August 15th
We are all jumping through moving trains.
This is a thought exercise. You can skip it and continue to the updates. I swear that I wrote it before this ZK AV Club post. But the coincidence gives me a lot more to reflect and think.
Imagine that there are three parallel rails where three passenger trains go side by side.
These trains go to one destination where one of them will stop forever there and the other two will continue perpetually circling earth. There’s an even MORE unusual railroad setup. All three trains have to reach that destination at the same time so they can stop and let passengers go off one of them and let the other two continue forward. How far they get, depends on the overall collective distance of all trains from the destination regardless which one of the trains is ahead or behind.
The trains are not adversarial, they’ll cooperate to their best ability. They can’t stop their march until their destination. Also, if this wasn’t twisted enough, two of the trains must exactly coincide on certain points or one of them will yield away. Things can get worse because, due to weird rails conditions, the trains need to balance the passenger count depending on the structural state of the railways. These railway conditions are uneven across the path in all three of these parallel rails. Railroad experts have determined that it’s not possible to run one of the trains forward to the finish line and wait for the others, because the load balancing needs won’t allow it. Given that these trains can’t stop, people will have to jump from one train to the other and account for slight train speed variability while the trains go unevenly marching together towards their destination. These trains also need repair, and even one of them is being built on the go! Oh… and there’s one more thing! there aren’t any redundant train engineers for some critical tasks.
All train jumpers have been given this vignette so they can jump to their best ability. (Credits: ChatGPT)
How should people jumping from one train to the other should evaluate their jump to be sure they will land it?
What if the train slows down or accelerates in between someone’s jump?
There are a myriad of things that could go wrong. Still, trains are steady going towards their destination (although slower than we would have thought).
Pacu, What kind of LSD trip is this? 
As crazy and far-fetched this sounds, this is the magnitude of the problem the Zcash ecosystem is dealing with right now with Zcashd deprecation, Z3 development and future NU7 deployment.
Because these all are very good trains, with excellent crew members, we sometimes forget how complex it is, and we take for granted that things will go well no matter what.
Plan every jump, protect every jumper, maintain every train. That’s the key to our success.
Now, let’s see how the trains are doing!
Outreach
Status: paused
So far we haven’t gotten any reports of reached organizations with Zcashd 6.3.0 roll out. Once we have definitions on Zallet’s Alpha readiness we will resume this effort.
Zebra
The ZF engineering team is working on a lot of things, for this particular goal, Zebra is getting performance improvements like adoption of BatchVerifiers and the team is performing chores that are needed to keep Zebre lean and fast.
Zaino (ZingoLabs)
- Status: in progress
Zaino continues their Restructure and continuation grants. A lot of tests are being added. Block explorer support and Lightwalletd feature replacement being wrapped up. Along those lines @nuttycom walked by the Zaino stables and left a neat contribution to link the canonical light client protofiles. ATH in collaboration continues!
In-Memory backend wrap up
- status: pending review
PR: https://github.com/zcash/librustzcash/pull/1634
No changes from last update
Zallet full node wallet
- Status: in progress
tracking work on this repository.
Zallet keeps progressing towards its alpha readiness. Z3 developers are working on configuration schemes for the Z3 Stack to be distributed to Alpha testing candidate organizations whose list is being defined.
The PR review bottleneck is striking us hard but fortunately @OxArbitrage is helping Zallet devs out with this. If you have good rust skills and time, please care to share your review!
Call for testers and Developers is still open! Check the previous updates to know what’s that about.
Block Explorer Support
- Status: Testing
@cacho is maintaining the current ZBE and helping out with some bugs that are causing shielded coinbase transactions not being displayed properly. We were reported an outage on API that supports CoinMarketCap’s APIs which Cacho fixed overnight. Thanks!
Pending reviews:
Thanks for reading!