Zcash Developer Relations Engineer

[pacu]

May 2025

Hello! May is coming to its end! Here’s a new update on this grant.

Executive Summary

This month was very hands-on, with a lot of development around Kotling ZIP-321 library, Zcash Explorer code in Elixir and some Rust polishing the Send Max feature for librustzcash.
Also helped testing and wrapping up some other grants like ZexCavator and ZeWIF. We continue to have contact with different partners of the ecosystem who currently run Zcash nodes but at a slower pace and specifically focused on feedback about migration paths from Zcashd to Zebra from a DevOps Perspective. Given that the containerization of the Z3 stack is progressing, we will soon expect to have the next phase of the outreach unlocked and start asking feedback and testing for those artifacts. There were a lot of PR reviews related to grants coming to completion which is awesome!

Extended Report

DevRel May 2025

• Zcashd Deprecation
  • Outreach to Zcashd users:
    • So far we got all the responses we could over messaging and current estimates and this is kind of stale. We are going to start doing 1-on-1s as soon as we have alpha builds and containers we can send them over for hands-on testing.
  • Updates:
    • May 2nd
    • May 9th
    • May 15th
    • May 23rd
    • May 30th
  • Development:
    • Started work on Zcash Block Explorer support for Zaino. Got it working and added new functionality requested by Coin Market Cap.
    • (tentative) There’s Transparent spending capabilities that Kris from ECC asked If I could work on which is related to the work on “send-max” I’ve been doing.
      • This could be worked on top of send max changes. Not planned yet.
    • Wrapped-up any changes requested on the “send max” feature
      • This needs another round of review by the core team. All comments have been addressed or responded to.
    • Responded comments from Zancas on Regtest ZIP zcash/zips@5484134
• Development:
  • Respond to Least Authority initial audit report for ZIP-321 libraries for Kotlin
  • Test ZexCavator
• DevRel:
  • Ad Hoc Ecosystem Response:
    • Coin Market Cap requirements for Total Supply and Circulating Supply
    • Worked with Blockchain commons and ZCG on ZeWIF grant completion.
    • Support to Unstoppable Wallet engineers on iOS SDK issues
  • Ledger NU6:
    • Followed up with Ledger engineers and reps on progress of Zcash fixes and paths forward for the Zcash <> Ledger relationship
  • Community calls
    • LCWG #97 May 15th
    • LCWG #98 May 29th
    • Arborist Call May 29th
    • Arborist Call May 15th
    • Crosslink Workshop
  • PR Reviews (some are post-merge):
    • Reviewed this snippet from Maya devs
    • Add github continuous integration builds. BlockchainCommons/zewif-zcashd#1
    • Fix ci beta lints BlockchainCommons/zewif-zcashd#2
    • Use zcashd-6.2.0-compatible zcash_primitives, zcash_address, and orchard versions instead of zingolibs forked types. BlockchainCommons/zewif-zcashd#3
    • Use zcash_primitives to perform parsing for protocol types. BlockchainCommons/zewif-zcashd#4
    • Use protocol encodings & remove excessive decomposition of key types. BlockchainCommons/zewif#4
    • Add CI workflows BlockchainCommons/zewif#5
    • Remove decomposed transaction parts. BlockchainCommons/zewif#6
    • Remove binary parsing BlockchainCommons/zewif#8
    • Add export block height & account birthday metadata. BlockchainCommons/zewif#9
  • Office Hours:
    • Met with the RedDev team weekly.
    • Attended some Zingo stand up meetings to interiorize myself on Zaino things.