July 11th
Hello! I’m writing this from the Berlin Airport starting my way back home with a few stops along the way after an incredible week at the Z|ECC summit in Prague. The updates corresponding to the summit will be in the Z|ECC chronicles in Free2z soon. With respect to Z3, all teams involved on it together, have reached consensus for a timelined roadmap towards Zcashd retirement that ECC will publish within the next few weeks as part of their updates to the community.
Now, let’s get to our weekly update.
Outreach
Status: resumed
ZCG members and myself regroup to brainstorm about how to improve our engagement rate in the face of the Zallet Alpha phase. We’ve come up with a new approach for the outreach and we will pivot to it next week.
Zebra
Project Roadmap board
Priority board
Part of the Zebra team was present at the summit so progress was made in terms of planning, roadmap and also development.
Team added sapling and sprout information to getrawtransaction RPC thanks to an external contributor’s PR that was merged. Also Zebra devs added the functionality to return information about side chains which is also needed for Zaino and Zallet. Zebra 2.4.0. There’s one more thing. Prometheus was added as a default feature. This open source tool for infrastructure monitoring will provide immense value to DevOps around the globe running Z3 in the cloud or in their own premises as well as for the Z3 team that will be deploying the update that will retire Zcashd.
Zaino (ZingoLabs)
- Status: in progress
Zingoistas are about to wrap up the finalized chain state service. Also will start responding to a request from Zallet developers to refactor how errors are propagated downstream to consumers of Zaino services. @zancas announced on yesterday’s Arborist call that Zingo will be requesting additional funding for expanding their team and stay on schedule to the light of these new pieces of work that have emerged during the integration of Zallet to Z3. Additionally they proposed that Z3 teams do weekly releases of their software to facilitate integration for the rest of the teams involved in Zcashd deprecation.
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
Kris Nuttycombe will try to make some room on his schedule to complete this review.
Zallet full node wallet
- Status: in progress
tracking work on this repository.
Zallet is about to be ready for the closed Alpha phase which was more in depth during the Z|ECC summit. A dockerized version of Z3 will be distributed to specific partners to request feedback on the breaking changes of the new stack as soon as possible. Although teams used the data from the first phase of the outreach to minimize this kind of changes, there are various functionalities that were present on Zcashd as an inheritance from the old Bitcoin core code and that don’t make much sense in 2025’s Zcash world. While teams seek to maximize ease of migration, they are also looking to balance that with our mandate to modernize Zcash’s stack and get rid of cruft and tech debt.
We are still looking for testers and new developers. See the call to action below
Call for Testers!
This won’t be a public alpha. We are looking for people that can build Zallet from code and run it with their Zebra nodes.
Call for Developers!
If you want to start working on something Zcash related and you don’t know where to start, Zallet is a good way to do it. With many RPC methods already developed that can be good examples for the creation of others, the project is in a good shape to start taking contributions from the broad community. Fork the Zallet repo and start hacking!.
Block Explorer Support
- Status: Testing
We have a new daily testnet snapshots site for Zebra thanks to @cacho. https://testnet-zebra.zcashexplorer.app/snapshots/ and we continue to move forward with Zcash Explorer support on Z3. There’s a suboptimal version in testnet for now and we will be updating it when the different missing RPC methods are being implemented in Zaino.
Pending reviews:
Regtest? What is that?
- Status: in review
I’ve addressed a second round of comments and am waiting for more.
Thanks for reading!