Winklevoss-owned Gemini has successfully migrated its Zcash systems to Zakura software, significantly improving network synchronization performance. According to Gemini's announcement, the new Zakura nodes caught up with the network in just over six hours during their deployments, compared to the previous Zebra software that required nearly a day. Zakura's developers published separate tests showing even better results, with a four-hour and 20-minute catch-up time against nearly 21 hours for Zebra. The exchange also provides a saved copy of recent network data that can bring replacement computers online without downloading Zcash's history from the beginning, achieving approximately 680 times faster sync speeds than standard methods.
Zcash developers have released Udon, a new component that moves parts of the proposed Tachyon scaling upgrade into Zakura Common, a shared cryptography library used by Zcash projects. According to Project Tachyon leader Sean Bowe, this integration represents a significant step toward preparing for a future with far more private transactions on the network. The Udon Rust crate was released on September 28, 2026, merging Tachyon's recursive proof code into Zakura Common and targeting tens of thousands of shielded transactions per second. Previous improvements to Common have already demonstrated substantial performance gains, with earlier enhancements cutting private-transaction creation times from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some tests, as reported by CoinDesk in August.
The software migration comes ahead of Zcash's planned NU7 upgrade, which will significantly reduce block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds and require network computers to process transactions three times as often. Developers are targeting November 5 for the mainnet upgrade, though Gemini has not published tests showing how Zakura performs under the faster schedule. NU7 is scheduled to reach Zcash's test network on October 6, and developers plan to decide on the November 5 mainnet activation after seeing the results. The upgrade aims to combine proofs from many payments so nodes have far less data to receive and check, with each payment potentially sharing one proof to reduce computational load.
The Winklevoss brothers' Zcash interests extend beyond Gemini's exchange operations. Their investment firm led a $59 million financing of Cypherpunk Technologies, a publicly traded company that holds and mines ZEC. A Winklevoss affiliate sold Cypherpunk a Zcash mining fleet for $33 million in August, and Cypherpunk reports that Gemini handles trading and custody for its ZEC holdings. This diversified approach demonstrates the Winklevoss family's confidence in Zcash's long-term potential across multiple business verticals, from exchange operations to direct mining investments.
As reported by ZecStats data, Zcash currently averages about 11,700 transactions involving shielded funds daily in the seven days through September 21, or roughly one every seven seconds. This figure dropped to approximately 6,200 transactions daily in the seven days through September 28. The PCD (Proof-Carrying Data) architecture addresses this directly by bundling validity proofs alongside each piece of data moving through the system, allowing validators to verify correctness incrementally rather than all at once. The proposed Tachyon upgrade still requires further development and a security review before possible activation, with the integration through Udon beginning the process but not yet demonstrating Tachyon's full speed capabilities under the accelerated block schedule.
