March 7th
Hello! This is a special update given that most development teams are participating on ZconVI.
I’ll take this opportunity to share a couple of reflections about ZconVI, how Zcashd Deprecation is going and the steps that we have ahead of us.
A lot of important topics for the future of Zcash were discussed during ZconVI. Staring by Scaling Zcash with @ebfull, a technical roadmap with ZingoLabs, ZF, ECC, QEDIT and Shielded Labs, Proof-of-Stake featuring Vitalik from ETH and Henry De Valence from Penumbra and Crosslink authors (@shielded-nate and @daira) and the future of ZSAs with Constance Beguier from QEDIT.
Let’s face it
None of these things will happen if we don’t deprecate Zcashd.
As I had been anticipating it on this free2z update there is still a list of things that need to happen before NU7 can be activated and it’s not short
- Deprecate/Disable Zcashd RPCs
- MVP of full-node CLI (Zallet)
- Get Zallet talking to Zaino
- A test version of the Zcash stack that can be shipped to different partners for integration testing purposes and detailed hands-on feedback
And I can add to the list the following critical items:
- A functional Block Explorer deployment that uses Zaino and Zebra that is a Proof of concept for other block explorers to adopt. Ship infrastructure that 3xlp, blockexplorer.one, trezor and others that run block explorers can deploy.
The optimistic timeline above -which was presented at Z|ECC and published by Josh-, shows that we are around 6 months away from the hypothetical “all things go very well almost ideally” Q4 2025 NU7 activation. We need to stop for a second, check our surroundings and reassess how we move forward. Zcashd is the most important thing, but we can’t ignore that there are HUGE ecosystem governance decisions to make like the funding mechanisms.
The ECC dilemma
As some X/Twitter ANON posted, unless generosity rains from somewhere, like from the market that ECC basically made materially possible by deploying ZkProof in real life, this team will cease to have funds to function.
This is both a huge operational and philosophical problem because, in the way I see it, ECC can’t afford work on a governance mechanism and deprecate Zcashd at the same time as it was stated by it’s CEO during ZconVI, it can barely afford working at their current affairs roughly for another year. As I understood it, this Gordian knot means ECC can’t continue to work without a funding stream and at the same time if it shifts its focus to work on governance mechanisms, it will not be able to work on the highest priority task that the ecosystem is demanding which is deprecating Zcashd. This is mostly why I believe ECC can’t get itself out of this dilemma and the rest of the ecosystem will have to take action somehow.
Things that are on my plate
Outreach
The ecosystem update is drying out. We need artifacts that we can show to the people we contact so they can have actionable, tangible and measurable (to them) results from it. Give or take we know more or less what RPC methods are used by block explorers, exchanges and miners, but we need more information, and that information is sensitive and they would probably not disclose it to us and we should assume they won’t.
Outreach Phase 2 is the second best approach we can take. We will continue to bug business developers with our campaign, yes, but we will shift our approach to send them these working deployment scenarios with alpha software and have them respond “yes, this works for me” or “no, we need this thing other way instead”.
I already met with @joshs from ECC, Jason from Shielded Labs and I’ll be meeting leaders of ZF and Zingo and infrastructure experts like Yasser and @emersonian to start coordinating how “Z cube” (Zebra, Zaino and Zallet) will be deployed and adopted by the ecosystem. This will also need a lot of surgical precision because at this moment, ZEC is not anyones’ top priority operationally speaking. When a DevOps worker from Company A gets a ticket to work on ZEC stuff, they triage it and categorize its urgency based on how important Zcash is to their daily operations. By making our outreach more actionable we can appeal to this DevOps’ interest as well.
Helping Getting Things Done. Cross our t’s, dot our i’s
One of the problems I see in our current state is that we have too many things in flight. We need to start wrapping up tasks. This means to start shipping software that starts tilting the scale towards shutting down our dear Zcashd forever.
The most innocuous deployment of our new stack is block explorer support. We need to prioritize getting that to the finish line. By innocuous I mean that for 99% of its use cases a block explorer that is not 100% fail-proof it’s highly tolerable. It’s the best first use case that we can safely address and start shipping to ecosystem partners to test. Partners can try the new block explorer support infrastructure safely since they can still rely on the current stack (Zcashd + explorer features). Let’s do it!
Zcashd Deprecation Dashboard (ZDD)
I’m working with ZecHub folks to create a dashboard that can provide quick access to progress, blockers and next steps of the Zcashd deprecation efforts at a high level to anyone that wants to know it. This won’t be simple because there’s a lot of unstructured information that I carefully gather personally and pour into these reports.
Now let’s go through the usual updates
Zebra
Project Roadmap board
Priority board
ZF has been mostly engaged with ZconVI which was a great success
Zaino (ZingoLabs)
- Status: almost back on track!
Project Board
As @zancas has announced here, Milestone 2 is complete!!
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
“Zallet” (that’s pronounced Zallè, like ballet) formerly Zcash Wallet CLI
- Status: delayed (but rapidly catching up)
ECC has notified a deviation of 2 months from the original schedule.
tracking work on this repository.
Transparent gap limit work continues. Also working on wallet RPCs
Wallet Export format
Milestone 1 is completed and the ZingoLabs and Blockchain Commons teams are working on milestones 2 and 3 to be delivered together within the originally proposed timeline.
TESTING TESTING!
I forward you a message from Wolf McNally from Blockchain Commons
I’d be happy to test against any drained wallets provided, and would obviously keep them in confidence unless explicit permission to release them publicly were granted. Also, I don’t even have to know the identity of the provider, as that’s immaterial to ensuring compatibility. Obviously in that case there would be no way to identify the submitter and therefore no way for the submitter to grant permission for release, so any anonymously-submitted wallets would have to remain permanently confidential. I’m also fine with pledging to sequester them on separate storage, and destroy all copies once the work is complete.
This is quickly becoming CRITICAL PATH, so anything you can do to help Wolf push forward: testing, advice, comments, and wallet files would be greatly appreciated.
Regtest? What is that?
As you may have seen in the forums, I created a ZIP draft according to the ZIP process to address this undefinition problem we’ve faced. https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/986
Things you shouldn’t miss from ZconVI
As you may know I was honored to co-host the ZconVI Recap event. For that I watched all the sessions live. It was exhausting because the amount of information, FACTs and HARD TRUTH enunciated in those talks felt like drinking directly from the fire hose.
The state of ZF was the traditional inaugural session. @dodger announced he will step down from his ED role and Alex Bornstein will be stepping in as interim ED. As I’ve said personally in private and publicly, the “one more thing” announcement took me by surprise and felt like a sour note for a conference that was just starting. Dodger has been involved in Zcash since its inception. His presence in this (now) ecosystem predates most of us first as a member of the “Zerocoin Electric Coin Company” and then as ED of Zcash Foundation. Regardless of whether one would agree with his takes or not, I think that Dodger always conducted himself with an intellectual honesty and integrity defending his ideas and staying true to his beliefs even if that would put him in a sour position from a “public relations” point of view. That’s something that I have high respect for and I hope that his departure from ZF doesn’t imply losing his points of view, thoughts, ideas and counter-argumenting stakes that we have been accustomed to. Don’t be a stranger Dodger!
The Zcash Foundation will soon become the maintainer of the Zcash consensus software. Bold text intended. This poses new challenges operationally speaking as the Zebra team will be receiving the majority of consensus changing code changes for review and approval.
Legally speaking, as announced by ZF former ED, ZF holds the trademark of Zcash and in the case of hard forks, it can legally claim which of the forks can claim the Zcash brand (within the US bound entities). Josh’s post Building Consensus. ECC Update briefly touches on this topic as well. This a seemingly small change but yet a huge one. Brutally speaking, few people would be “crazy” enough to fork a C++ 2015 fork of bitcoin-core with ZkProof capabilities and maintain their own fork. That dynamic will be completely different for the case of a modern, well-organized, mostly-tech-debt-free codebase like Zebra. It can be the case that human disagreements will materialize in code which is something that did not happen often (they did happen when Ycash, ARRR, Zcoin and other Zcash forks were created). Regardless of whether ZF can trademark-slash US-based entities into calling “Zcash” their fork, PoW consensus clearly dictates who actually is the winning hard-fork. Here you can find a quick primer about this dynamic in general (not specific to Zcash PoW)
The Electric Coin Company talked about their point of view of the ecosystem and the state of the company itself.
Zaki Manian, suggested a different way for Zcash development teams to approach the tasks at hand. Nuttycom presented the zcash-devtool and gave a great walkthrough. Bridges and DEXs are closer than ever with redbridge (@mrkit2u) and Maya (Aaluxx Myth). A post-quantum ZEC lecture by Daira-Emma. A panel about how to expand Zcash use cases with various ecosystem partners, and a demo of the first Zcash web wallet . Hanh explained Coin Holder voting 2.0 and Zancas warned us about using tools that serve other masters and presented a new product from Zingo Labs. A great decentralization panel with great takes from @aarnott, Matthew Green and Andrew Miller. And finally an AMA with @ZCG.
I suggest watching all the community talks! But more specially the Zcash Nigeria one.
Thank you for reading.
Onward!
Edit: thanks to Zancas for proofreading of this post. 
Edit 2: clarified the source of the timeline that is being feature on this post. Thanks Daira-Emma
according 
