A Path Forward for Ledger and Zcash

jenkin · July 28, 2026, 7:45am

Hello @abhi-ledger , today is the Ironwood activation day and we are three days to july ending… I saw some activities on zcash-related ledger repositories, any news about the new zcash app with full ironwood support?

Jiggytom · August 11, 2026, 3:28pm

Any updates for us?

abhi-ledger · August 14, 2026, 3:31pm

Zcash Community Forum - August 2026 Update

Hi everyone,

Update from the Ledger integration team, covering everything since the June update. We owe you an explanation for skipping July, that’s at the end of this post. The short version of the whole update: Ironwood support shipped before activation, shielded send and receive is now complete across the stack and in QA hardening, and the reported swap and error issues are fixed and released.

1. NU6.3 / Ironwood

Support for the new consensus rules shipped across the whole stack (signer, wallet, device app) two weeks before the July 28 mainnet activation. Transparent ZEC send and receive were unaffected by the upgrade.

2. Shielded send and receive

As announced in June, the implementation was re-based onto Ironwood rather than shipped on Orchard first. It is now complete across all four layers:

Crafting library (ledger-zcash-utils): Ironwood pool sync, V6 transaction builder, finalize and broadcast.
Device app (app-zcash): shielded transaction signing, clear signing of every flow, security fixes.
Signer (device-sdk-ts): shielded signing on device, Ironwood bundle support, on-device address verification.
Ledger Wallet (ledger-live, filter by “zcash”): a standalone Zcash module, Ironwood balance and send routing, the complete send flow (source selection, address validation, sync status, fees, summary, shield/unshield), and the private address in the Receive screen.

Where it stands: real shielded sends now sign on a physical Ledger and broadcast on mainnet in internal builds. We are in QA hardening; what it has surfaced so far is wallet-side and fixed as found. One item remains open on the device side: the memory footprint of a shielded spend on the smallest devices. The device app goes through an independent security audit before release.

3. Swap failures and other reported errors

Swap: the rise in generic errors when swapping ZEC in late July, across all providers, came from two bugs in how Ledger Wallet handled the transaction that had funded a user’s coins. Neither was in the Zcash device app, which is why updating the app changed nothing, and why the failures looked random: being affected depended on which transactions had funded your coins, not on your app version. Both are fixed and released in Ledger Wallet Mobile 4.14 (August 7) and Desktop 4.15 (August 11).

Also fixed and released: the device prompt never appearing, broadcast failures after signing, incorrect fees and maximum amounts, transparent balance mismatches, shielded state lost between sessions, and wrong amounts in shielded history. The incorrect consensus branch id error reported in this thread came from wallets stuck on an old version by an auto-update bug; it resolves on update, as confirmed in that post.

Still open: spending coins received from an Ironwood transaction (the wallet now refuses clearly instead of erroring; full support needs the next device app), and one case of very old pre-Sapling transparent coins failing to spend through a third-party wallet, under investigation.

Scoped, not started: retiring the legacy Sapling app, so other wallets can drop it without stranding anyone’s funds.

4. Grant scope and Ironwood

To be explicit about how this relates to Grant #152: the deliverables remain the same, with the Orchard-specific components delivered as their Ironwood equivalents, since Ironwood is now the network’s shielded pool. We will publish a written mapping of the original grant scope against the Ironwood deliverables for ZCG’s review, so there is a clear shared record of what is being delivered against the grant.

5. On the communication gap

We missed the July update. Part of the reason: the Ironwood pivot created additional engineering effort that was not anticipated by the original grant, and much of the past weeks went into the commercial and legal groundwork for covering it, including a potential sponsorship from within the Zcash community for that additional technical effort. We held this update longer than we should have waiting for that to conclude. In hindsight, the technical progress you’ve just read deserved its own post regardless.

The next update will be a bigger, formal one.

– Abhi
Product | Coin & Blockchain Integration | Ledger

abhi-ledger · August 14, 2026, 3:39pm

Hi please check the formal update here: A Path Forward for Ledger and Zcash - #170 by abhi-ledger

abhi-ledger · September 15, 2026, 1:32pm

Ledger and Zcash: Ironwood funding agreement and Grant #152 scope mapping

Hi everyone, major update!

In the August update we said the next post would be a bigger, formal one, covering the commercial and legal groundwork mentioned there. That work has concluded, so here is the full picture.

1. The Ironwood funding agreement

The Ironwood pivot created additional engineering work that was not anticipated by the original grant. That additional work, and only that work, is now covered by a Blockchain Integration and Funding Agreement between Ledger and Zcash Labs LLC (their announcement), under which Zcash Labs funds USD 80,000 for adapting the original Orchard-scoped deliverables to Ironwood (NU6.3).

To be explicit about governance, because it matters here:

This is a bilateral agreement between Ledger and Zcash Labs. It is separate from, and independent of, Grant #152.
It changes nothing about Grant #152: not the deliverables owed to the community, not ZCG’s review and acceptance process.
Zcash Labs has no authority of any kind over Grant #152. It cannot modify, approve, or direct anything under the grant. That remains entirely between Ledger and ZCG.
Any steps Zcash Labs may take within Zcash community processes regarding its sponsorship are its own initiative, in its sole discretion. Ledger is not a party to any such process.

2. Grant #152 deliverable mapping

As promised in August, the written mapping of the original grant scope against the Ironwood deliverables is now posted on the grant issue for ZCG’s review: Github Issue #152 Comment.

The one-line summary: every deliverable stands as originally defined in Grant #152, with the Orchard-specific components delivered as their Ironwood equivalents, since Ironwood is now the network’s shielded pool following NU6.3 activation. The comment also lists explicitly what is not covered, so there is no ambiguity at acceptance time.

3. Where delivery stands

Shielded send and receive remain complete across the stack and in QA hardening, as described in August. Release is gated on completion of the independent security audit of the device app and final QA; we are targeting end of September. The regular monthly update follows at the end of the month.

We are grateful for constant and proactive support from Tom (Zcash Labs LLC), ZCG, FPF and ZODL team. And we are looking forward to long term collaboration with Zcash community