Gemini Preps for Faster Zcash With Move to Zakura

Gemini's Zcash infrastructure now runs on Zakura, an open-source Zcash full node written in Rust, a programming language for high-performance blockchains. Zakura is a consensus-compatible fork of Zebra, built so operators can sync, prune, and recover at the scale Zcash is heading toward.

Why We Switched

On September 14, coinholders voted to cut Zcash’s block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds in NU7, the next network upgrade, which is targeted for November. Nodes will need to process roughly three times as many blocks in the same period. That makes sync speed, storage efficiency, and recovery time even more important. We moved to Zakura now so we are ready before NU7 goes live.

Faster sync: In Zakura's published benchmarks, a full sync took around four hours and 20 minutes, compared with nearly 21 hours on Zebra. In our deployments, Zakura reached the chain tip in a little over six hours, while Zebra took close to a day.

Pruned snapshots: Zakura publishes about 12 GB in pruned snapshots that start a node about 680x faster than a standard P2P sync. If a node has to rebuild from scratch, it's back in minutes, not hours.

Same interface: Zakura now handles consensus and peer-to-peer networking. Our payout systems still use the same Zcash-style RPC interface.

What Customers Should Expect

Deposits and withdrawals will work exactly as before. All improvements are behind the scenes.

Gemini’s commitment to privacy

Gemini listed ZEC in 2018 as the first licensed Zcash exchange. We added shielded withdrawals in 2020, then unified addresses and Orchard in 2025. This summer we supported Ironwood, Orchard's replacement, on day one. Zakura is the next step: infrastructure for private payments at scale.