Zakura, a new free and open-source full node for Zcash, shipped its v1.0.0 release — a collaboration between Sean Bowe’s Project Tachyon and Dev Ojha’s Valar Group, both funded by private ZEC donations.

Forked from Zebra and consensus-compatible with the Ironwood (NU6.3) upgrade, Zakura syncs the chain in roughly 4h20m — nearly 5× faster than Zebra — with native block pruning and published snapshots that bootstrap a fresh node in under two minutes. It also ships a zcashd compatibility mode and an experimental transport layer targeting sub-500ms block propagation, aiming to scale Zcash’s node infrastructure.