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About Tachyon
Tachyon is a scalability proposal for the Zcash blockchain, focused on private (shielded) transactions. Its core business is to redesign how shielded payments are validated and stored on-chain.
The main pain point it addresses is that Zcash's private transactions are large and expensive to verify, and every full node must permanently store all nullifiers (anti-double-spend markers), causing blockchain state to grow without bound. Tachyon solves this through recursive proof aggregation (compressing many transactions into one small proof), proof-carrying wallet state (wallets hold their own balance proofs instead of scanning the whole chain), and nullifier pruning (nodes only keep recent nullifiers).
Its core narrative is "privacy at planetary scale": keeping Zcash's strong privacy guarantees while making the chain lightweight enough for everyday use. It also introduces post-quantum privacy protections.
In the past six months (March–September 2026), Tachyon reached several milestones. In May 2026, the first release candidate went live on testnet with 25-second blocks and doubled Orchard throughput. ZIP 2005 added quantum recoverability, protecting funds if elliptic curve cryptography is ever broken. However, in early June 2026, a soundness flaw was disclosed in the Orchard circuit — a serious bug that could theoretically allow counterfeit note creation. It was promptly patched, and a new shielded pool called Ironwood was proposed to isolate any residual risk. The incident highlighted the importance of formal verification, which is now being extended across the new stack. Another concern is sync-service concentration: if a few providers dominate oblivious sync, they could become operational chokepoints, though they cannot read user transactions.
Over the past six months, progress around Tachyon, Zcash's scalability solution, centered on Ironwood security and formal verification. Ironwood, a new shielded pool, activated with NU6.3. The official team published a machine-checked Lean proof with 2,700+ theorems demonstrating the absence of undetectable counterfeiting bugs (balance integrity). A turnstile mechanism forces Orchard funds to migrate into Ironwood, auditing the old pool's supply and bounding circulating ZEC. Tachyon's protocol design advanced around proof-carrying data (PCD) and oblivious synchronization, enabling shielded transaction aggregation, validator state compression, and removal of quantum-vulnerable privacy assumptions. The team also built Ragu, a Rust recursive zk-SNARK toolkit based on Halo without trusted setup, and began formally verifying circuits using zkSecurity's framework. Official future focus: make formal verification central to cryptographic development, continue building Tachyon to overcome Zcash's privacy scaling limits, and advance post-quantum privacy.
Sean Bowe (Co-founder, Lead Cryptographer)
Tal Derei (Engineering & Cryptography)
Connor O'Hara (Engineering & Cryptography)
Alex Xiong (Engineering & Cryptography)
L Winslow (Protocol Engineer)
Samuel Akinosho (Engineering)
Source: https://tachyon.z.cash/team/