Zcashd Deprecation updates

Ecosystem Updates
52

February 28th

Hello! Another week, another Zcashd Deprecation update. Although we are all preparing for the Zcon VIrtual of next week things keep moving and we are one week closer to deprecate Zcashd.

Outreach (@pili @pacu):

  • Status: on track

In terms of the optimistic timeline we are only 6 months away from Q4 2025 and we will be introducing changes to our outreach approach.

Zebra

Project Roadmap board

Priority board

The Zebra team is on fire :fire: according to this board, block explorer support on Zebra is almost a few tasks away. This is a great milestone that will let grantees like @emersonian and @cacho start working on their block explorers to move away from Zcashd and also lead the way for the rest of the Ecosystem

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 wrapping up milestone 2. Currently there is ONE outstanding item

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

Zec Rocks adds a Zaino endpoint

@emersonian just announced that he had deployed some Zaino containers for you all to test on. Check his post here

Kudos to The Bug Hound

I wanted to dedicate a paragraph to @Edicksonjga, who is constantly testing out Zingo wallets and bringing up bugs as he finds them. Some days ago, I noticed that he had opened this issue in github about “ghost transactions” disappearing from the history of his Zingo wallet when they were in the mempool. A couple of Zingoistas and myself recalled that there was a Zebra release not long ago so we wondered if there were any servers not running the latest version and asked Edickson to reproduce the bug on both while others went to track the Zebra github repo to see any possible changes. Zingo folks are in the process of researching the possible sources of the problem and Edickson opened this issue on the Zebra repo to start the conversation.

This whole situation tells us two things.

  1. Edickson, you are in fact a fearless hound when it comes to testing. Thanks for reporting this! It’s hard to be the bearer of bad news when it comes to an annoying bug that your team has battled with and it seems to be coming back. Kudos.
  2. We are still very short on testing infrastructure. We need to keep collaborating to create tooling and end-to-end tests.

About 1, I encourage everyone to get in touch with Sheyla and send some cookies to Edickson’s house. And about point number 2, regardless this in fact ends up revealing as a regression from a change upstream or not, we need to be mindful of how we can test our possible regressions across the whole stack and act accordingly.

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.

Transparent gap limit work continues. This is part of the work that was left outside the last release train of librustzcash. This work and @sellout’s transparent script work continue towards the goal of supporting the import of seed phrases from transparent addresses which is fundamental for Zcashd wallet deprecation

NU7 constants about to land in librustzcash

This is a milestone of the various timelines you’ve seen on NU7 deployment. It’s a stepping stone and we celebrate it! zcash_protocol: Add constants for the NU7 Network Upgrade

Commitment tree fixes on their way

@aarnott and other wallet devs have reported some users being affected by this issue that @nuttycom has been chasing and has been working on a fix for quite some time. zcash_client_sqlite: Add methods for fixing broken note commitment trees. by nuttycom · Pull Request #1709 · zcash/librustzcash · GitHub

Wallet Export format

  • Status: On-track

@dorian and Wolf from Blockchain Commons started to work in the Milestone two of the grant which is the “WALLET INTERCHANGE SPECIFICATION DESIGN”. But they realized that given the manual nature of the whole process they were having to implement part of the tooling that was planned for milestone three of this grant, so they are making some changes to the grant spec while keeping the delivery dates unaffected. Shannon explains this himself here.
We still need swept wallet.dat files that people can donate to make. Read the call for action below.

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?

  • Status: In review

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

Thank you for reading.

Enjoy your weekend!

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