Zcash Developer Relations Engineer

Community Grants
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:waving_hand: hi! This conversation is really inspiring but it will get lost if it’s not on its own topic. I’m flagging these last comments so that @Shawn moves them to a better suited topic. :folded_hands::folded_hands::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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April 2025

Executive Summary

April was a heavy hands-on month with substantial development efforts committed to answering Least Authority’s audit reports and delivering the “Send Max” functionality on librustzcash that can later be integrated to wallets that are librustzcash clients (except Ywallet that uses a fork and already has this). In the “Rel” front, Ledger and Binance took substantial part of our efforts given the locked treasury situation Binance faced due to their dependence on Ledger hardware. @aquietinvestor, @zooko and myself worked long hours along with Ledger to prioritize fixing the outstanding issues, starting with t2t support to unlock Binance which was building up as a critical concern within the community and “crypto-twitter”. We resumed the outreach by leveraging the 6.2.0 release of Zcashd and the impossible to miss long configuration flag to enable deprecated endpoints and ack’ing Zcashd’s deprecation in 2025. NEAR intents Hackathon brought a few teams to the space that we hope they’ll stay building their projects to the finish line.

Extended Report

DevRel April 2025

  • Zcash Z3 (Zcashd Deprecation)
  • Outreach:
    • Piggybacking on the release of 6.2.0, we resumed conversations with many exchanges and mining pools. Big Tech firms are requesting some timeline to be able to prioritize Zcash Z3 into their backlog. All team leaders are committed to analyze our backlog situation and remaining work to provide such input in our best effort that is not over-promising neither too padded far away in time.
  • Development:
    • BlockExplorer support prep work:
      • Synced Testnet node on development machine. Found possible on Zebra and reported it here ZcashFoundation/zebra#9456
      • this is now starting to be unblocked thanks to Zaino’s JSON RPC pull request that is in review
    • Work on “send max” feature for Zallet and wallets using librustzcash: Finally implemented in several different PRs.:
      • This PR adds tests to verify that sending all the available funds when Fees are known upfront works properly
      • This PR implements the concept of TargetValue as a way to define the intent of matching a spend value with the available funds
      • This PR Implements the bulk of send max
  • Development:
    • Respond to LA’s Audit report for ZIP-321 Swift
      • There were no vulnerabilities reported. Although they found several improvement points. Sent suggested improvements here
  • DevRel:
    • NEAR Intents hackathon:
      • Participated as a judge with NEAR DevRel
    • Ledger:
      • Per ZCG’s request I participated in a series of conversations that led to Ledger actively involving into fixing their Zcash issues as it was described on this thread
      • Followed up on the Ledger anonymous Survey collected from Zcash Anons which we used to depict the current landscape for Ledger executives.
    • Binance:
      • Related to the point above, I actively tested Ledger’s fixes with Binance engineers to get their treasury unstuck and get liquidity to their hot wallet.
    • Office Hours:
      • Zingo Labs:
        • Attended some ZingoLabs standups in which I interiorized on project progress, design decisions among other things.
      • Red Dev:
        • Weekly check in where we debugged their integration with Zebra, discussed bridge’s UI designs and project progress.
    • LCWG, Arborist and other community events:
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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

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June 2025

It’s June already!!! Once again, I want to thank the Zcash community, ZCG, ZF, Zingo, ECC, Shielded Labs, ChainSafe, Least Authority, Unstoppable Wallet, ZecHub, Zcash Brasil and all the rest of the ecosystem actors I have the honor to work with on each milestone.

Executive Summary

June was a very hands-on month where a bunch of development happened which ended up in a testnet staging of the Zcash Block Explorer using Zebra as backend by the Testnet Infrastructure grantee. The ZIP-321 Kotlin and Swift libraries developed in previous grants have reached 1.0.0 after passing an audit by Least Authority. In terms of Z3 coordination we set up weekly working calls between Zaino and Zallet devs to iron out API requirements 1-on-1 (in this case many to many) given that the “meeting-less” approach proved not to be as time-saving as it promised to be. This workgroup will extend through the prague Z|ECC summit as the teams conforming the Z3 effort prepare for a Zallet closed alpha phase led by ECC engineers. Weekly updates were posted in the forums and the rudimentary dashboard was updated in ZecDev’s github.io site. Pacu also supported ZCG in different endeavors with a handful of existing and potential ecosystem actors.

Extended Report

DevRel June 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:
    • Coordination:
      • Organized the Zaino API workgroup calls and took notes on some of the calls. (except the one I was OOO)
    • Development
      • Worked on Zcash block explorer to find out needed changes in Zebra which led to a PoC integration of Zebra and ZBE and subsequent changes
      • Still waiting for send-max to get a second round of reviews to the changes made from the first review. Rebased to the latest codebase which involved some changes to the code.
  • Development
  • DevRel
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Hello! time flies and my current grant is about to be completed. As I always say, I want to thank the Zcash Community Grants committee (all past and current members) and the community for their continuous support and encouragement. Also to thank every team I have the pleasure and privilege to work daily with like ZF, Zingo, ECC, FPF, RedDev, ChainSafe, Shielded Labs, QEDIT, ZecHub, Zcash Español, Zcash Brasil and I hope the list continues to grow!

I have presented a grant extension for the next 12 months starting in September 2025.

For this, following procedures from FPF I have edited my current grant. I updated its scope and extended the number of milestones.

You can read the hole grant proposal here

Again, thank you for the trust and support, I hope I can continue to be honored with the role Zcash DevRel Engineer.

Below you can find the details of the extension of this grant for the 12 months (continuing from September 2025)

Description of Problem or Opportunity:

What problem or opportunity will your project address or solve? Provide context for the problem or opportunity and clearly present how your project will add value to the Zcash ecosystem.

Zcash is one of the most reputable projects of the crypto space, not only has the most advanced Zero-Knowledge Cryptography, furthermore it spawned a novel concept in the crypto space (not without controversy): a Dev Fund to provide self-sustainability to the project and committee that its community elects to distribute a portion of this fund in the form of grants. This fund allowed several teams to grow and orbit the Zcash ecosystem delivering a lot of value in different grants such as ZecWallet, Nighthawk Wallet, ZecPages, Z-Go, Free2Z, Global Ambassadors Program, Zcash Media, Z-Faucet, Ziggurat, Zcash Block explorer, Lightwalletd.com, Y-wallet, Zingo!, Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead, Zaino and many others.

Although the mentioned above are successful cases, there is room for improvement in terms of Developer Experience and general direction of the developments and cooperation between grant recipients.

Scarce re-usability of grant-funded developments

The different grants that ZF and ZCG have given out regarding wallets or tooling produce good outcomes, but often they don’t end up being beneficial to the whole developer and user community in terms of providing building bricks for other developments. Teams usually don’t have either the motivation and resources to prioritize generalizing their developments. Tooling for the wide Zcash Dev ecosystem comes out of exceptional efforts from ZF and ECC where it should be the norm that all grants allocate a portion of their work for the benefit of the wide ecosystem.

Opportunity: Improve cohesion and collaboration between the different Zcash Teams to grow our ecosystem

We are all technologists here. We love nerding out, getting into the weeds, exploring rabbit holes just for the sake of it. That’s fine, but users shouldn’t have to download 3 wallets to know what works. This is also a risk because loading the same seed backup in different wallets is not a safe practice.

One thing I’ve learned from all of these years of “coding the last mile” is that one has to live with this hard truth: Users don’t care how things work under the hood. If they have to, then you are probably in trouble. Thanks sustained work from Zcash wallet developers Zcash’s UX has improved significantly. But friction is not only a problem at the user level. Zcash needs to grow its developer community in order to achieve its mission. It is also the case that Zcash developers should have their basics covered, so that they can focus on what their users need and we all should work to create a development stack that keeps hitting the ATH in collaboration and keeps expanding the number of teams that are involved with Zcash development by improving our tech stack.

Proposed Solution: Describe the solution at a high level.

Please be specific about who the users and stakeholders are and how they would interact with your solution. E.g. retail ZEC holders, Zcash core devs, wallet devs, DeFi users, potential Zcash community participants

The section above describes the overall picture that led me to write this grant proposal. Although it does not cover them all. Resolving these issues would require more than a single person. Hence, I propose an initial step towards addressing these points that is more suited to the current market conditions, that is more focused on delivering specific and tangible value quickly to the developer community.

I propose to continue in the role of a Zcash Developer Relations Engineer that can work to fill in the gaps on the different teams and their articulation within the Zcash ecosystem. This would be a full-time role split between different tasks that support the Zcash development teams and the community.

Zcash Developer Relations Engineer 2025-2026

  • Zcashd Deprecation Efforts (Development of the Z3 Stack)
    • Ecosystem Outreach:
      • Contact and build relationships with relevant actors of the Zcash ecosystem towards their migration from Zcashd to the new Zcash Z3 stack.
    • Development:
      • Contribute with development tasks that can be suitable to a part-time dedication given the role has many hats.
    • Liaison between developers and community
      • Coordinate Zcash deprecation calls and follow up tasks and items
      • Inform the community and different actors of the ecosystem of the progress of this endeavor
  • Development and Testing
    • Part-time development for the different Zcash teams
    • Provide Code Reviews where my expertise appl
    • Developing general-purpose wallet integration testing tooling
  • Other Ecosystem Outreach
    • Moderate, expand and steer Light Client Working Group
    • Attend Arborist Calls and the Zcash Ecosystem Spaces
    • Office Hours of Technical support to Dev Teams requesting Grants or proposing RFPs
    • Respond to ad hoc ecosystem needs such as exchanges needing API endpoints, listings, etc.
    • Attend conferences and other events that are relevant to the role (funding will be evaluated independently with ZGC and ZF with different grants if more funds needed)
    • Collaborate with ECC and Shielded Labs on Crosslink integration
  • Collaboration with ZCG
    • Guiding Grant applicants through the grant application process, helping them connect with different actors of the ecosystem the project they are applying a grant for might rely or depend on.
    • Consulting sessions with ZGC on RFP or grant proposals
    • RFP drafting and assessment
    • Reviewing Grantee’s work
  • Developer Relations
    • be a point of contact for existing and new actors of the ecosystem
    • help teams connect and develop synergy and positive feedback loops that advance the Zcash ecosystem
    • participate in events that are of strategic relevance for Zcash and the financial privacy space
    • keep track of the short comings of our tooling and contribute with the different development teams to keep makin Zcash more accessible to new comers and more productive for the existing developers.

Solution Format: What is the exact form of the final deliverable you’re creating?

E.g. code shipped within the zcashd and zebra code bases, a website, a feature within a wallet, a text/markdown file, user manuals, etc.

Similarly to the Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead, the deliverables will be established on a monthly basis, agreed between the involved teams and ZCG, then informed to the whole community.

There are many projects and initiatives in flight in our ecosystem. Many of them depend on one or more teams. I have made an effort to attempt to forecast for that I have contacted many actors within the Zcash ecosystem like ZCG, ZF, ECC, Zingo Labs, Shielded Labs and Red Dev to have a rough estimate on things that I could continue to contribute to if I remained within this role.

A 10.000 ft view of what’s coming for Zcash in the next 12 months: (not specifically in order)

  • NU 6.1
  • Zcashd retirement
  • Development, alpha, beta and Launch of the new Zcash Z3 stack
  • NU7 integration to the Z3 stack
    • support of ZSAs across the stack from Nodes to wallets and Block Explorers
  • Continue to integrate Zcash In the browser experience
  • Support Crosslink integration and outreach
  • Integration to DeFI through DEXs and Bridges
  • Keep improving and expanding support of Shielded ZEC on hardware wallets
  • Ecosystem Response that derive from all of the above

Technical Approach: Dive into the how of your project.

My methodology has been similar to a Staff member of the teams I contribute to, where they would hand me well scoped tasks over their GitHub repositories or other public means that the Zcash community or anyone can oversee. I’ve also been interacting more over community channels like the forums and R&D discord to communicate with other teams as needed.

Work dynamic will be agreed with the ZCG committee on a quarterly basis in terms of direction and priorities and monthly in terms of specific task to complete. All activities will be publicly informed to the community through the Zcash forums in a montly basis following the requirements of the Zcash Community Grants rules.

This project will contain a mix of daily ongoing tasks that are fruit of collaborating with other teams and small contributions that depend solely on the DevRel Role.

Example:

  • Ecosystem responses that are either time-sensitive with tight deadlines like the “avoid delisting initiative”
  • Ongoing initiatives that have high-impact on the wallet ecosystem and would require collaboration and support from ZWCD but they mainly depend mainly on other teams:
    • Zcash Z3
    • FROST
    • ZSAs
    • PoS
    • HW wallet support
    • Bridges w/ other Coins (ZAVAX bridge)
    • NU6.1
  • Initiatives that solely depend on Zcash DevRel:
    • Tooling development
    • Library and SDK development and maintenance
    • Community Activities
      • LCWG and Office Hours

This reflects how ZCG and myself agreed on managing emerging blockers and priority changes that naturally happen in decentralized and distributed software engineering projects like Zcash. Managing a pool of possible tasks avoids being in a “deadlock” that would make the grant progress to be stalled by dependencies in other projects.

Dependencies: What external entities is your project dependent on? What involvement is required from ZF, ECC, and/or other external organizations? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?

The nature of the work done should not need any further integrations beyond having my PRs accepted by the organizations I’m helping. It wouldn’t require involvement from ECC or ZF besides their regular business as usual community outreach.

Execution risks: What obstacles do you expect? What is most likely to go wrong? Which unknown factors could jeopardize success? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?

Risk: One risk could be that the workload is too much for a single person and that I’m spread too thin to be effective.

Mitigation: During this (hopefully if the community wants so) first half of the grant, it has been the case that some milestones were too varied and I noticed I suffered a lot from context switching. I’ve come to manage it, but for this following chapter I will try to be more dedicated to a main objective within one (or more) milestone, and a secondary one. This will not only help me be more effective but also be more present with the teams I’m committing to work with.

Risk: The opposite would be that teams can’t organize to delegate manageable pieces of work that I can deliver without causing them more overhead than the off-load that would mean that I could take on those tasks for them. Adding people to teams does mean that they have to dedicate some time to accommodate the new team members so they can be productive and on par with the rest of the team.

Mitigation: A way to help avoid this risk would be to create such onboarding processes as part of my work so they can use those processes for augmenting their teams and onboarding new team members or receiving open source contributions from independent developers. An example of this could be how Zingo Viridians and I worked together in shaping up darksidewalletd integration tests. The datasets and tests I worked on were documented in a way that they would be helpful for the team to keep working on them as if one of the Viridians had worked on that and not some external person. Also being my work for “general purpose” it included documentation and examples that internal development wouldn’t invest on.

Risk: Teams depended on are “off schedule” -that being late or early- in terms of the milestone forecast

Mitigation: This has happened in the past part of the grant. And ZCG and I could resolve this by anticipating work of future milestones or bringing in other work that was not originally included in the grant but that it was found to be of importance for the ecosystem. I have also worked with teams to define, scope and delimit the work I’ll be performing with them, and will continue to do so, to be fair to all teams I’m collaborating with. As it was done previously when needed, any deviations from the estimations that might affect my milestones, will be brought up to ZCG for advice.

Unintended Consequences: What are the negative ramifications if your project is successful? Consider usability, stability, privacy, integrity, availability, decentralization, interoperability, maintainability, technical debt, requisite education, etc

An unintended consequence could be that the role becomes a single point of failure or a centralization point. The focus of this role should be supporting and empowering teams to align their particular developments with the interest of the general Zcash developer community and grow this role into a team of people that can outlive the interest of a single person.

Evaluation plan: What metrics for success will you share with the community once you’re done? In addition to quantitative metrics, what qualitative metrics will you commit to report?

It would be a mix between completed pull requests and feedback from the development teams that require my services as community developer. Quoting the Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead grant proposal, Zcash community project developers should be asked how useful my outreach and support has been, and they should rate me as helpful, polite, and be willing to recommend working with me to other Zcash projects.

Compensation total budget / total proposed USD value of grant:

Total Request: 240000 USD (120000 2024-2025, 120000 2025-2026)

Please provide justification for the total compensation budget:

I’ve averaged the annualized compensation of a principal software engineer

Total Request: 240000 USD (24 milestones, 120000 correspond to Sep-2024 to Aug-2025 and 120000 to Sep-2025 to Aug-2026)

Startup funding:

Schedule and Milestones: What is your timeline for the project? Include concrete milestones and the major tasks required to complete each milestone:

Do you require startup funding?

No.

Milestones

  • Milestone 1: (September 2024)

    • Document with agreed tasks with ZCG
    • Publish report of such task being completed
      …

  • Milestone 12: (August 2025)

    • Document with agreed tasks with ZCG
    • Publish report of such task being completed

**Grant Extension **

  • Milestone 13: (September 2025)

    • Document with agreed tasks with ZCG
    • Publish report of such task being completed
      …

  • Milestone 25: (August 2026)

    • Document with agreed tasks with ZCG
    • Report of such task being completed

The proposal entails providing community support and sustaining a presence within the ecosystem to build up and strengthen the role. Since some activities could consume the whole time allocation they will be time-boxed to estimate their impact in the overall schedule and milestones.

Time-boxed Activity time slot (hours/month)
Arborist call (two bi-weekly) 3
Light Client working group (two bi-weekly calls + administrative) ~6
LCWG Initiatives Lead ~3
Community Forums (depending on activity) ~6
R&D Discord (depending on activity) ~6
Office Hours (per request but in fixed scheduled) 8 hours
Pull Request Reviews ~6
Maintain Existing Repositories ~10
total 15 to 45 hours

These are subject to change given the long term nature of the grant and the many dependencies.

As it was stated before, the different milestones will vary depending on the teams’ priorities and other teams like ECC, Zingo, Red Dev, Ywallet or ZC Grantees requesting additional support. As it has been done in the previous grant, this situation has been anticipated and ZCG, myself and the different involved teams have worked to make the best use of my full dedication to Zcash development.

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July 2025

Hello! This is my progress report for milestone 11. Thanks to everyone who collaborated with me. If I could achieve any of this is because of you folks!

Executive Report

The month focused on outreach and coordination activities for Zcashd deprecation, including ongoing communication with exchanges regarding NU 6.1 testnet and Zcash 6.2.0 EOL, hosting the 100th LCWG Light Client protocol steering call, and aligning cadence for collaboration meetings to improve productivity. Development highlights included contributing to CoinMarketCap’s CirculatingSupply API and ChainSafe’s Zcash Metamask Snap, along with continued collaboration on key wallet functionalities such as “Send Max.”

Developer Relations activities involved assisting ChainSafe’s Metamask Snap launch, attending the Z|ECC summit, engaging in PR reviews, reporting UI bugs in Brave wallet and NEAR Intents, collaborating on Ledger’s next steps with Zcash alongside ZCG, and providing ecosystem support through regular office hours and Arborist calls.

Extended Report

DevRel July 2025
Zcashd Deprecation

  • Outreach to Zcashd users: added one more exchange to our list of contacts. We also started to do the NU 6.1 testnet and Zcash 6.2.0 EOL outreach.
    • Community Updates:
    • Coordination:
      • Continue to host Zaino API workgroup
      • Hosted 1st LCWG Light Client protocol steering call. Which was call #100!
      • Resulting PR
      • Notes
      • Zcash deprecation collaboration calls:
        • I took ownership of these in accordance with ZF and ZCG.
        • We agreed on cadence and attendance requirements with the intention of lowering overhead and boosting productivity and meaning.
    • Development:
    • Worked on specific divergence in Zcashd and Zebrad responses for GetBlockchainInfo methods.
    • Continued to collaborate with Kris Nuttycom on “Send Max”

Development

  • Completed API requirements for CoinMarketCap and their CirculatingSupply data endpoint needs
  • Contributed to ChainSafe’s Zcash Metamask Snap shielding feature

DevRel

  • Helped ChainSafe on their Metamask Snap launch
  • Attended Z|ECC summit and published updates for the community
  • PR Reviews:
  • Ad Hoc Ecosy​​stem response:
    • I reported two UI bugs involving NEAR Intents and Brave wallet. Details here
  • Worked with ZCG on Ledger Next Steps with Zcash
  • Attended Arborist Calls
  • Office Hours:
    • RedDev weekly syncs
    • [Anonymous new Zcasher]: Went over possible projects this person could collaborate on.
    • Zaino syncs
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August 2025

I can’t believe it’s milestone 12 already. It’s been a pretty intense year and it’s always the merit of the ATH in collaboration that keeps going on and on! I want to express my deep gratitude to @ZCG and the broad Zcash community for honoring me with this role.

Executive Summary

Over the course of August, Pacu focused on Zcashd 6.3.0 release outreach reaching out 33 organizations with a response rate of 66% and initiated a Zcash Network Upgrade Friction survey per suggestion of Kris Nuttycom to gather input for an RPF that ZCG is evaluating to draft for NU7 support. Delivered weekly community updates on the status of Zcashd deprecation. Coordinated meetings and working sessions. On the development front, contributed to fix a bug in a Zebra chain info RPC, worked with ECC devs to merge the in- memory implementation that chainsafe contributed as part of WebZ.js and co-authored the “send max” feature with Kris Nuttycom. As of DevRel duties, held office hours with YK Labs, Zingo and RedDev, reviewed several PR by request and Ad Hoc, steered LCWG calls and supported various teams in an on-demand fashion.

Extended Report

Dev - Rel August 2025
Zcashd Deprecation

  • Outreach to Zcashd users:
    • Wrapped up Zcash 6.3.0 roll out.
      • Total orgs reached: 33
      • Total orgs that responded: 22
    • Zcash Network Upgrade Survey: a campaign to find out how problematic are NU’s that involve transaction format changes in comparison to those that don’t
      • Sent the survey to all tier-1 contacts
      • Started to get results
  • Community updates:
  • Coordination:
    • Continue to host Zaino API workgroup and Zcashd deprecation collaboration calls
    • Hosted 2nd LCWG Light Client protocol steering call
      • Resulted in a canonical protocol repository and definitions for inclusion transparent data in the Light client protocol
    • Ecosystem Roadmap tracking:
      • Developed a high-level ecosystem roadmap that needs to be discussed with all the involved teams before it can be made public.
  • Development

DevRel

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September 2025

Hello! Although I took some days off, a lot of things were done! As always, thanks ZCG, FPF, ECC, ZF, Zingo and the widespread community for your support.

Executive Summary

During September Pacu wrapped up the previous outreach and started the Zallet Alpha, while followed up on the NU Friction and started to contact orgs for 1-on-1 with their business developers with the idea of fostering closer relationships that make these efforts more effective in the future. Update the community on Z3 stack development process and and held the various coordination calls with the help of colleagues given he took some days off. Contributed to Zaino (PR in review) and will continue to do so with the idea of learning more about Zaino development experience and contributing to fill any gaps. On the DevRel side there focus was on PR reviews and maintaining existing projects, specifically responding to September 14th huge supply chain attack that targeted javascript utils. In accordance, I’d like to thank @mrkit2u who pinged me with early news about this before this matter exploded in the vast Tech Twitter and other communities.

Extended Report

Zcashd Deprecation

  • Outreach
    • Followed up with NU Friction Survey for transaction parser RFP
    • Started Zallet Alpha outreach. Six orgs contacted 3 accepted to participate, we are awaiting responses for the other 3
    • Started to contact people on different organizations that the ecosystem could benefit from a closer relationship with to schedule 1-on-1s with them as alternative to the message outreach which is more impersonal.
  • Community Updates
  • Coordination:
    • Supported Zingo Labs in some internal processes regarding Zaino
    • Thank you @nsheep for covering for me on Zcashd deprecation collaboration calls while I was away.
    • Zaino API workgroup calls were first and last week of the month
    • Zallet Testing party:
      • We organized this but there were some issues that complicated the event.
      • Anyway I took it for a spin on a clean dev environment and reported issues zcash/wallet#221 (comment) and zcash/wallet#243 and both were resolved/ :grinning_face:
  • Development:

DevRel

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October 2025

Executive Summary

During October Pacu continued ongoing outreach efforts and piled price action attention to start 1-on-1 with BDs of the ecosystem. Updated the community weekly and coordinated the various Zcashd deprecation calls. In terms of development actively contributed to Block Explorer support and leading Lightwalletd deprecation support for Zaino by adding the new features of Lightwalletd based on the data analysis requested by Core developers. In terms of DevRel activity, Pacu actively supported Shieded Support on Ledger, WebZ.js and metamask, ZCG, Zaino and RedDev, LCWG and Arborist Calls. Also reviewed various PRs when developers requested it

Extended Report

Zcashd deprecation

  • Outreach to Zcashd users:
    • Continued NU Friction Survey
    • Zallet Closed alpha follow up
      • Reached out to Coinbase, Decred Dex, May, NEAR/Aurora, ViaBTC, Binance and Bitfinex as tier 1 partners for Zallet Alpha and followed up with the ones that responded that they’d participate.
    • NU 6.1 Outreach and follow up
      • Updated the wide ecosystem of Zcashd node operators to update to newer versions of full nodes and wallets towards November 23rd
    • Started Z-on-1’s with strategic allys of ZEC with miners, exchanges and API providers
      • Scheduled calls with Fireblocks and waiting for responses from others
  • Community Updates
  • Development Coordination
    • Hosted Zcashd Deprecation collaboration calls
    • Coordinated with teams to cope with the impact of higher user demand on Zcashd deprecation and NU7
    • Zaino API Workgroup
    • Supported Zaino folks on internal processes
  • Development

DevRel

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Zcash Foundation has no connection to Zcash Community Grants (ZCG). I’m sure ZCG members will see this message and respond accordingly.

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@ZCG Sorry @Alex_ZF for tagging you.
Please hear my appeal again.

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November 2025

Executive Summary

During November Pacu was focused on three main things: NU 6.1 outreach, follow-up and response, representing ZCG and supporting Zcashers during DevConnect and Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2nd edition in Buenos Aires and developing transparent data support for Zaino’s lightclient APIs. NU 6.1 saw an increase of 50% in outreach response compared with NU6, with no major outages and no follow-ups needed on major shielded and transparent wallets.DevConnect and ETH CC II were a major success. Supported the ZK Av club which recorded 16 hours of 4K footage for high quality content at Polkadot Sub0 and DevConnect and a podcast episode. The Web3privacy summit/ETHCC II booth was really popular. We ran out of swag and onboarded many new users to Zashi. On the development side the transparent data feature is currently in-review. Additionally Pacu carried out the rest of the usual tasks like Zcash Z3 outreach, Zallet Alpha follow-up, Ad Hoc ecosystem response, PR Reviews, hosted LCWG and Office hours.

Extended Report

Zcashd Deprecation

  • Outreach to Zcashd users:

    • NU 6.1 follow up and monitoring of upgrade

      • Outreach concluded with no major incidents or outages. Only one party not updating in a timely manner.
      • 25 out of 25 partners responded to the outreach. Last outreach NU performance was 66%. This is a 50% increase year-to-year

    • Zallet Closed Alpha:

      • Supported Binance DevOps testing Z3
      • Supported other two Exchanges testing out Z3

    • Z-on-1’s with strategic allys of ZEC.

      • This was deemed not that prioritary given price action increased response rate of outreach by 50% although we continued to foster new conversations over telegram
  • Community Updates
  • Development Coordination
    • Hosted Zcashd Deprecation collaboration calls
    • Coordinated with teams to cope with the impact of higher user demand on Zcashd deprecation and NU7
    • Zaino API Workgroup
    • Supported Zaino folks on internal processes
    • Started discussing/planning deployment of Zaino-lightwalletd replacement in production and development of feature parity.
  • Development:
    • Continue development and deployment of Transparent Data into Light Client Protocol. Develop this feature with Zaino and ECC devs

DevRel:

  • Support Zcashers attending ETH CC II, DevConnect and satellite events:
    • Zcash Booth at ETH CC II Web3Privacy
      • Assisted with logistics, Swag purchase and was present in the booth throughout the whole event.
    • ZkAv Club support at DevConnect and satellite events
      • Attended all the weekdays, supported the Zk AV folks with logistics, hosted interviews, a podcast episode and connected personally with many existing and potential Zcash partners.
  • Ad Hoc Ecosystem response
    • NOWNodes requested me to be panelist on their Builders X Space
    • reached out to Trust wallet trustwallet/wallet-core#4560
    • Atomic wallet reached out to me and we created a telegram group to coordinate and explore collaboration opportunities
    • Concerns about the ZecWallet website still offering downloads of outdated wallets. Danika from FPF contacted me with developer and we are working with ZingoLabs on a transition solution for stuck users.
    • MEXC Exchange contacted Pili wanting to list ZEC (and they did). We created a group on telegram with them to follow up on more things like Z3 adoption.
  • Maintain existing projects (update CI Tokens, dependabot, etc)
  • Follow-up ChainSafe grant backlog
    • We followed up on their changes needed for NU 6.1 weekly (although they could not deliver on time :sigh: for NU 6.1 day due to how ChainSafe prioritized their work despite our constant reminders and aid)
  • Follow-up DappsOverApps Dev Tooling grant progress
    • I followed up with this team weekly and personally over DevConnect. I found some issues that I followed up and discussed internally with ZCG.
  • Follow-up and support Shielded ZEC in Ledger
    • Ledger continues to scope and define technical requirements for their grant and is about to post the proposal in the Zcash forums in the following days.
    • I met their integration lead at DevConnect and we talked about possible paths forward to bring shielded support as early and low technical risk as possible.
  • LCWG:
    • Work on transparent data is coming to conclusion
    • The group is hashing out React Native support led by EDGE, Zingo and other teams.
    • Call notes of LCWG #105 zcash/lcwg#148
  • Arborist Call
    • Nov 13th: could not attend due to commitment with NOWNodes to be panelist on their Builders X Space
  • Office Hours with Teams
    • Weekly Syncs with RedDev (4x 0.5hs)
    • Troubleshoot DKG in GoLang w/ RedDev Developer (1 h)
    • Office hour w/ Anon Zcasher (1 h)
  • PR Reviews:
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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
  • 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:

DevRel

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January 2026

Executive Summary

During January Pacu attended Zeboot 2026 and a hacker house event he was invited to. Worked with ZnewCo devs (Formerly ECC) on Zcashd deprecation items and met new core engineers. Additionally briefed the community with two free2z articles about the summit. . Carried out release and outreach of Zcash 6.11.0 due to 6.10 EOL and curated a list of community collaboration items for Zallet. In terms of development he wrapped out addition of transparent data to Zaino reaching feature parity in terms of the lightclient-protocol API v0.4.0 with lightwalletd following Zaino dev’s feedback and thorough review, and maintained existing projects to respond to bug reports from Zashi devs on the ZIP-321 libraries.. As DevRel he held office hours with RedDev, Routescan and DappsOverApps (which was a no show :slightly_frowning_face:) also followed up with connections from DevConnect who were interested in collaborating within the Zcash ecosystem, followed-up, reviewed existing grants to assist ZCG and participated in community calls.

Extended Report

Zcashd Deprecation

  • Outreach to Zcashd users:
    • Communicated 6.11.0 EOL release to Zcashd users
  • Community Updates
  • Development Coordination
    • Hosted Zcashd Deprecation collaboration calls
    • Supported Zaino folks on internal processes
    • Worked w/ Zallet devs to curate a list of “community collaboration needed” github issues.
  • Development:

DevRel

5 Likes