These past 2 weeks we’ve been wrapping up the things we were currently working on so we could start with Hackmas.
In Zebra news, the observability infrastructure for local development received a major update. A new observability stack was added that includes Grafana with auto-provisioned dashboards, Prometheus configured with production-appropriate scrape intervals, and AlertManager for handling alerts. This setup includes pre-built dashboards for monitoring various aspects of Zebra nodes (block verification, network health, mempool, peers, and more) along with alerting rules for critical issues like when a node becomes unreachable, sync gets stuck, or peer count drops too low. On the RPC compatibility front, the getinfo response was fixed to use the correct field type for timestamps.
We refactored the old code for handling block subsidies, added addresses for founders’ rewards, added support for pre-Canopy block subsidies in the getblocksubsidy RPC, and added support for Sapling note commitment trees in the getblocktemplate RPC. This work also unlocks mining pre-Canopy blocks in Zebra, which increases parity with zcashd on Regtest and in the Python test bank. We also finished the work on adding support for constructing coinbase transactions in librustzcash. This work, together with the implementation of ZIP-213, unlocks mining blocks with shielded coinbase transactions.
For FROST, we removed the cheater-detection feature as this code is no longer needed as this functionality is now part of aggregate_custom(). This is part of our work towards a v3.0.0 release that we’re expecting to complete in the new year.
A thank you to the contributions to Zebra from @syszery. They submitted a cleanup to remove an unused parameter from the network code and a refactor to improve error handling in the parameters builder. Also, for the initial work on ping RPC and latency metrics to the getpeerinfo response, which will help users monitor network peer health.