Dear Zcash community,
We have been working towards making progress on our milestones for the ZSA and Asset Swaps grants. On the back of our initial draft of the Asset Swaps ZIP a few days ago, we’re really excited to share that we have now published our tool for testing transactions to Zebra nodes. This corresponds to Milestone #8 of our Zcash Shielded Assets Grant.
We believe that this tool will help not just us as we continue with our implementation of ZSAs with Zebra, but also to other developers in general who want to locally test their wallets or other tools with Zebra nodes.
The repository for this tool can be found here: GitHub - QED-it/zcash_tx_tool: A testing tool for Zcash transaction generation
The functionality, in brief
Developers will be able to use this tool to create and send Zcash V5 transactions to a Zebra node. We have included a Docker image creation process to set up the testing scenario.
We highlight that there are a few changes to our mode of node operation as compared to the normal Zebra node.
- We have an activation height of 1,060,755 blocks. For ease of operation and reduction in the sync time that would be needed to get these many blocks, we have pre-mined blocks up to the activation height and stored them in a database that is built into the Docker image.
- The consensus branch ID is set to a custom value — this ensures that the testing takes place on a fork of the main chain.
- The node does not connect to peers (it has an empty peers list). This allows for testing in a manner similar to Regtest mode on zcashd. Furthermore, while zcashd regtest mode had proof of work enabled but set to a low difficulty for block mining, this tool disables proof of work so as to simplify the generation of new blocks by the single node, and focuses on the creation and sending of transactions.
Please go ahead and try it out, and let us know your thoughts or comments!
Best,
The QEDIT Team.