Zcashd Deprecation updates

December 20th

Hello fellow Zebras! Another week, another update on Zcashd deprecation!

Before I continue with the usual update, I wanted to tell a short story.

December 20th is not any date for argentinians. While December 18th 2022 was one of the happiest days of this century (World Cup!) December 19th and 20th of 2001 are written with blood of the people in the pages of the dark history of my beloved country. Chapter 10 of the Movie “Memory of the Looting” from Pino Solanas (2004) depicts the terrible episodes of a formerly democratic government that helped the Banks (Citibank, BoA, HSBC, etc.) steal People’s savings and who’s president flee in a helicopter while killing hundreds of people with the State’s “Security forces” when people rose against this theft.




This is probably why crypto is so important for me and my people. We know what it’s like to be backstabbed by your smiling bank executives that were supposed to “take good care” of your savings.

More than ever, Justice for the Fallen. Not your Keys, Not your coins. Sovereign custody is the only way to a free world. Onwards.


As we said last week NU6 work is over! There are some outstanding issues with wallets. You can follow updates about that on this other thread that @shawn has put together. Thank you!

Outreach (@pili @decentralistdan @pacu):

* Status: on track

We finished crafting a follow-up message that conveys a more sense of urgency and also has better actionable items by accompanying a form that people we contact can forward to their engineering teams easily and clearly. We went through the outreach contact list and sent this new message to the tier 1 and tier 2 contacts that hadn’t responded yet. We don’t expect much activity because of the holidays but that won’t stop us from pinging, nudging and reaching out.

Zebra

@pili has published a thorough sprint update. Zebra team has been working on and I quote: “RPCs, RPCs, RPCs”. This is either implementing new, enhancing existing ones, reviewing and assessing deltas between Zcashd RPCs and Zebra ones.

Go Zebra!

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • status: on track

Project Board

Zaino devs continue to work on their findings on Zebra Regtest issues. They’ve reported having fixed the outstanding issue that was blocking them and now continue to rock it as usual! They also are carrying on testing infrastructure development that is further enhancing their bug squashing capabilities which will soon be available for every team when Zaino is productive.

Note: Zaino devs are still working on finding out indices that will be needed on Zaino. If you run Zcash infrastructure as a backend for your project Reply to that github issue NOW!!!!!1

In-Memory backend wrap up

- status: on track

This has been falling through the cracks a bit, we still need to provide reviews to this PR Add serde derives to primitive types behind feature flag by willemolding · Pull Request #1627 · zcash/librustzcash · GitHub

Fortunately @nuttycom is going to take this one for a spin and take the needed actions for this upstream contribution to be included in librustzcash so we can cross out those Zcashd Deprecation DAG boxes soon!.

Last week I told you about a meeting between Chainsafe, ECC and myself to talk about how PCZT, WebZ.js and the metamask snap could work together. We met on Wednesday. Kris and Str4d showed Eric and Dan the PCZT feature and how it works on Keystone. They believe it can significantly lessen the amount of effort needed for handling transaction signature on the Zcash Metamask Snap development and also avoid custom code from Chainsafe that would need extra care from them. Eric and Dan will look into it with the rest of the team. They were very enthusiastic about it!.

Zcashd Wallet CLI —> Now “Zallet” (that’s pronounced Zallè, like ballet)

  • Status: on track :warning:

This is scheduled to be completed by the end of January! This timeline is TIGHT!

tracking work on this repository.

Last week ECC Engineers announced that they had open-sourced their zec-sqlite-cli tool. Now it’s called zcash-devtool. This newly published work from ECC is very useful to test wallet code, transaction formats, identify hashes, encodings and a lot more that will be added to it soon. ECC engineers are in conversations with QEDIT to include their transaction tools for ZSA development into this tool. That would be cool!

Kris will also be factoring out script handling as a way to keep enhancing and decoupling the transaction part of the protocol in the librustzcash codebase. This is super important so we have a clear separation of concerns and locality of the code. That does a lot to improve our developer experience. Having a tidy home is always more welcoming to newcomers and a more pleasant stay for everyone. Before all of the tools were somewhere “in the garage” while now, our garage has labeled compartments and containers that say what they are for and you know where to find things and also where to put new tools as well! It might seem dumb, but it’s a lot of time that we save by knowing where to look for some code or where to put NEW code!.

Wallet Export format

  • Status: Grant proposal expecting feedback from community

Blockchain Commons and Zingo are working on a proposal for “ZeWiF”. There is a grant proposal for this work on this forum thread. Work has already started. Dorian from @ZingoLabs is currently working on a survey of the existing wallet formats current and past and has made ENORMOUS progress already. KUDOS Dorian!

Also he’s making a PR to update ZIP-400! Which will be evaluated by ZIP editors soon. ZingoLabs has stepped up to Core Development, expanding their operations and bringing in new developers and that has to be celebrated! If you see a Zingoista online, say congrats!

The following weeks will be slow, many are taking some time off to be with their loved ones. Some of us will still be around quietly doing things here and there.

Have a Fun Friday and happy holidays to you all.

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