In July, our priority was to keep up with the demand of lightwalletd as we noticed increased usage overall, and to make Nighthawk Wallet releases to keep up with wallet syncing issues.
We invited members of the Zcash community to contribute language translations and we would like to thank the first group of 7 contributors who’ve helped translate strings into Arabic, Spanish, Russian & Ukrainian!
The major outstanding issue remains the ability of light wallet infrastructure to hold up the ongoing high transaction load and to provide a seamless Zcash experience on mobile. We will continue to work on building support for NU5 & Orchard pool transactions as per the spec and ZIPs to support both Sapling & Orchard transactions in the coming future.
The Nighthawk team is also participating in discussions with core engineers around changing the transaction fee format and distributing lightwalletd server load.
Nighthawk Wallet updates:
- Make new wallet releases with improved type safety, upstream SDK updates, upgraded dependencies, and support for Android 13 & iOS 16
- Keep up with sync calls with @thomaslzy to monitor the progress of the OMR library.
- Provide ongoing end-user support to new users of Nighthawk Wallet.
- We would like to extend thanks to ECC engineers who have helped troubleshoot issues over the weekend & long weekends too.
- Full App Changelog is available at https://nighthawkwallet.com/changelog/
BONUS: We’ve partnered with Unstoppable Domains to make it easy for our users to send and receive ZEC! All external services will be opt-in, i.e. Nighthawk users will manually need to enable UNS address resolution. This is in line with the focus of the privacy-first approach taken by Nighthawk.
Light Client Working Group:
- Attend bi-weekly LCWG calls to discuss upcoming mobile SDK changes and plans following NU5.
- LCWG meeting briefs are available at GitHub GitHub - zcash/lcwg: Light Client Working Group project management repository
Goal: Keep up-to-date versions for zcashd & lightwalletd to continue providing public infrastructure for light wallet-based Zcash applications.
- Monitor increased bandwidth-related load and costs.
- Monitor potential Out of Memory issues in lightwalletd server instances.
- Perform two critical node upgrades: zcashd v5.1.0 and v5.2.0
- Maintain 100% uptime via load-balanced main-net and single instance test-net services
- Continue maintaining the monthly warranty canary on https://lightwalletd.com
Goal: Provide a fast, lightweight, Tor-enabled, no-tracker/no-analytics/no-logging Zcash transaction explorer.
- Fix all remaining v5 transaction resolution issues.
- Explore changes around architecture & caching improvements to withhold increase in visitor load.
- Monitor increased load to zcashblockexplorer.com following the NU5 release.
- Uprade zcashd node to v5.2.0
- Continue working towards hosting a test-net version of Zcash Block Explorer, need to evaluate server costs.
Zcash <> Thorchain Integration
Goal: Add Zcash to Thorchain to enable decentralized ZEC trading and LP incentives.
- BiFrost
- Continue updating test cases.
- Update Node Launcher PRs to follow the new Thorchain PR submissions process.
- Switch to using the v5 transaction format.
- Upcoming -
a) Work on bridging ancillary Python code for integration tests.
b) Continue executing the smoke test suite on test-net infra.
NOTE: Smoke tests are a secondary implementation of Thorchain in python and it simulates the entire Thorchain stack twice and runs tests for all the APIs.
And that’s a wrap for our July update. We will be present at Zcon3! Stay tuned for @aiyadt’s session on Intro to Zcash & collecting general feedback around light wallets to share with the light wallet devs at Zcon3!