Feature Branch Testnet and Compatible Developer Tooling

Community Grants Applications
4

Dear Zcash Community,

We’re here with an update on what we’ve been working on recently. The general theme has been bringing our codebase in line with the updates that have been made in the recent NU6.2 and NU6.3 releases.

halo2

  • We are happy to share that our PR#887 was merged into upstream after another round of reviews. This allows the creation of non-identity points properly pinned to constants, which is required for the OrchardZSA circuit.

Orchard

  • A new PR#546 to upstream has been opened and is ready for review. This PR separates out the changes to add the ZSA circuit into the Orchard protocol.
  • This is done in a way that allows it to be incorporated into the upstream code without yet changing the behaviour of the upstream protocol.
  • The changes are unreachable from the builder, and bundle construction, encoding and verification remain unchanged at this point (the zsa_enabled flag is hard-coded to false).
  • This allows for the circuit changes to be reviewed and incorporated as a first step by the core developers. The rest of the Orchard changes will be submitted as a follow-up PR.
  • OrchardZSA now builds on top of the NU6.3 changes, as described in the previous update - we have made various improvements to help reduce the diff from the upstream.

Testnet

  • We have updated the URL from which we can connect to the testnet - it is now available at https://rpc.test-zsa.org.
  • Please note: Our previous URL for this has now been deprecated! Use the new URL to connect to the testnet, by setting the following variables:
    ZCASH_NODE_ADDRESS=rpc.test-zsa.org 
ZCASH_NODE_PORT=443 
ZCASH_NODE_PROTOCOL=https

librustzcash

  • The ZSA version of librustzcash is mostly synced with NU6.3 (PR#355). This is currently being reviewed internally.

zcash-test-vectors

  • Updates (PR#58, PR#59, and PR#60) have been made to support the addition of quantum recoverability in the Orchard repository and to extend it to work with the OrchardZSA code.

Zebra

  • The ZSA version of Zebra has been rebased over v5.2.0 (i.e. the last released version before NU6.3) (PR#155).
  • The rebasing over NU6.3 continues to be in progress.
  • There have also been various additions to the infrastructure to support the deployment of a ZSA testnet.

zcash_tx_tool

  • We have released v0.6.0 of our tool, which works with the ZSA version of Zebra v5.2.0 (as described above) (PR#101). This also makes it clearer which version of the Zebra node is compatible with the tx_tool.

Best,

The QEDIT Team.