May 16th
Hello! Another week! Another Zcash Z3 update! The community has voted and they’ve decided they want the developers of the ecosystem to prioritize changes that will materialize the new funding mechanisms. This will certainly have some impact over Zcashd deprecation and NU7 deployment. @ZCG and core developers of the ecosystem are working together to exactly measure what that impact is, and how that affects ZCG’s planning for 2025. You can watch some discussion about this on the “Open Discussion” section of May 15th’s Arborist Call.
Outreach
We will start asking the ecosystem specific questions on their expectations, requirements and suggestions of the process of migrating from Zcashd-to-zebrad. We have included past feedback on the existing work that is being developed by ECC devs.
Zebra
Project Roadmap board
Priority board
Another sprint came to an end and @Pili published a very thorough report as she always does at every sprint end.
The Zebra team fixed several integration issues in gettreestate, getblock and validateaddress and they are working on mempool changes and mine to orchard which will not only help miners but according to what Zaino devs have been discussing it would speed up some tests as well.
Alfredo has been integrating all the Z3 components and I’ll tell you a bit more about it in the Zallet section. Everything is coming together and our team updates start to mix in as well!
Zaino (ZingoLabs)
- Status: on track!
This week has mainly been updating zcash deps for Zaino folks. Zaino dev now relies on un-forked librustzcash latest and zebra latest. Which is awesome! One less librustzcash fork dependency is great news!
Zaino folks have also been working on the re-architect of zaino’s chain cache. They are very close to having our plans complete and are starting to move to the implementation phase.
Zaino folks have also started to look into their continuation grant which features block explorer support pieces. I’ll tell you a bit more about this in the corresponding section!
In-Memory backend wrap up
- status: pending review 
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 (but rapidly catching up)
ECC has notified a deviation of 2 months from the original schedule.
tracking work on this repository.
The ECC has many competing priorities due to changes that the community has voted to prioritize, such as the C&C funding mechanism and lockbox disbursement development. Other competing priorities have emerged related to address rotation support and UA transparent receiver removal. That hasn’t stopped them and progress on Zallet continues steadily.
OpenRPC is fully integrated, so as z_sendmany although not with all the features that the Zcashd version has (yet). Zcashd Wallet import is also closer to completion but not as the team would have expected by now. We will tell you about this a bit more in detail in the next section..
Alfredo from Zcash Foundation has been testing Zallet, Zaino and Zebra altogether and discovered a bunch of integration issues he’s helping to address. Thank you Alfredo!
Wallet Export format + ZexCavator
- Status: On-track
Yesterday @bc-shannon posted an update on their progress. ZeWIF integration hasn’t been as smooth as expected @nuttycom has spent quite some time integrating this to Zallet and contributing back upstream. The Zcashd portion of ZeWIF is the trickiest one because it is the one that contains “The Lore” of this project. There’s a lot of history, context and background that it is necessary to know in order to transform a wallet.dat file into an interoperable format. If you watched May 15th’s Arborist Call you probably heard a section of the call about this topic, the hurdles that the developers had to deal with and the unplanned work that they did and what’s ahead of us. Jason and I met with Blockchain Commons to learn more about this situation and we will also meet with Zallet folks to determine next steps..
ZexCavator is progressing and I’ve been taking it for a spin. I caught some bugs and issues, some of them I could contribute back as PRs and others I documented. Thanks Dorian for reviewing those PRs and merging them.
Block Explorer Support
- Status: Started
I started this by syncing a testnet Zcashd and getting the Block Explorer running. Since
@aquietinvestor started a conversation with people from Coin Market Cap (CMC) to fix the (mis)information they display about Zcash because it’s causing problems to other orgs that take data from their API, this became something convenient and timely to get this rolling.
I made this small PR that needs review. Thanks to @cacho for getting in touch and helping me get this into prod as soon as possible.
Regtest? What is that?
- Status: paused
I haven’t been able to get to the second round of comments yet but it’s in my queue.
Thanks for reading!