tachyon

Zcash community member ValarDragon posted on the official community forum, proposing a series of plans to be included in the NU8 network upgrade, and suggested setting the upgrade target for the end of January 2027. The main content includes the launch of the Tachyon shielded pool, expanding transaction formats, increasing the maximum block size from 2MB to 8MB, and adding support for post-quantum cryptography transparent transaction opcodes.Other proposals also include: adjusting the NSM redistribution date to be closer to the time of Zcash's seventh halving; determining a date at the protocol level for Sapling to stop accepting new deposits while continuing to support transactions and withdrawals; and eliminating the need to update the Consensus Branch ID with each network upgrade to reduce wallet compatibility issues. ValarDragon stated that with the combination of Tachyon and larger block capacity, a shielded transaction processing capability of approximately 200 TPS is expected. In addition, the post-quantum transparent transaction feature will introduce schemes based on SPHINCS with 128-bit and 192-bit security levels. The above content currently belongs to the upgrade ideas proposed by community members, and specific implementation still depends on development progress and subsequent NU8 discussions and voting.

Zakura has announced an experimental network layer P2Pv2 for Zcash nodes, intended to replace the old protocol inherited from Bitcoin. This layer combines high-throughput networking, resource control, and a consensus engine tested for properties, allowing developers to add services without permission. Zakura states that approximately 50,000 transactions per second require each full node to continuously receive about 100MB/s of block data, while the 25-second block of NU7 can carry a maximum of 2MB, with existing network throughput differing by more than a thousand times from this rate. Tachyon can reduce the proof after entering the block, but the network still needs to propagate a large number of individual transactions.P2Pv2 replaces the protocol stack from about a decade ago with protocols that can be optimized for latency, throughput, or robustness, allowing a secure connection to carry multiple independent services. The transport layer uses its own zakura-quic, based on quinn-proto, utilizing QUIC and TLS 1.3, and authenticating peers with Ed25519 node identity. Related changes remove the dependency on Iroh, allowing nodes to configure socket buffers, flow control windows, timers, and connection admission before the TLS handshake. The new transport directly connects to peer addresses without using relays, external address lookups, automatic port mapping, or QUIC NAT traversal. Nodes sign identities, addresses, protocol scopes, and service IDs, allowing clients to find peers based on specific services.The independent component zakura-header-chain verifies block headers and retains competing branches in a directed acyclic graph, selecting the best qualified chain. Block synchronization schedules requests based on the delivery rates measured by each peer, and a verified commitment tree is used to skip the reconstruction of Sapling, Orchard, and Ironwood trees for each block. Currently, the Mainnet still defaults to the old P2P stack, while the Testnet and Regtest run dual stacks by default, with the native protocol version being p2p-v2/3. Zakura notes that P2Pv2 still has known denial-of-service risks and has not yet become a hardened trust boundary; production hardening, resource control, and block relay protocols are still in progress.

Tachyon co-founder Sean Bowe posted on X, criticizing Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake's recent warnings about quantum threats. He stated that such vague alerts would cause harm on multiple levels and become self-harm for their quantum advocacy work.Sean Bowe stated: The threats from quantum and artificial intelligence are real, and industry teams are making prudent decisions on how to practically address risks and help users deal with uncertainty. Some teams have strong judgment from cryptographers, while others need to refer to trusted experts; due to the complex dimensions involved, the relevant trade-offs are almost impossible to explain to non-cryptographers, and experts should remain calm and take corresponding responsibility.He also mentioned that once the situation is clarified, people may find that this is at most an unintentional promotional move, resulting in a significant loss of trust, and no one knows how to proceed afterward. He believes that the judgment regarding the relevant direction is correct, that previous warnings were meaningful, but they have gradually turned into uncontrolled predictions lacking feedback constraints, which will long-term affect trust in reasonable concerns about classical cryptography. He pointed out that the other party admitted that there was no new information driving this and asked Justin Drake to explain why he thought this approach was correct.

According to CoinDesk, Zcash developers are integrating part of the proposed scaling upgrade code, Tachyon, into the software already in use to prepare for a large number of privacy transactions in the future. This component is named Udon, originally developed as part of Project Tachyon.According to Sean Bowe, the head of Project Tachyon, Udon was released on Monday to Zakura Common, which is a cryptographic library shared by Zakura and other Zcash projects. Common is responsible for handling some of the heavy mathematical computations behind creating and verifying privacy transactions, with Zakura being jointly developed by Bowe's team and Dev Ojha's Valar Group.Zcash wallets need to prove the validity of a privacy payment without disclosing the payer, payee, or amount, and the computers running the network subsequently verify that proof. According to CoinDesk's report in August, previous improvements to Common have reduced the time to create a privacy transaction from over 3 seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some tests.If privacy payments become more common, these computers will need to handle more data. Udon brings some of the computational requirements for the proposed scaling upgrade of Tachyon into Common, allowing developers to continue building on the already accelerated code. Udon has been released as software, but the upgrade has not yet been activated on Zcash.Bowe and Ojha's long-term goal is to exceed 50,000 payments per second. At this rate, they estimate that current cryptography will allow each Zcash node to receive over 500 MB of data per second.

ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, ConsenSys Mesh has announced the launch of the TachyonX accelerator program. TachyonX is a new initiative aimed at founders of early-stage Web3 projects. After an application and interview process, ConsenSys Mesh will invest $150,000 in their projects and receive 4% equity in the projects along with the right to a proportional allocation of internal tokens. (source link)