Development Goals
Tachyon is designed and developed to reduce unnecessary dependencies between tasks and speed the deployment process.
Ragu is Tachyon's foundational proof-carrying data (PCD) scheme: a Rust library that closely follows the original Halo construction.
Still under construction, Ragu will undergo several rounds of optimization and auditing until it satisfies the performance and safety requirements for deployment in Zcash.
Tachyon decouples the shielded protocol from the payment layer, enabling two approaches to scale shielded payment delivery while preserving privacy.
One approach, developed independently in collaboration with our team, uses Private Information Retrieval (PIR) and post-quantum key exchange to achieve scalable, post-quantum privacy with minimal UX change.
In parallel, we will explore more scalable payment protocols that leverage dedicated infrastructure for note delivery. This may introduce UX or backup/recoverability trade-offs, but serves as a hedge if a more experimental protocol proves cost-prohibitive.
We are designing a shielded protocol with a simplified key structure that is designed to maximally leverage PCD for oblivious synchronization and shielded aggregation. After sufficient review and analysis, the protocol will be deployed on a test network.
This protocol, which acts as a new shielded pool independent of the existing Orchard pool used in Zcash, will accommodate all foreseeable requirements that the parallel payment layer may place on the underlying system.
Once community consensus is reached and the proposal meets Zcash's ZIP requirements, we will activate on mainnet.