The Path to Billions. ZODL Update

Ecosystem Updates
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Our destination is clear. We are building a parallel world without mass financial surveillance, where law-abiding people can transact freely and privately, where financial privacy is the default, and access to markets is a human right. There is no sovereignty without privacy.

Our work is to build the path there, for billions to traverse. From onboarding and secure storage through spendability and utility. The path must be wide enough to carry the traffic and built to last.

Every path needs a substrate. Our simplified value proposition is to hold private, spend anywhere. Holding private ZEC allows us to be free from prying eyes into our wealth and history. Spending anywhere lets us use our private holdings, regardless of the currency the recipient prefers.

Ben Horowitz describes the only job as delivering the right product at the right time. Both halves have to land together. After a decade of grinding, we have both.

We set stones on the substrate. These are the big bets that move us rapidly forward. They are the things that provide value, bring new utility, and greater adoption. They aren’t things that get in the way. It has to be simple for the user to step forward toward the destination.

We pour sand between the stones to shore up the path. These include UI tweaks, minor protocol improvements, and optimizations. The grains of sand are not foundational to the path, as they’d be quickly washed away in the rain. They are important, but only once the stones are in place.

We have little time and much to build. We mustn’t tarry too long in the towns in between. We mustn’t build the path too wide, superfluously adding things that don’t get us to the destination quickly. Nor should it be too narrow, excluding those who will need to travel its course. We mustn’t build multiple routes, each forging our own way because we like ours better. And we certainly shouldn’t build toward someone else’s destination. We must continually check ourselves, check our bearings, and have the discipline to build what is necessary.

That discipline of focus and effort allows us to categorize and prioritize our work.

  • What we own: those things that we must build in the protocol, and in the Zodl product(s).

  • What we compose: those things that other products and chains can provide that can be composed with our core capabilities to unlock greater utility, faster. Our work with NEAR Intents to enable swaps and CrossPay is a perfect example.

  • What we reject: these are side quests that don’t adequately further us toward our destination, superfluous features, or activities antithetical to our mission.

We plan to share, test, and reorient our work based on these categories at the upcoming ZODL Summit in July. I also hope that we can continue to align and work together across the Zcash community so that we maximize our collective strengths rather than each going our own way. With any decentralized protocol like Zcash, these side paths will happen. Different ideas, different opinions. But if we get the stone-laying aligned as much as possible, we will reach our destination. We will build the path to billions.

ZODL updates for the week.

Zodl (Product)

  • Zodl iOS 3.4.0 released. Version 3.3.0 introduced the ability to disconnect a Keystone hardware wallet from Zodl. 3.4.0 makes sure reconnecting is a smooth experience. Together, these two releases give you a full loop for managing your hardware wallet setup inside Zodl: connect, disconnect, and reconnect. Release post.

  • Underlying Swift SDK 2.5.0 and Android SDK 2.5.0 released in lockstep, closing out the 2.5.0 cycle on both platforms and carrying the rewind/rescan plumbing and synchronizer-state work that gates the next wave of mobile features.

  • Coinholder Polling implementation and review finalized on both iOS and Android in collaboration with the Valar Group team. Merged and now in internal testing, with the first-ever in-wallet coinholder voting on track for the upcoming NU7 sentiment poll (see below).

  • Coinholder Polling designs, UX, and UI updated based on the latest round of feedback, including the bottom-sheet picker that lets users choose which authority publishes the active poll list, plus edge-case frames for polling and polling results.

Looking ahead at Product:

  • Continue testing and polishing Coinholder Polling.

  • Continue work on iOS sync errors.

  • Next up: Automatic Server Switch, Multi-Server Transaction Submission, and Multi-Currency Conversion.

  • Finalize Coinholder Polling design updates and shift focus to Multi-Account Support designs.

Zodl iOS Analytics

  • Unique Installs: 41.9k (+0.5k)

  • Total Downloads: 49.9k (+0.7k)

  • App Store Rating: 4.9★ (no change)

Zodl Android Analytics

  • Install Base: 15.6k (+0.3k)

  • Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 50k (+0.5k)

  • Play Store Rating: 4.24★ (−0.02)

Zcash Core (includes R&D)

  • Discussion on the proposal to shorten block times from 75s → 25s converged this week.

  • Diagnosed and fixed a shielding failure (librustzcash #2347) hitting Android Zashi/Zodl users with many small transparent UTXOs, typically miners receiving regular small payouts.

  • Multiple ZEWIF fixes landed, including a blob-size correction and a fix for redeem-script handling, tightening wallet and interchange reliability. Follow-on zewif2 ideation also opened this week.

  • Zallet alpha.4 progress: reviewed and merged alpha breaking-change detection. Old-alpha wallets now refuse to run on incompatible builds instead of corrupting state.

  • Reviewed the shielded-voting Swift SDK PR cluster and the multi-server transaction submission implementation, both feeding directly into the mobile work above.

  • Wrapped up follow-up work on the CompactBlock message, reducing legacy and protocol overhead.

  • Unified zcash_client_backend handling of sent and received transparent UTXOs (librustzcash #2260), fixing inconsistencies in the transparent UTXO path.

Looking ahead at Core:

  • Focus on the remaining Zallet alpha.4 scope.

  • Finish review on z_shieldcoinbase RPC support.

  • Three sequential pieces of sync-engine work in flight: the put_blocks / store_decrypted_tx refactor to unify shielded and transparent processing paths, full-block scanning support in zcash_client_backend, and migration to Zaino’s new ChainIndex trait.

  • Expand Zallet’s zcashd-migration to support all legacy key types, with integration tests built around historic versions of zcashd-generated keys.

Other

  • Opened community review on a set of NU7 sentiment poll questions (forum post, X post). Poll will run through both ZCAP and coinholders, with the first-ever in-wallet coinholder voting via Zodl. Hardware wallet users supported via Zodl plus Keystone.

  • ZODL Summit invites opened (forum post, X post). The ZODL Summit (previously the Z|ECC Summit) is the twice-yearly working gathering of Zcash contributors and ecosystem partners. July 8 to 10 in Prague, Czech Republic. Apply here.

  • Cypherpunk Policy Dinner: continued community engagement on the ZCG anchor-sponsorship request, a side-event to the 2026 DC Privacy Summit. Once approved, the next step is to recruit additional Zcash ecosystem sponsors while keeping the event focused on Zcash.

  • New team members are joining over the next couple of weeks. Harry is joining as Senior Mobile QA, Danny Willems as Principal Cryptographic Engineer on May 27, and Giulia as Marketing Associate.

  • Coinholder Grant application for Zcash core work submitted. Post here.

  • Miner BD: outreach process kicked off, with codebase owners reaching out to miners directly to strengthen engagement and process with the mining community.

  • Marketing: ECC blog restored. Zodl x Slope brand engagement continuing.

  • We’re hiring. Open roles at jobs.ashbyhq.com/zodl.

Market and Ecosystem

Building the path,

Onward.

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