Hi everyone,
This is the Zcash Foundation’s Engineering update for Sprint 15 (July 16th - July 29th.)
During this sprint, the Zebra team switched their focus to the upcoming NU6 activation on testnet, currently scheduled for August 8th 2024, and implementation of the ZIPs that will be activated with NU6 at the next Zcash halving. The team have been working on implementation of the ZIPs currently planned for activation which include a new lockbox pool, allocation of block rewards for non-direct development funding and a requirement for the full amount of miner subsidy and fees to be collected in coinbase transactions. We are planning to release a version including these changes by the end of this week (Thursday 2nd or Friday 3rd August) ready for NU6 testnet activation on Thursday 8th August.
The FROST team finished the refactor of the frost-server architecture which removes responsibility for commitment and signature share aggregation from the server. We have also started working on updating the signing tool we use for FROST in Zcash, based on @hanh’s Ywallet signing tool. We are updating our branch of this tool to use the latest ECC crates which will simplify it (previously it required generating a Sapling key which wasn’t being used, due to lack of support in the underlying crates). We are also planning to further integrate this tool into the frost demo code. This sprint, we merged the ability to remove signers and refresh shares within a trusted dealer scenario and have now started work for the same in a distributed key generation (DKG) scenario.
Devops work during this sprint included work on standardising how the Zcash Foundation’s production services, such as the DNSSeeder, are deployed. This initiative was driven by the Engineering team’s need for a staging/test environment in the cloud, where they could test new code or features for services supporting the Zcash ecosystem. This effort also enables better permissions segmentation by utilizing different roles across our development and production GCP projects. Additionally, access to GCP was enhanced by leveraging the Workload Identity Federation.
We are also working on documentation for a proposed change to how lightwalletd docker images are built. The current image could not be built with the specified Go version, and it lacks the necessary zcash.conf, cert.key, and cert.pem files. Consequently, a Lightwalletd server with a default configuration wouldn’t run with this image unless additional steps were taken to include this information. The goal is to make the image usable—as is—for development and testing purposes.
Thank you for reading!