Zcash Z3 updates (formerly Zcashd Deprecation)

Ecosystem Updates
64

April 11th

A lot of discussions have been going on. There’s a ton of work to do and limited time. What to prioritize? What are the bottlenecks? How to avoid burnout of the development team?

In line with the Decentralized But Organized mindset I shared in this Zcash Dev Summit article, I tend to think of the group of people in charge of deprecating Zcashd and bringing the Z3 stack to life as one team composed of people from different organizations. This is a challenge because Z3 has its own priorities while the different organizations also have their own objectives, development practices, project commitments and therefore, priorities.

This is where “Unstoppable Private Money” technology like Zcash meets the “Human Scale” constraints. We are human, we can only do a certain amount of things in a given period of time. Although everyone is juggling many things in the air, one thing at a time has our deepest attention. That’s ok. We are not machines and have to be aware of our limitations to work around them. The burnout topic appeared at the last Zcashd deprecation meeting. We should take this as a serious matter. The continuously sustained effort by all development teams has a toll, ignoring it will only make the price higher. Forcing the engine of this team of teams will make us slower, not faster. Also, we are reaching the point where integration of each one of the Z’s of the Z3 stack is happening. Things will break, code-pairings will have to happen, changes will have to be made in the different components and all of that contributes to heating up the system.

“How can we avoid burnout or unsustainable work practices throughout this project?”

I believe these principles will help us through the hard working months we have ahead of us:

  • Work as one team and help each other.
  • Pick your teammate up if they are falling behind.
  • Favor cross-pollination to grow overall knowledge. Tear down team silos.
  • Stuck on something? Bring it up! Others can’t help you with problems they are not aware of.
  • Beware of the dangers of Side-Quests! If you need someone’s time, try to think about how you can compensate for that time given that you certainly know they are already overbooked as you probably are.
  • Software Engineering is inherently frustrating. Don’t let stress talk for ourselves. Everyone is fighting a battle you don’t know of. Be kind, always.

I’m in a strange spot, because I can’t enforce any of these things. I work and collaborate with all teams, but I’m not part of any of them. But I’m certainly here to contribute in every single way I can to deprecate Zcashd and deploy Z3 to production.

Now, the usual updates

New webpage from Z.cash team:

Check it out!

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

The Zebra team is wrapping Sprint 7 right on target for their schedule.

Although some CI issues keep the team slashing and hacking. Shoutout to Marek and Gustavo who are working this!

Done:

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: almost back on track!

Project Board

Team continues to progress on Milestone 3. Also Zaino is being integrated to Zallet which is bringing up some work for the Zaino devs. A lot of collaboration is going on there.

There was an issue stopping zecrocks from fully moving from Lightwalletd to Zaino.

Also a new release candidate tag is being cooked!

In-Memory backend wrap up

- status: pending review :warning:

This has been falling through the cracks a bit, we still need to provide reviews to this PR https://github.com/zcash/librustzcash/pull/1634

We need reviewers for this!!

Zallet full node wallet

  • Status: delayed :warning: (but rapidly catching up)

ECC has notified a deviation of 2 months from the original schedule.

tracking work on this repository.

Zallet has been getting a lot of updates and I’m not exaggerating.

Things merged to the main codebase this week. Sync wallet using a full node via Zaino instead of a lightwalletd which tells us that Zaino is feeding the wallet with blockchain info. Added support for async operations so that clients of Zallet can spin up some long running task and check it periodically along with these RPCs:

Contributors are welcome!

@str4d and @nuttycom have taken the time to create the github issues of the RPC methods to be implemented and this is a great opportunity to start contributing to the Z3 stack.

Wallet Export format

  • Status: On-track

Blockchain Commons and Zingo Labs folks continue to work on their grant milestones while Kris from ECC is starting to integrate ZeWIF into Zallet. ZeWIF folks will have their bi-weekly meeting next week. Stay tuned for more updates!

Regtest? What is that?

  • Status: First round of review comments addressed

Same state as last update: I addressed the first round of comments on this PR https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/986 and I see more comments coming!

You can read, review and comment too!

Thanks for reading!

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