Nighthawk update for October 2022

[NighthawkApps]

As we enter the fourth quarter of 2022, the Nighthawk team continues to maintain the lightwalletd service infrastructure, Zcash Block Explorer, and work on a light client strategy for 2023 & beyond for Nighthawk Wallet. The present syncing times and experience remain degraded, and our priority is to get the ZIP-317 changes adopted & implemented to reduce the impact on light clients.

ZIP-317 Wallet Dev Call Announcement

Aditya @aiyadt from Nighthawk and Nate @nathan-at-least from ECC are hosting an open public call focused on wallet developers for the Zcash ecosystem all about ZIP-317, a proposed change to transaction fees in Zcash. The purpose of this call is to answer questions and gather feedback from Zcash wallet developer teams about the ZIP and to coordinate adoption and deployment of the fee changes. ZIP-317 is a proposal to require transaction fees to be proportional to the number of inputs and outputs…

Nighthawk Wallet updates:

• Transition the Unstoppable Domain Name Service endpoint from Alchemy to a self-hosted.
• Continue reviewing & testing upcoming changes in the light client SDK.
• Plan towards adopting Unified Addresses for Sapling and Transparent pools only before adding Orchard pool support.
• Provide ongoing end-user support to users of Nighthawk Wallet via Twitter & ProtonMail channels.
• App Changelog is published at Nighthawk Wallet

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

lightwalletd.com

Goal: Keep up-to-date versions for zcashd & lightwalletd to continue providing high availability public infrastructure for light-wallet based Zcash applications.

• Upgrade main-net & test-net services with zcashd v5.3.0
• Monitor lightwalletd servers and increased bandwidth demands.
• Maintain 100% uptime via load-balanced main-net and single instance test-net services
• Continue maintaining the monthly warranty canary on https://lightwalletd.com

ZcashBlockExplorer.com

Goal: Provide a fast, lightweight, Tor-enabled, no-tracker/no-analytics/no-logging Zcash transaction explorer.

• Upgrade zcashd to v5.3.0 for Zcash Block Explorer.
• Monitor increased load on zcashblockexplorer.com due to both visitor demand and zcashd resource usage.
• Continue working towards architecting & estimating costs for a test-net version of Zcash Block Explorer.

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(On Hold) Zcash <> Thorchain Integration

Goal: Add Zcash to Thorchain to enable decentralized ZEC trading and LP incentives.

The Zcash implementation is currently on hold following upcoming conventional transaction fee-related changes and optimizations for zcashd core node software. As for the Zcash-specific Thorchain work, the following items are pending:

a) Work on bridging ancillary Python code for integration tests.
b) Executing smoke test suite on updated test-net infra with zcashd v5.2.0+
c) Work on xchain.js wallet APIs for Zcash to support upcoming changes in conventional fee structure.