December 2025
Executive summary
During December Pacu focused on wrapping up NU 6.1 and ongoing surveys while also re-targeting the Zcashd deprecation timeline that was agreed upon with Z3 developers and communicating that to ecosystem partners. Z3 feedback kept arriving and worked with ZF, Zingo and ECC folks to support orgs testing the software. Updated the community on progress and wrapped the year (as it seems to be the thing nowadays). Held and assisted many community events like Arborist, Crosslink workshops and other collaboration calls like Pepper-sync walkthrough and LCWG which is organizing to support Zcash on React Native as a first class citizen to keep bringing Zcash everywhere. In terms of development worked on creation of lightclient-protocol v0.4.0 with ECC folks and its adoption on Zaino. As usual, reviewed numerous pull requests, maintained existing projects, held office hours for teams who requested it and followed up with ongoing ZCG grants like Ledger, ChainSafe and ZecKit in collaboration with others (thanks Hanh, Kris and Gguy).
Extended Report
Zcashd Deprecation
- Outreach to Zcashd users:
- NU 6.1 Retrospective survey
- It didn’t get much traction possibly due to the holiday season.
- Zallet Closed Alpha:
- Binance, Fireblocks and MEXC are actively testing Z3.
- Processed and Published NU Friction Survey results
- Updated the deprecation target timeline to every partner in the outreach list
- NU 6.1 Retrospective survey
- Community Updates
- Development Coordination
- Hosted Zcashd Deprecation collaboration calls
- Zaino API Workgroup calls (when needed)
- Supported Zaino folks on internal processes
- Helped set up Pepper-Sync walkthrough (Kudos to OscarPepper! It was a great meeting)
- Development:
- Wrapped up support for lightclient-protocol v0.4.0 on Zaino (formerly Transparent data support) which is pending review and further discussion.
- Worked with Larry Ruane, Kris and Str4d on the lightclient-protocol canonical files
DevRel
- Z|ECC Logistics preparation
- Follow Up with DevConnect and EthCC II connections.
- I followed up with a couple of connections like Kanga Exchange from Poland who launched their ZEC/USDC pair. Also with Routescan devs and a couple of others I’m looking forward to meet after the holiday season.
- Ad Hoc Ecosystem response
- Provided shielded coinbase support to a miner organization.
- PR Reviews (requested and Ad Hoc)
- Maintain existing projects (update CI Tokens, dependabot, etc)
- dependabot updates on ZecDev
- Create a README for lightclient-protocol
- rebase orchard crate fork to latest main zcash/orchard#432 in an attempt to unblock RedDev team’s PoC.
- created a separate branch to unblock reddev team’s FROST PoC zcash/orchard#476
- Follow-up w/ existing grantees:
- Various Community activities:
- Attended Crosslink workshop
- LCWG: Steer React Native SDK initiative, which call notes can be found here zcash/lcwg#150
- Attended Arborist Call on December 11th
- Office Hours with Teams
- RedDev syncs December 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th.
- On December 23rd RedDev found a blocker on their FROST PoC due to forks not being compatible with NU 6.1. This is complicated PR resolution due to quantum recoverability work that is stopping the upstream contributions needed to be merged in order to be able to update the librustzcash tooling accordingly. I ended up creating a separate draft PR that has the code that tentatively unblocks the FROST PoC RedDev is doing
- Met w/ Routescan BD for possible contribution of theirs and grant application.
- RedDev syncs December 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th.