The Zcash Daily — Wednesday, September 9, 2026
The most consequential conversation on the September 3rd Arborist Call was about fees, and it didn’t reach a conclusion.
Here’s the stake in one number. Someone holding 270,000 small transparent UTXOs would pay 13.5 ZEC to shield them — over $16,000 at today’s price, just to move their own money into privacy. That’s not a theoretical edge case. It’s a real person, priced out of the thing Zcash exists to provide.
ZIP editors are weighing a Shielded Labs proposal to cut the marginal ZIP 317 fee to 1,000 zatoshis per logical action. But the sharper question came from Kris: should routine fee adjustments be automated against historical ZEC/USD price data instead of hand-updated by ZIP editors? Pili objected to anchoring Zcash fees to USD at all. Zooko suggested testing both. Nothing was decided.
I’m torn. Pegging fees to a surveillance currency is an uncomfortable irony for Zcash. But manual adjustment strands users every time ZEC moves — and ZEC has moved a lot.
Either way, this is bigger than a footnote in a biweekly dev call. It’s a live constraint on one of Zcash’s core promises, being worked out quietly by a handful of people, with no answer yet.
Also from the Arborist Call: the Zebra team completed a major refactor of its transaction types — replacing duplicated transaction representation with a wrapper around the upstream zcash_primitives type. More than 5,000 lines of code touched. In librustzcash, PR #3022 merged decryption using ZIP 316 outgoing viewing keys, and PR #2992 is in review for detecting transparent spends when scanning full blocks. ZIP 316 Revision 2 is nearly ready to land. A lot of load-bearing code is moving at once — quietly, in the background, while everyone else watches the price and the vote.
On the grant side, a few things caught my eye that aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Colosseum — the team behind Solana’s hackathons for six years — just proposed a dedicated Zcash track in their next competition, “Crypto World’s Fair.” External hackathon orgs showing up with proposals is new. Is this the ETF effect in builder form?
Then there’s the Zcash SeedSigner — a DIY air-gapped signer built from ~$35 in off-the-shelf parts (Pi Zero, LCD, camera), signing Ironwood and legacy Orchard PCZTs with on-device verification. Self-custody for shielded ZEC that anyone can build at home. No Ledger. No Trezor. No company between you and your keys. That’s not a hardware wallet. That’s a statement.
Two more worth your time: 0xramp is asking for $206K to build non-custodial ZEC-to-local-fiat rails covering Nigeria, Colombia, and Ecuador — shielded-first, with a public on-chain metrics dashboard. Real fiat ramps into emerging markets, non-custodial. That’s the kind of infrastructure that actually moves adoption.
And Privacy Literacy Lab Canada — $15,000 for a simple, free module with twelve real-world scenarios that help people understand what “shielded” actually means and what it protects. No login, no account, no data harvesting. Just an opportunity to learn. With so many people coming into Zcash through ETF headlines without much context for what “shielded” even means, I can’t help but think this little, unglamorous proposal could end up being more important than some of the six-figure grants sitting on the board right now.
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