“Hubert, who, as victor in the first trial of skill, had the right to shoot first, took his aim with great deliberation, long measuring the distance with his eye, while he held in his hand his bended bow, with the arrow placed on the string. At length he made a step forward, and raising the bow at the full stretch of his left arm, till the centre or grasping-place was nigh level with his face, he drew his bowstring to his ear. The arrow whistled through the air, and lighted within the inner ring of the target, but not exactly in the centre.
“You have not allowed for the wind, Hubert,” said his antagonist, bending his bow, “or that had been a better shot.”
So saying, and without showing the least anxiety to pause upon his aim, Locksley stept to the appointed station, and shot his arrow as carelessly in appearance as if he had not even looked at the mark. He was speaking almost at the instant that the shaft left the bowstring, yet it alighted in the target two inches nearer to the white spot which marked the centre than that of Hubert.”
- Ivanhoe, Ch 13.
The path of Robin of Locksley’s arrow was not an opportunistic or accidental moment in time. It was a collection of varied things, forged together, eventually set upon a bow and string, in the hands of someone in tune with his surroundings and unbothered by the moment, because he had been prepared by the path he had taken through life up to that point.
The arrow itself was also ready. The hewed honeyed ash wood of its thirty-six-inch shaft, fashioned to carry the forged iron tip, and guided by the feathers that once grew upon the wings of a goose.
The six-foot-long bow, made of reddish-orange heartwood and sapwood, provided the tension and flexibility its owner had learned to draw on. Polished horn from cattle, shaped and grooved by some local horner for connecting the hemp string to the tips of the bow.
And the man, who was once a boy, and before a babe in the arms of a doting mother, now on the stage, with the feather of an eagle in his cap, holding the five-inch cow-skin grip of the bow, about to shock the court of Prince John.
For years, cycle after cycle, we have been fashioning the tools needed to protect human dignity and agency through financial privacy. We have been bending math on top of silicon, shaping the user experience, and hardening the protocol.
Much of the tooling is here, ready to be used and tested. Already, true adoption of shielded Zcash is happening at a greater clip than ever before. We still have work to do. Improvements to scale, post-quantum, and usability are moving forward at a pace.
Prince John is assembling the court. Soon the arrow will fly. Eyes will open. And it will seem effortless because of all that has preceded the moment.
Zodl (formerly Zashi)
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Zodl 3.3.1 (Android) is now available on GitHub, Solana, and F-Droid, closing out the 3.3 release cycle.
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Zodl 3.4.0 is approaching release. The Connect Keystone and Wallet Birthday Height flow now uses the new core wallet rewind API for cleaner rescanning, and a cluster of Android bugs were resolved (failed-transaction display, post-resync connectivity, and a QR library regression). All 3.4.0 fixes and features are now ready; final QA runs once the supporting backend releases are out.
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Android send-flow and locale fixes: resolved an oversend issue for users on the English (Portugal) locale, fractional ZEC amounts being cut off and the Send Review button being blocked for users whose locale uses a comma as the decimal separator, and Tor protection dropping when syncing on a device low on disk space.
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Coinholder Polling: edge-case and error-state designs are finalized; the iOS implementation (full voting flow plus results screen) is in code review; the Android implementation is underway in cooperation with the Valar Group team; and the supporting Swift SDK shielded-voting integration is in code review. Nothing has shipped to users yet; landing the full stack and taking it through review is the focus of the coming weeks.
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Finalized designs: a redesigned Receive screen (shielded address QR shown by default, fewer taps to share an address), transparent address rotation refreshed for the new Receive layout, and the Time to Spendability feature that tells users when incoming funds will be available to spend.
Looking ahead at Mobile and Product:
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Test and ship Zodl 3.4.0 once the supporting backend release is out.
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Complete the Coinholder Polling implementation on iOS and Android and take it through review.
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Ship server reliability improvements on iOS: automatic and manual server selection and multi-server transaction broadcast, both currently in code review and contributed by the Valar Group team.
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Continued design work on multi-currency conversion (prompted by a community PR and new access points for turning conversion on) and the time-to-spendability estimate.
Zodl iOS Analytics
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Unique Installs: 40.6k (+0.2k)
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Total Downloads: 48.1k (+0.4k)
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App Store Rating: 4.9★ (no change)
Zodl Android Analytics
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Install Base: 15.4k (no notable change)
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Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 48.8k (+0.4k)
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Play Store Rating: 4.26★ (no change)
Zcash Core (includes R&D)
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Released orchard 0.13.0 and sapling-crypto 0.7.0, including the orchard/orchard_internal split that lets downstream protocol extensions (e.g., the voting circuit) reuse internals without enlarging the public API. Cleared the yanked core2 dependency that had been blocking cargo update across the codebase.
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Released the librustzcash crate stack up to zcash_primitives.
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Shipped the wallet Rewind API: rescanning from a newly imported account’s birthday no longer disrupts the spendability of notes in existing accounts. Added IVK-only scanning support as a companion change.
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Completed and merged EIP-681 payment URI integration into the iOS SDK, and fixed an ambiguous numeric-value parsing bug in the core library.
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Continued zcashd to Zallet wallet migration: in-flight fixes for importprivkey keys, P2PKH/P2SH and watch-only address migration, Sapling view-keys, and transaction-buffer key-index updates, alongside the end-to-end migration integration test suite.
Looking ahead on Core:
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Land the Zallet alpha.4 release. Gated on three sequential pieces of sync-engine work: the put_blocks/store_decrypted_tx refactor (unifying shielded and transparent processing paths), full-block scanning support in zcash_client_backend, and migration to Zaino’s new ChainIndex trait.
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Continue zcashd migration correctness work and integration testing.
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Continued collaboration with Dev’s team on NU7 scope and performance.
Other
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I attended and participated in a fireside chat with Barry Silbert at the DCG Summit this week. DCG used the stage to also announce their investment in ZODL. Zcash was center stage with DCG’s focus on building awareness, the ecosystem, and their own projects, including Grayscale, Foundry, and Fortitude.
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Zodl rebrand: brand agency engagement underway with visual identity work continuing.
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Launched @zodl_support on X as a dedicated support and community channel.
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We’re hiring. Open roles posted at jobs.ashbyhq.com/zodl.
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Policy & Regulatory: Continued work across the People, Product, and Protocol protection pillars. EU and US regulatory counsel proposals are being packaged for executive review in early May. MiCA risk assessment for non-custodial swap features advanced through engagement with industry peers. Attended the Surveillance Accountability Act press event at the U.S. Capitol and continued alliance-building with privacy advocates, including Naomi Brockwell, on shared advocacy priorities.
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Zodls cross-chain payment feature, Crosspay is getting attention.
Market and Ecosystem
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Speaking of Robin Hood, Robinhood listed Zcash nationwide on April 23, opening ZEC trading to U.S. customers across the Robinhood Crypto mobile and web platforms, including in New York under BitLicense. Withdrawals are limited to transparent (t-) addresses. Robinhood Crypto VP Johann Kerbrat confirmed New York coverage. Coverage characterizes the listing’s “privacy-with-limits” approach as a potential template for other U.S. fintechs taking on privacy assets.
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THORChain Zcash integration advanced this week, with preliminary support landed in THORChain’s common package and mainnet rollout targeted for the end of April. Once live, users will be able to trustlessly swap native ZEC for any other THORChain-supported asset (BTC, ETH, etc.) without wrapped tokens or bridges. Initial deployment will exclude shielded addresses; shielded support is a follow-on.
Bending the bow,
Onward.