Since I’m repeatedly seeing discussion here on the forums that sounds like “ZF does nothing” I feel obligated as an ECC engineer to jump in and say ZF’s engineers are kicking ass and writing really quality code. They have also helped us find serious bugs and specification issues on our end.
Zebra is probably one of the biggest endeavors in our project’s history and essential work if we want to escape the C++ hellscape we inherited from bitcoin. Naturally, it’s a long-term project so it doesn’t get the love it deserves and ZF engineers don’t get the praise they deserve for working on it. It will increase our velocity in shipping new features in Zcash when it’s finally at feature parity (and it’s getting close!) and overall its existence strengthens our project’s decentralization and security.
I admit to being slightly disappointed in ZF’s engineering cadence in the past but the challenge before them is immense and over the last year they’ve made way more progress than I was expecting. And then look at us: NU5 has been a total slog! That’s an egg on my face.