Hi Folks,
We have had a solid month of work on the ZeWIF project in February and remain on target to deliver a complete toolset (per milestones 2 + 3) at the end of March, in advance of the zcashd retirement. But, our model for the task has shifted, which is pushing back what we’d initially identified as the intermediary milestone 2.
Our initial plan was a top-down approach: we were going to produce the ZeWIF specification in February, then produce libraries to support writing and reading ZeWIF in March. However, as our engineer has dived into the project, he’s come to the conclusion that beginning with the coding is a superior methodology due to the complexity and breadth of the Zcash wallet ecosystem, with the specification then to be written based on the pragmatic, real-world needs of the wallets as they currently exist.
As a result, we’ve been able to release an initial version of “zmigrate”, the Rust crate that we’ll be offered to support conversion to and from ZeWIF. It currently supports reading zcashd files and parsing most keys:
A video describing the zmigrate work is here:
The keys we’re parsing are described here:
We are looking for the following support to help make zmigrate successful:
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If you have a zcashd wallet, download and run zmigrate.
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File Issues and/or Create PRs based on your use of zmigrate. Tell us if it successfully parsed your entire wallet.dat, or if there were values that it missed.
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If you have a zeroed-out wallet from any wallet app (particularly wallet apps other than zcashd) that you are willing to donate to help us continue to test wallet formats and improve ZeWIF, please let us know ASAP.
More pragmatically, this has obviously interfered with our ability to meet the second milestones as originally planned.
Ideally, we’d like to be able to submit our published “zmigrate” repo and video as fulfillment of our second milestone, or some portion thereof. We’d then meet the rest of the milestone 2+3 requirements at the end of March. We could get by without this, but it’d be helpful, so please let us know if there’s an option here.
Otherwise, we just need an OK to mush our original milestones 2+3 together, with both the specification and libraries likely to arrive at the end of March—and of course let us know if there are any issues or concerns with our previously discrete milestones being completed together at the end of March.
Thanks very much for the understanding and support. Progress has been strong, just in a different order than originally intended, and we wanted to make sure the ZCG community was aware of that and to see if accommodations could be made for it.
Shannon
