Zcash Web Gateway is a foundational infrastructure project that solves a critical technical blocker for browser-based Zcash wallets: browsers cannot directly communicate with lightwalletd servers because lightwalletd uses gRPC, and standard gRPC (HTTP/2-based) is not implementable in browser environments due to networking API limitations.
WebZjs (ChainSafe’s browser wallet library) explicitly documents this constraint, stating that browser wallets require “a special gRPC-web proxy to a regular lightwalletd instance” and that “using an unproxied URL will NOT work.” Currently, teams either depend on ChainSafe’s hosted proxies (creating soft centralization) or build fragile one-off proxy setups with inconsistent security, no monitoring, and poor reliability.
Team
Project Lead
Ikeoluwa Oke — Technical Lead / Infrastructure & Backend Engineer (github.com/okeoyebade-del)
Designed and scaled the backend of a DEX Aggregator, handling the full infrastructure lifecycle from architecture to production. Built a privacy stealth payment app with a focus on transaction anonymity and security. An active open-source contributor to Stellar’s Soroban ecosystem. Hands-on experience with proxy, configuring Envoy, bridging gRPC-Web translation, enforcing TLS/CORS policies, wiring health checks, and validating system performance at scale.
Additional Members
Olowu Timilehin — Protocol Engineer (github.com/Timi16)
Has experience with lightwalletd integration, gRPC service compatibility, streaming protocols, rate limiting, and conformance test design. Actively contributes to open source, fixing bugs in Zaino and Zingolib, with pull requests successfully merged and closed.
Owoeye Ajuwonlo — Software Engineer / Research and Development
Built Docker Compose and Kubernetes (Helm) deployment templates, set up CI/CD pipelines, and configured Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring. Also wrote documentation and helped onboard operators. Also Leads the team in researching the blockchain ecosystem understanding what is needed, how things integrate, how they help, and finding gaps that can be filled with real solutions.
Problem
Browser-based Zcash wallets cannot communicate directly with lightwalletd. Browsers cannot implement native gRPC (HTTP/2 with trailers) due to networking API restrictions. The only bridge is a gRPC-web proxy — a layer that translates browser-compatible gRPC-web requests into native gRPC.
WebZjs documentation is unambiguous: “To work in the web these need to be a special gRPC-web proxy to a regular lightwalletd instance. Using an unproxied URL will NOT work.”
ZCG has invested $318,000 in WebZjs. That investment only pays off if the proxy layer exists, is reliable, and is decentralized. Today it is not — developers either depend on ChainSafe’s hosted endpoints or cobble together untested one-off setups.
This is the gap we close.
Solution
A minimal, production-ready gRPC-web gateway stack built on Envoy Proxy — fully open-source, deployable by any operator, and validated by a conformance test suite. We are not reinventing anything; we are packaging, hardening, and documenting what the Zcash ecosystem actually needs to run independently.
We will deliver four concrete things:
Gateway Stack — Envoy-based gRPC-web proxy, Zcash-hardened: rate limiting, CORS, TLS, health checks, privacy-safe logging defaults. Compatible with both lightwalletd and Zaino as upstream backends.
Deployment Templates — Docker Compose (local), Helm chart (Kubernetes). Operators go from zero to running gateway in under 20 minutes, against either upstream.
Conformance Test Suite — CLI tool (zcash-gateway-test) that validates any endpoint: connectivity, headers, streaming, error handling. Covers both lightwalletd and Zaino RPC surfaces, and validates correct handling of ZIP-defined wallet operations.
Endpoint Registry + Status Page — A lightweight public registry of vetted, tested gateway endpoints with uptime monitoring and declared upstream type (lightwalletd or Zaino). Developers stop guessing and start routing reliably.
We have reviewed prior feedback carefully. This revised submission is scoped specifically to what we can deliver and prove. We have removed speculative deliverables, cut the budget and structured Milestone 1 and 2 as a public working prototype so the community can validate our capability before further funds are released. We welcome retroactive review of any milestone.