The developer Zcash has released a set of encryption and protocol libraries named Common, with the goal of improving the operational efficiency of wallets and full nodes. After the news was announced, the price of ZEC surged by about 5%, reaching around $838 and touching a high since January 2018.

Significant improvement in the speed of mobile proof generation

The core of this update lies in demonstrating the generation speed. Zakura indicates that the proof generation speed on mobile devices can be increased by more than 14 times, and on desktops by over 5 times as well. In addition to proof generation, Sinsemilla shows that the hashing speed has increased by more than 21 times, the trial decryption speed has increased by over 1.5 times, and zk-SNARK indicates that verification speed has also improved by 4 to 8 times.

This means that the waiting time for some wallets when creating transactions is expected to be significantly reduced. According to Zakura, in some scenarios, users may have previously had to wait for more than 3 seconds, but with the integration of Common, this time can be reduced to within 200 milliseconds in many cases.

Benefits of wallet synchronization and node propagation

According to Zakura, the new database is open to both wallets and full nodes simultaneously. For wallets, this integration is expected to speed up the synchronization process; for full nodes, it may lead to faster transaction propagation and reduce the occurrence of orphan blocks.

Zcash, co-founder, also commented on this release, stating that the wallets that use Zakura Common for blocking, as well as all nodes including Zakura, will benefit from the performance improvements.

No need to upgrade network rules.

Another key point of this release is that Common does not require Zcash for network upgrades. The relevant libraries have been made open-source, allowing developers to integrate them directly into subsequent versions of Zakura and compatible wallets. This enables faster performance improvements to be delivered to users without the need to adjust the underlying network rules.

At the market level, ZEC has been actively traded recently. Reports mention that ZEC has surpassed $800 for the first time since January 2018, and after the release of Common, the price further rose to around $838.38.