---
title: ""Zcash's next major upgrade, codenamed Sapling, will feature a set of…"
date: 2017-11-22
source: facebook
type: Archer T. Ships shared a link.
---

# "Zcash's next major upgrade, codenamed Sapling, will feature a set of…

*November 22, 2017 · Facebook*

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[https://z.cash/blog/cultivating-sapling-faster-zksnarks.html](https://z.cash/blog/cultivating-sapling-faster-zksnarks.html){target="_blank"}
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\"Zcash\'s next major upgrade, codenamed Sapling, will feature a set of groundbreaking performance improvements for our shielded transactions. In the last blog post of this series, we talked about a new elliptic curve for zk-SNARKs called BLS12-381, as well as new proving systems and other algorithms.\
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Matthew Green, Ian Miers and I are happy to announce that we have made significant performance improvements to the zk-SNARKs that Zcash uses. These improvements are being published open source, free of patents, for the broader crypto community.\
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We have designed an elliptic curve called Jubjub which is efficient to perform operations on inside of zk-SNARK circuits built over our new BLS12-381 curve. These kinds of \"embedded\" curves have been explored in previous works such as Kosba et al. . We achieve record-breaking performance for fixed-based exponentiation.\
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Fast elliptic-curve cryptography in this context allows us to use more efficient primitives for commitment schemes and collision-resistant hashes. Combining the various techniques we\'ve discussed in previous posts, we can get a rough idea of the performance improvements:\
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Jubjub benchmarks\
This rough estimate indicates an 80% reduction of proving time, and a 98% reduction in memory usage which is a key requirement for opening up mobile support for Zcash shielded addresses.\"\
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[https://z.cash/blog/cultivating-sapling-faster-zksnarks.html](https://z.cash/blog/cultivating-sapling-faster-zksnarks.html){target="_blank"}
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