Zcash Z3 updates (formerly Zcashd Deprecation)

Ecosystem Updates
81

May 2nd

Hello! Another week! Another Zcash Z3 update!

Outreach

The Z3 team is working on some request for information that came back from some bug partners for them to prioritize the integration of the new Zcash stack into their work planning. Some changes on the Zaino roadmap will have to be factored in as well

Zebra

Project Roadmap board

Priority board

The team is traversing week 1 of Sprint 9. A new version is on the stove. Zebra 2.3.0 will be released soon. Meanwhile the team has continued working on Docker integration and RPCs needed for Zcashd deprecation, ironing out some RPCs from Zebrad that differed from what Zcashd served.

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: almost back on track!

Project Board

Zaino’s Milestone 3 of the first grant is progressing and close to completion (factoring out the RemoteStateService work).

JSON RPC is merged into the dev branch! This is one of the things needed for Block Explorer integration which is featuring its first appearance in these updates today.

After completing this Hazel and Arlo which are the principal Zaino developers, will go into an architecture redesign rabbithole for a bit to improve some things of the project’s structure and accommodate better for some requirements that Zallet integration needs. After addressing this, the follow-up grant “Complete Zaino” work will begin.

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.

@str4d has been working on important tooling to move Zcashd operators to Zebra for which he’s looking for feedback. Please leave comments on this PR

He also added support for OpenRPC which will help out developers integrating to Zallet which the Zebra team will possibly be looking at to use as reference for including that in Zebra as well. rpc: Add OpenRPC support. Also “Add z_sendmany” is considered ready and being reviewed.

ZeWIF integration in Zallet continues with serious amounts of collaboration between blockchain common, Zaino and ECC folks.

Wallet Export format + ZexCavator

  • Status: On-track

ZeWIF migrate tool development continues and as Kris integrates zmigrate to Zallet, some issues are being discovered and fixed.

ZexCavator work is being done as well by Dorian from Zingo Labs. What’s ZexCavator? In a nutshell is a utility tool designed to excavate and dig out any buried ZEC that you may have in an ancient wallet from the “good ol’ days” that you don’t know how to recover.

Contributors needed!

The ZeWIF team is definitely looking for PRs from the community at this point, to make sure we have all the abstractions for wallet contents right. Just be sure you have the latest pull, since the repos were updated this morning.

Block Explorer Support

As Zaino’s JSON RPC endpoint is maturing, we started to integrate Zcash Block Explorer into Zaino. Things will break for sure, but they will get better soon.

There’s a generous PR from @emersonian that updates several parts of the dusty tooling of the Zcash Explorer that hasn’t received much love recently.

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 [#985] Create a ZIP Draft to document Regtest mode by pacu · Pull Request #986 · zcash/zips · GitHub and I see more comments coming!

You can read, review and comment too!

Thanks for reading!

10 Likes
82

I am interested in testing when the devs release a working alpha!

1 Like
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3 Likes
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Yeah currently “works” as in fireworks :sparkler::rofl:

3 Likes
85

May 9th

Hello! Another week! Another Zcash Z3 update!

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

With Zebra 2.3.0 being out the Zebra team is working on very important things for Zcash Z3

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: on track!

Project Board

Last week I told you that Milestone 3 of the first grant was progressing and close to completion. Yesterday @Zingolabs updated their grant thread.

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.

Yasser is starting to work on Docker tooling on Zallet.

@str4d continues to work on important tooling to move Zcashd operators to Zebra for which he’s looking for feedback. Please leave comments on this PR

ZeWIF integration in Zallet continues with serious amounts of collaboration between blockchain common, Zaino and ECC folks.

Wallet Export format + ZexCavator

  • Status: On-track

According to yesterday’s update from @ChristopherA on this thread, the ZeWIF part of this effort is considered done! This is a HUGE milestone since exporting Zcashd wallets to the new Stack is a critical part of upgrading all zcashd wallet users to the new infrastructure. ZCG informed the grantees they approve this consideration of Milestone 5 completion.

Block Explorer Support

  • Status: Started

As Zaino’s JSON RPC endpoint is maturing, we started to integrate Zcash Block Explorer into Zaino. ZingoLabs informed that they will parallelize some of their current work to start their follow-up grant that includes Block Explorer Support.

Zingo folks, myself and others started to fork the zcash-explorer repo to contribute to it.

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!

5 Likes
86

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!

Project Board

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 :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.

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!

5 Likes
87

May 23rd

Outreach

We will discuss this further in the next sections but we are getting closer to have artifacts and containers that Zcash partners can start testing so we will pivot to the next phase of outreach when those are almost done.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

There’s a lot coming to completion in the Zebra house and that means a lot of code to review. Seventeen (yes 17) items are up for review and QA and from a variety of endeavors: Z3 stack, Zebra improvements, NU6.1 and NU7. But the Zebra folks are not only reading code but also writing and testing quite a lot of things with twelve items in progress. @oxabritrage is testing Zebra and Zallet integration and finding a lot of things to improve, Gustavo is working on containerization of the Z3 stack and that’s leading to important debate with all the team’s Infrastructure and DevOps specialists, Arya is literally EVERYWHERE and Marek is battling a long time foe: Orchard shielded coinbase which will help miners continue to moon the Orchard pool, but it will also speed up a lot of Zaino tests. woohoo!

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: on track!

Project Board

As integration of the Z3 stacks progresses adjustments are made to Zingo’s winning horse Zaino. Like ​​better zebra error propagation. Work on refactoring how Zaino stores blockchain material is progressing as well. Draft PRs for Zcash Block Explorer support are starting to emerge! Every week we are 7 days closer to Zcashd deprecation and a lot of things are finally coming together!

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.

Zcashd wallet migration is one critical part of this all. And @nuttycom has done a tremendous effort to achieve this. A draft PR has been pushed! Add migrate_zcashd_wallet command.
Also a new RPC is seeing the light of day with the Add z_viewtransaction Pull Request from @str4d

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!.

Wallet Export format + ZexCavator

  • Status: On-track

Zingo folks continue to work on ZexCavator. You are a week closer to dusting out that old wallet that you thought you’d never recover again! Also, next steps for ZeWIF ecosystem integration are being discussed and outlined by Blockchain Commons, core developers and ZCG.

Block Explorer Support

  • Status: in progress

This continues to be in development. We it happens that Coin Market Cap did need more that total supply, and we are working on that API method on the Zcash Block Explorer.

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!

6 Likes
88

May 30th

Hello dear Zcashers! there’s another update on the progress of our new Zcash Stack

Outreach

Status: Paused
We will discuss this further in the next sections but we are getting closer to having artifacts and containers that Zcash partners can start testing so we will pivot to the next phase of outreach when those are almost done.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

Another Sprint has finished and as always @Pili has posted a very thorough Engineering Update.

The Zebra team is reviewing a lot of code and contributing to Zallet and Zaino. Zcash is ATH in collaboration and Zebra engineers have a lot to do with that!.

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: on track!

Project Board

Zaino folks are wrapping up ​​better zebra error propagation and working on the chain cache refactoring and re-architecting.

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.

This past week ECC folks have been focused on Tachyon and protocol research in an off-site event. Zallet work didn’t stop but did slowed its pace a bit.

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!.

Wallet Export format + ZexCavator

  • Status: Done!

The ZexCavator v0 was released last Saturday and didn’t make it to the last update!

Block Explorer Support

  • Status: in progress

This continues to be in development. I developed a new method to cover Coin Market Cap’s requirements and we will see these changes on the mainnet block explorer soon. We will continue to work on Zebra + Zaino integration gradually as missing RPCs continue to be implemented.

Regtest? What is that?

  • Status: in review

I’ve addressed a second round of comments and waiting for more.

Thanks for reading!

5 Likes
89

June 6th

Hello fellow Zebras! It’s this time of the week where we update the community on our progress developing the new Zcash Z3 stack. Things are progressing but I won’t hide the fact that not every interaction has been “a bed of roses”. These past weeks there have been a few moments where expectations on delivered work varied from team to team and this led to some friction and frustration. While the overall architecture and high level requirements of Z3 was overly discussed, the devil is in the details. This caused that different interpretation of the same requirements caused unexpected situations where some code worked differently as others assumed it would, and priorities of the different teams made those discoveries happen later than expected and code re-design and refactoring would be needed. This happen with Zaino’s cache design which is falling a bit short on the amount of chain data in needs to be able to track and also with ZeWIF, which ended requiring a lot more of work than originally scoped which severely affected Kris’ ability to “drop-in” the ZeWIF crate and required a lot of review and re-work.

Following @earthrise’s advice from Zcon4, ZCG, different team leads and myself followed a “blameless culture” retrospective to analyze why these “broken telephone” kind of issues were happening and where were they coming from and identified a few factors:

  • The wish for a “lean development process” with not much overhead and fewer meetings went too far.
  • Zcash (and zcashd specifically) has a lot of ‘lore’ and the unwritten nature of it makes it difficult for developers to factor those into their developments, especially those that have “less mileage” in our ecosystem.
  • Priorities of the different projects between teams can vary significantly.
  • The combination of the three items above was a terrible combination.

Changes to the development process going forward:

Workgroup(s) creation

Developers will hold regular hands-on code meetings about Zaino API design. In the past requirements weren’t written down, we will do that in these working groups to design APIs. Candidates topics: Zaino library; zcash_client_backend; ZeWIF; light client protocol.

Action items:

  • Pacu will repurpose Light Client Working Group for some of these items specially Light Client Protocol similarly to what ZIP editors do
    • @nuttycom will take the lead on organizing another ZeWIF meeting for next week
    • @idky137 from Zingo labs will organize the Zaino API meeting
Reducing the impact of ‘Lore-based requirements’

I ran a quick check on some of our repos and they don’t contain good cues for developers joining the ecosystem. Suggested paying attention to the repos and labeling “good first issues”, “learning opportunity” and “help wanted” issues that apply. Also the workgroups will be a touchpoint for developers to talk about these.

Helping new teams scope their initial grants in an end-to-end fashion

We identified a problem with the “handover” nature of the ZeWIF grant. At some point the wallet integration part of ZeWIF into Zallet was handed over to ECC and not really in-scope of the ZeWIF milestones. This made the developers produce a great Zcashd-wallet extraction library that then was difficult to convert into ZeWIF and the integration into Zallet was very painful.

In a retrospective call ZCG held with BlockChain Commons and ECC engineers, @nuttycom suggested that future grants of this nature have less breath of scope but do achieve end-to-end completion, meaning that the width of the development task is lessened in favor of investing more in a deep integration of the tool being developed into the part of the ecosystem that will be solving.

That being said, let’s move on to the usual updates

Outreach

Status: Paused
We will discuss this further in the next sections but we are getting closer to having artifacts and containers that Zcash partners can start testing so we will pivot to the next phase of outreach when those are almost done.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

The Zebra Team is working on their last items on their ToDo list for Zcashd deprecation while waiting for other past developments to be reviewed and merged to the main codebase. Also, during the past Zcash deprecation collaboration call, the Zebra team requested ECC to point them to places where their team could contribute to the Zallet repo! ATH In collaboration! Go Zebra!

Current In development items: (see board for more details)

Add a mempool_transactions() RPC method for listening to changes in the mempool
Enable coinbase funds to be mined to Sapling
Enable coinbase funds to be mined to Orchard
DoS vulnerability in getblocktemplate RPC
Update getaddressbalance RPC method for block explorer usage

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: refactoring

Project Board

Zaino folks are scoping and working on the chain cache refactoring and re-architecting to better serve Zallet and other downstream clients such as block explorers and light wallets.

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.

The ECC team is back from their Tachyon conclave! A lot of work happened as well as necessary conversations as I detailed previously. ZeWIF integration in Zallet is progressing and there are a lot of PRs in review. ECC engineers will get in touch with ZF engineers who requested issues to work on and help out.

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: in progress

Yasser and Pacu are reviewing @emersonian’s PR with enhancements to the Zcash Block explorer. While we are solving issues on the zcashexplorer.app mainnet instance that is blocking us from deploying the CMC fix mentioned in last week’s update it is very possible that we will have to reindex that explorer because it’s not tracking the transparent pool and we need that information which might cause some considerable downtime (that’s why we are moving away from Zcashd haha)

Next fixes:

I’m starting to work on Zaino integration, so if you hear explosions, that’s probably it (LOL).

Regtest? What is that?

  • Status: in review

I’ve addressed a second round of comments and am waiting for more.

Thanks for reading!

9 Likes
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What happened?

were_ready
were_ready375×247 141 KB

1 Like
91

Apparently the new ZkPope was elected :face_with_hand_over_mouth: kidding.

I think the last ECC update comments about this.

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June 13th

It’s Friday the 13th! Well… for some folks that doesn’t mean anything. Did you know that for different cultures it’s other days on the calendar that are “jinxed”? In Spanish culture it’s Tuesday the 13th. “Martes 13 no te cases ni te embarques” my grandma used to say. For my Italian part of the family it was Friday the 17th. The number 17th is “La disgrazia” of italian culture.

Ignoring all superstitions I embarked myself! Because I believe in science, probability and moon math. Next week I’m going to be taking a few days off, so the June 20th update will probably not be published as thoroughly or at all.

In terms of our Z3 endeavor and last week’s update, Z3 workgroups have started and advancements have been made.

I would like to specially thank @nuttycom for helping out in various matters and for making time on this busy schedule for myself and ZCG.

Outreach

Status: Paused
We will discuss this further in the next sections but we are getting closer to having artifacts and containers that Zcash partners can start testing so we will pivot to the next phase of outreach when those are almost done.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

The Zebra team has completed another Sprint! And of course, @pili has written an awesome engineering update. You should go read it and leave comments to this great engineering team we have in our Ecosystem. There has been a lot of progress around Block Explorer support, mining to shielded pools and RPC tests with Zallet. Go Zebra!

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: refactoring

Project Board

Zaino folks continue refactoring the data cache and indices incorporating feedback from the Zaino API workgroup calls as part of the continuation grant

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

Kris Nuttycombe will try to make some room on his schedule to complete this review. Our hero :smiling_cat_with_heart_eyes:

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.

Kris and Str4d continue to work on Zallet with enhancements on sync, importing Zcashd wallet.dat files and also pairing with Zaino folks on API requirements for Zaino, data that Zallet needs available and performance expectation for each kind of data indexed by Zingo’s winning horse. ECC core devs are also figuring out the outstanding pieces for an Alpha version of Zallet. Listen the announcement on the June 12th Arborist Call

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: in progress

I started to get into the nitty-gritty of Zcash Block explorer support which led to opening some issues to the Zebra repository to add missing data in Zebra’s transaction data object which is what different zebra clients consume and that the block explorer needs when showing a block details and transaction details. I humbly sent a pull request to add one of the needed fields and reviews did not wait to come. :slightly_smiling_face:

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!

8 Likes
93

June 20th

Hello! I was OOO last week so this week’s update isn’t as detailed as usual. The important thing is that we keep iterating and progressing towards Zcashd deprecation. Let’s get to it!

Outreach

Status: Paused
We will discuss this further in the next sections but we are getting closer to having artifacts and containers that Zcash partners can start testing so we will pivot to the next phase of outreach when those are almost done.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

The Zebra team has been working on NU6.1 (lockbox disbursement mechanism), NU7 and Zcashd deprecation items are also being worked on. A lot of is going on there. Enable coinbase funds to be mined to Orchard continues, DoS vulnerability in getblocktemplate RPC and Implement getmempoolinfo RPC method are also in progress. Block Explorer requirements are also being picked up by the ZF team but not yet visible in their public board I will detail that in the corresponding section.

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: refactoring

Project Board

Zaino folks continue to refactor their state cache and indices to better accommodate Zallet’s requirements. The weekly Zaino API workgroup meetings are improving Zaino’s APIs in terms of data availability needs and performance expectations and they have already made impact on the codebase itself.

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

Kris Nuttycombe will try to make some room on his schedule to complete this review. Our hero :smiling_cat_with_heart_eyes:

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.

The team keeps progressing on Zallet, with fixes z_listunspent, Add gettransaction and started working on an rpc CLI interface and moving forward towards to the alpha release milestone.

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: in progress

ZF folks picked up the missing fields on getblock and get transaction fields that need to be there for Zcash Block Explorer which takes us a big step further to reach the Block Explorer support milestone.

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!

4 Likes
94

June 27th

Hello! June is almost over!! Before this month is over don’t forget to vote for ZCG elections if you are in ZCAP. If you are not, check that post to know if you are eligible to be part of it. Also, there’s a survey that the Zashi team is running. They need to hear your thoughts (anonymously, of course). Please participate! Let’s make the Zcash we want to see in the world!

Outreach

Status: Paused
We will discuss this further in the next sections but we are getting closer to having artifacts and containers that Zcash partners can start testing so we will pivot to the next phase of outreach when those are almost done.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

The Zebra team is transitioning into Pili’s sabbatical and they are in the good hands of Natalie. We’ve already heard awesome updates in the last arborist call. Congrats to ZF for that! Last week Zebras finished work on gettransaction to include fields that were missing for Block Explorer support, picking up some work that I left in a PR before I went OOO. I’m really thankful for that!
Getblock now includes the state of value pools at the time of the block, also there’s a new method to hook up to mempool changes. Also, there’s a new release of zcash_script which runs the Rust and C++ implementation side to side and log possible discrepancies. Once the rust side is proven to have equality with the C++ one, it will replace it.

A lot of cleanup happened in the Zebra codebase as well. Go team!

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: refactoring

Project Board

Zaino folks are working with ECC and ZF teams to finalize API details and changes that are discovered as we are all integrating Z3 altogether. There are several pieces needed for block explorer integration that are in the works and soon to be ready. Additionally, there are fundamental changes to how Zaino converts its data to disk since versioning is being incorporated so that Zaino is extensible and future-proof.

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

Kris Nuttycombe will try to make some room on his schedule to complete this review. Our hero :smiling_cat_with_heart_eyes:

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.

ECC folks are spread thin, but progress continues. There’s NU6.1, NU7 review and Z3 stuff. Fortunately we’ve heard that cavalry is coming! A new core engineer will join the ECC team next week in Prague. As for Zallet goes, Config files are being added into Zallet and PCZTs support is now in zcash_script and an important milestone is coming.

Call for Testers!

As you can see in The DAG, Zallet is soon to be in an alpha stage.

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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

Grantee @cacho has announced that he managed to get the Zcash Block Explorer to work with Zcash. This will start being tested in testnet and eventually go to mainnet.

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!

6 Likes
95

July 4th

Hello! Happy independence day for those who celebrate. I’m writing this from a plane to Prague. I always remember the 4th of july because it’s the date when many years ago I got my first job and started my own journey as an independent adult-wannabe like 20 years ago when I started the accent training and american culture course to be a call center tech support representative for a company that had a very “family oriented” business but very racist customers that wanted to speak to “real americans” (if that ever existed) when they had problems with their devices. So remember: facism is not “a respectable opinion”. Embrace every accent, every culture. No borders! No masters!

Now, to our weekly update

Outreach

Status: Paused
We will discuss this further in the next sections but we are getting closer to having artifacts and containers that Zcash partners can start testing so we will pivot to the next phase of outreach when those are almost done.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

The Zebra team is preparing Release 2.4.0! Which has items that take us closer to Zcashd deprecation like:

  • The debug_like_zcashd config option for mining is no longer available.
  • Implemented deserialization for Zebra’s block and transaction types (#9522)
  • Update getaddressbalance RPC to return received field (#9295, #9539)
  • Added a mempool_change() gRPC method for listening to changes in the mempool (#9494)
  • Added invalidateblock and reconsiderblock RPC methods (#9551)
  • Updated (z_)validateaddress to validate TEX addresses (#9483)
  • Added a addnode RPC method (#9604)
  • Added missing fields to getrawtransaction (#9636)
  • Added value pool balances to getblock RPC output (#9432, #9539)
  • Added support for configuring shielded addresses for mining (#9574)

While that is cooking, other important changes are on their way, like feat(rpc): Sync all chains in TrustedChainSync::sync which incorporates non-best-chain information to the ReadStateService which is one of the main sources of information for Zaino.

Congrats to the Zebra team for this future release.

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: in progress

Project Board

Zingo continues with their re-architecting work while parallelizing other RPC work on newer members of the team. Chain index types and Zaino-state work progresses as part of the rearchitecting work that Hazel and Idky have been developing with Zaino API Workgroup meetings as input while Nacho, Dorian and Alamode are working on development tooling, error handling and testing.

A huge PR on non-finalized chain landed on the Zaino codebase. Congrats to Hazel and @idky137 for it!. This moves Zingo’s winning horse further down the road to Zcashd deprecation by being better at tracking the many competing chain tips of a PoW blockchain such as Zcash.

It’s very motivating to see a new team continue to grow and gain experience and expertise on core development tasks. We should all continue to foster new teams to join the ecosystem and take great responsibilities like Zingo is doing.

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

Kris Nuttycombe will try to make some room on his schedule to complete this review.

Zallet full node wallet

  • Status: in progress

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

tracking work on this repository.
Are travelling to Z|ECC summit this week.

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

A testnet zebra block explorer has been spawned and is being tested as @cacho announced a few days ago. This development is working around some methods that are still missing from the RPC API of Z3 so it’s less performant than the Zcashd one. Once we have the methods in place we will be able to fully replace Zcashd in terms of block exploring!

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!

5 Likes
96

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

Project Board

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 :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

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!

9 Likes
97

Good resume, Pacu!

I think communities needs to do more noise about this! Testers and developers are very necessary and important

3 Likes
98

July 18th

Hello! After some intense days of travelling, meetups and talks, the teams are fully back to Z3. We’ve made a few changes in our weekly syncs, also I’ll be collaborating with ECC, ZF and Zaino to improve visibility of our progress. This is easier said than done since we will have to reconcile different tools into one dashboard of graphic aid that let’s everyone know how we are doing.

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

A stumble is not a fall! The Zebra team informed that they’ve removed Zebra 2.4.0 due to a regression. Still progress continues with the inclusion of a functionality that lets Zaino and other clients know what changed in the mempool. Zaino folks cheered at this piece of news. Mine to Orchard is also progressing along with a lot of silent work that Alfredo is doing with the RPC tests that will verify functionality that exists on Zcashd and that should exist in Zebrad. Zebra is also getting overhauled with performance optimizations like orchard batch processing.

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: in progress

Project Board

Zaino folks are doing a bunch of things at once. On block explorer support a few RPCs are in development

Integration with the latest Zebra code has been kind of problematic and the teams are trying to figure out what is the process that can avoid these integration problems that deviate focus from development.

Zaino API meetings continue to happen weekly and Zaino re-architecture keeps progressing.

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

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 keeps progressing towards its MVP or Alpha phase Str4d added support for data-dir which will surely help folks testing different wallets.

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

Specifically on Block Explorer support another small change that fell through the cracks in development [#9427] Fix: possibly change “lockbox” vs “deferred” value pool name

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!

5 Likes
99

July 25th

A roadmap will take us where we want to be.

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ECC just released their Q3 2025 roadmap, Unlike other roadmaps of the past this was a collaboration effort between the different orgs attending Z|ECC Summit. I’ve been biting my nails not to post that picture of the whiteboard. After all, we are a privacy project! And we had agreed that we would wait for the host of the event to publish it first. This roadmap is a best effort panorama of what’s to come. Transparency is a core value of the Zcash project and we must be clear when communicating so we don’t generate the wrong expectations. All teams are running at a 100% capacity and unexpected events could have impacts on the different teams schedules. We will keep up with the efforts of keeping the community up-to-date with progress. So let’s go with our traditional weekly update

Outreach

Status: resumed
We are responding to ecosystem partners that are reaching out about Zcashd deprecation. In the following days we will coordinate how the Zallet Alpha phase will be carried out.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

As we informed last week, Zebra 2.4.0 has been removed and 2.4.1 is being released with instructions for affected users to fix their db migration issues.

The Zebra team continues optimizing the Zebra codebase by removing crates that ended up not being much used (zebra-sync and zebra-grpc) and also deleting duplicated code by making a more extensive use of the zcash-primitives create maintained by ECC on librustzcash. Regtest improvements are on their way and RPC tests keep being worked on to have a solid benchmark towards deprecating Zcash. The Zebra team has also been reviewing and merging contributions from many developers of our ecosystems. Speaking of reviews, NU 6.1 implementation is in review!

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: in progress

Project Board

Zaino folks are wrapping up their finalized and non-finalized state refactor for it to track the different competing chain tips of the PoW protocol. They have also reported that parity with Lightwalletd functionality to serve mobile wallets and light clients will be code complete in two weeks!

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

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 keeps progressing towards its alpha phase. The ECC core team is working on the necessary pieces for P2SH work to be available in the zash_script crate and looking forward to including it in both Zallet and keystone. This is a key piece for the NU 6.1 coinholder-directed grants to work.

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

Specifically on Block Explorer support another small change that fell through the cracks in development [#9427] Fix: possibly change “lockbox” vs “deferred” value pool name is still in review

We added a circulating Supply API for the block explorer to fix a problem on Coin Market Cap’s display of current supply .

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!

5 Likes
100

August 1st

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We are here! August 1st. Let’s get to our usual updates.

Outreach

Status: resumed
We started informing about Zcashd 6.3.0 and piggybacking on Zcashd deprecation as well. We’ve messaged all “tier 1” contacts and we are proceeding with “tier 2” which are mostly support emails.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board
Zebra folks have mitigated the 2.4.0 migration issue and they are talking to affected parties and helping them recover from it. RPC test port is progressing (Kudos Alfredo!) which is a super valuable effort and somewhat tedious as well. Please salute our dear @0xArbitrage who’s giving it all to have a good test suite for Zcashd deprecation.

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • Status: in progress

Project Board

@Zancas made my job easier today. With two updates: One in Zaino Respecification and Zaino Complete threads. Zaino folks have been working a lot on CI as well.

In-Memory backend wrap up

- status: pending review :warning:

This has been falling through the cracks a bit but we need to pick it up soon since there are other grants depending on this getting merged. We’ll start working on figuring out how we can allocate resources https://github.com/zcash/librustzcash/pull/1634

Zallet full node wallet

  • Status: in progress

tracking work on this repository.

Zcashd 6.3.0 and NU 6.1 testnet support took most of this past week’s time for ECC core developers. Still some progress in CI and Containerization is being made. That’s necessary for Zallet’s alpha. Meanwhile, contributions from Alfredo from ZF have been merged Implement z_listunifiedreceivers

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 decided how to proceed with this in the last collab call [#9427] Fix: possibly change “lockbox” vs “deferred” value pool name and the ball is on my court. On it!

Pending reviews:

Regtest? What is that?

  • Status: stalled

No progress here

Thanks for reading!

5 Likes