Zcashd Deprecation updates

January 24th

Hello fellow Zebras! Another week, another Zcashd Deprecation update! We have important updates to cover today. Not everything is good news. Sometimes there are no good or bad decisions, only trade-offs.

Outreach (pili decentralistdan pacu):

* Status: on track

The outreach is about to change a bit. As we are approaching having alpha infrastructure the communications will shift towards a more “hands-on” approach. How’s that? Currently we were warning about the upcoming Zcashd deprecation and asked some questions to the recipients of the emails and surveys. But on Z|ECC summit, @str4d had a great idea that will help us get concrete feedback from exchanges, miners and API providers. As soon as we have an RPC capable Zallet, we will start shipping extremely alpha, “testing testing 123” infrastructure builds and utilities so that DevOps teams form the various partners we are in contact with can integrate to their testing environment and see what breaks in a “safe-to-try” fashion. For the time being we will still continue nudging and pinging people and we will start to work with @elecriccoinco @emersonian and @zcashfoundation engineering teams to create this testing infrastructure.

Zebra

The team is working on a new jsonRPC server, bug fixes and new unit test suites. @0xarbitrage has already put substantial work on migrating Zcashd python tests into Zebra and there is probably more work to do on that front. Also, Arya is looking into Zaino #145 issue.

FROST full demo with server capabilities is about to be published and a code walkthrough will be scheduled by the first week of February where Conrado and Nathalie will show us around all the goodies they’ve built. After that, Pili decided that the FROST team will start focusing more on Zebra towards NU7.

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • status: off-track :warning:

Project Board

@zancas communicated a slippage on milestone completion dates on this post. We previously communicated and started to outline a plan to catch up as new developers join the Zaino efforts.

Zaino devs continue to work on Zaino and they are reporting being close to having a replacement for lightwalletd functionality soon.

We still are delving into these two regtest environment bumps, recently Zebra engineers have also jumped into these two issues.

Zebrad Regtest findings:

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

“Zallet” (that’s pronounced Zallè, like ballet) formerly Zcash Wallet CLI

  • Status: delayed :warning:

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

tracking work on this repository.

As @joshs recently communicated, there is a 2 month delay on the optimistic timeline that ZIP Editors had drafted back in October 2024 for a full-node wallet to be implemented.

In January 23rd Arborist Call this was explained in more detail. You can watch the whole section here.

This is how the same Gantt chart looks like factoring in the keystone integration work overhead.

Credits: Str4d - Electric Coin Company

Zallèt will be supporting light-wallet functionality already available on Zashi through Zaino as a first important milestone of the project and then will continue to add RPCs related to full node functionality. As explained in the outreach section there will be early builds of the Z^3 stack (Zebra * Zaino * Zallet) to partners to provide API feedback hands on.

Wallet Export format

  • Status: Ahead of schedule (*)

(*) I consider that this is ahead of schedule because ZExCavator work already started and it was scheduled for later milestones.

First ZeWIF call was held! More details here.

Blockchain Commons’ gordian developers and @ZingoLabs are crushing it. The first ZeWiF call was a blast and a lot of progress was shown. Zcash developers could also add feedback to make the most of this new format that is being born.

Huge shout out to @dorianvp from Zingo Labs who’s carrying out the wallet format survey excellently with spectacular results. He carried out a lot of “not pleasant” scavenging with high levels of motivation and energy.

Dorian joined Zingo Labs at Crecimiento, the PopUp city event held in Buenos Aires. Zingo pushed really hard to make the most out of it, investing time and resources to spread out the Zcash mission and cypherpunk ethos. @Zancas and team remind us the value of engaging with community activities. Onward!

Enjoy your weekend!

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