator must be running Ironwood-capable software before activation at block 3,428,143, expected around the end of July. Zebra 6.0.0, released July 10, supports the upgrade, and Zakura supports it from day one. The Zakura teams were largely responsible for Ironwood’s implementation and coordination.
ZEC traded near $563 early Sunday, up about 4.5 percent over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko, and has held above $500 since early July. The scaling push also puts Zcash in a race it did not face a year ago. Payment incumbents are building their own onchain rails, including Visa’s new stablecoin platform, and crypto markets are positioning for a more favorable second half, with options traders betting $2.5 billion on a bitcoin rally into the Fed’s next meeting. Whether encrypted payments can compete on speed with public ones is now a live engineering question, and Zakura is the first piece of that answer to reach production.
Frequently asked questions
What is Zakura?
Zakura is a free, open-source full node for the Zcash network released on July 15, 2026 by Valar Group and Project Tachyon. It syncs about five times faster than Zebra, supports pruning and snapshot bootstrapping, and includes a compatibility mode for software built on the retiring zcashd node.
Who is behind Zakura?
Sean Bowe, a Zcash cofounder who has built the network’s zero-knowledge cryptography since 2015 and leads Project Tachyon, maintains Zakura with Dev Ojha, cofounder of the Osmosis decentralized exchange and head of Valar Group. Both teams are funded by private ZEC donations.
What is the Ironwood upgrade?
Ironwood, also called NU6.3, is Zcash’s next network upgrade. It activates at block height 3,428,143, expected around the end of July 2026. Node operators must run upgraded software such as Zebra 6.0.0 or Zakura before activation, because zcashd has reached end of life.
