Hi everyone, while still in the midst of our flurry of updates from Hackmas, we’re also returning to our regular updates. So, aside from finishing out Hackmas work, here’s what we’ve been doing so far in 2026. Highlights include releasing v3.0.0-rc.0 of FROST and v4.0.0 and v4.1.0 of Zebra. We also had lots of contributions from the community.
CI/DevOps and Infrastructure
We made significant improvements in Zebra’s deployment infrastructure and observability. Issues with GCP node deployments were fixed, including a race condition in static IP assignment and enabling external network access for inbound P2P connections. The instance template creation was made more reliable by adding idempotency checks. For CI, scheduled full sync tests are now running on Testnet.
We added OpenTelemetry distributed tracing support, including a Docker Compose stack for Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana, and AlertManager. We added new metrics for RocksDB I/O latency and sync progress, for value pools, RPC performance, and peer-health monitoring; and performance histograms for identifying bottlenecks.
With Docker, a breaking change in a dependency required replacing gosu with setpriv for privilege handling. Several Docker test patterns were also updated to match the current log format, and build failures related to disk space were resolved.
Zebra
We released version 4.0.0 and version 4.1.0 of Zebra. A new DNS seeder from Shielded Labs was added to improve network connectivity, subsidy constants were refactored into submodules, and Zaino was added to the QA testing framework.
A big thank you to all the lovely contributions we’ve had in Zebra this last month. Thank you to @syszery for adding a new Bounded vector type with min/max size constraints and improved error propagation for checkpoint verification. @zlyzol implemented mempool standardness checks, @GarmashAlex improved performance by caching restorable database versions during cleanup, @MozirDmitriy optimized the WtxId conversion to avoid unnecessary cloning, @Bashmunta fixed connection task exit reporting for better error handling, and @emersonian fixed a bug where Zebra would fail to parse valid TOML config files.
In FROST, thank you to @scaraven who added a pre_commitment_aggregate hook to the signature verification function, and @kwsantiago who implemented ZeroizeOnDrop for SigningNonces to improve memory security.
Thanks for reading!