Zcashd Deprecation updates

Ecosystem Updates
49

February 14th

Hello fellow Zebras! Today is Valentine’s Day for those who celebrate. What a great opportunity to tell the whole world about that special someone in your life, your everything, posting a love note on ZecPages! If it is just a love declaration even better!

Outreach (@pili @decentralistdan @pacu):

* Status: on track

We are currently focusing on Tier-1 contacts only to try to get as much of those as possible.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board
Priority board

Zebra engineers keep rocking it and several things that we announced as in development a few days ago now are “In Review/QA”:

Other things brought up in the last update are Done!

Also ZF engineers are on top of requests form Zaino devs regarding Regtest features they need to accelerate their work. Thank you Pili and team for always being receptive to these requests!

Zaino (ZingoLabs)

  • status: off-track :warning: (but catching up!!)

Project Board

Milestone 2 work is progressing and the team is catching up to the previously announced delay.
The team is close to nail the “Lightwalletd replacement” feature set which is depending on these PRs

Attention to all devs! There are PRs that need review.

Wallet and Block Explorer operators please check:

This Issue is tracking the indices that Zaino devs are identifying as necessary. If anything that you rely on is not here please reach out by commenting on the issue.

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: (but rapidly catching up)

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

tracking work on this repository.

Last wednesday @nuttycom did an awesome and very necessary Librustzcash crate walkthrough. There is much more than it meets the eye. Substantial work went into preparing this masterpiece of how to show a codebase to others. In the first sections of it you Kris goes over some of the changes that were done to the repository to make Zcash libraries more modular and easier to work with by decoupling dependencies, favoring “dep-free” imports for cases like front-ends needing specific functionalities or WASM cross compilation.

We expect that this material can help encourage devs to contribute eagerly to librustzcash. At the end of the call there are a few calls to action for newcomers.

Wallet Export format

  • Status: Ahead of schedule

New repository appeared!!! Say hello to zmigrate.

https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/zmigrate

Wolf McNally from BC has started working on this framework to create the in-memory representation of the ZeWIF specification. It’s focused on importing from zcashd at the moment.

@BC-Shannon has two important Calls to Action!

TESTING TESTING!

WE NEED YOUR HELP! (I) TESTING

Please take a look at the repo. Try to import wallet data. Report out issues or problems you see to Wolf as Issues. Or, equally feel free to correct them as PRs. This is where you can privately parse your own wallet and see how it does. We need real-world examples/testing of this sort!

Tests with shielded transactions, address books, or other user-provided metadata would be particularly helpful.

WALLET FILES NEEDED

WE NEED YOUR HELP! (II) WALLET FILES

We need robust examples of wallet files (or database dumps) from a variety of wallets showing a variety of activities.

Wolf has wallet.dat files from zcashd, but they are sparse and simplistic, with coinbase transactions and no shielded transactions. If you can help with real-life zcashd wallet.data files that actually have shielded transactions they’d be a big boon.

We also need wallet.dat files (or database dumps or whatever) for other wallets, as we don’t have any of those currently, just the raw documents that @Dorianvp and @BC-Shannon put together.

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?

  • Status: On track

Well isn’t that what everybody is wondering these days? Well not really, but it’s an important question to answer for developers.

At a high level, there’s Mainnet, the network you use everyday. Testnet is a testing version of ZEC, which is called TAZ. (TAZ does not have a trading value. Don’t get excited.)

New features go into Testnet first before going to Mainnet. But what if you need your own local copy of a small piece of the blockchain to test this something you are working on? Well… that’s what regtest is for… or something like that… that’s what we are defining!

Originally Zcashd inherited Regtest from Bitcoin. It’s time to decide how we want it to be from now on since Zebra will be the home of Regtest mode too.

After some differences in behavior expectations between Zcashd and Zabrad Regtest modes we decided that we need to write a ZIP for it so everyone is on the same page on what are the features of Regtest and how it differs from Testnet.

I started a HackMD document that will convert into a draft-ZIP soon. Please leave your comments!

Thank you for reading.

Enjoy your weekend!

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