ZF Engineering Update: 2024 Sprint 20 (September 24th - October 7th)

Hi everyone,

This is the Zcash Foundation’s Engineering update for Sprint 20 (September 24th - October 7th.)

During this sprint, the team continued to work on adding functionality to zebra regtest mode by working on a user requested feature to make the halving interval configurable for custom networks and regtests. We uncovered an incompatibility issue between zcashd and zebra which was causing testnet to stall and we started working on adding authentication to zebra’s RPC server using cookie based authentication. We also continued to work on adding support for orphan transactions to ensure that Zebra can support TEX transactions.

Finally, in order to support the new node and wallet stack that will enable us to deprecate zcashd, we started work on adding the spent outpoint and nullifier indices that a zcashd replacement wallet will need from Zebra.

On the FROST demo project, we continued to work on adding frost-client support to the trusted dealer workflow and allowing reading from and writing to the config file instead of having to manually specify a JSON file. For this sprint we focused on integrating the participant and coordinator parts of the demo into frost-client so that they can use the frost-server with the help the config files. This is required to add encryption and authentication to communications between frost-client and frost-server.

We have also been reviewing some welcome external contributions to support other FROST-based protocols and smart contract use cases in the FROST reference implementation.

DevOps work this sprint included a refactoring of how we deploy our cached states to be able to select the type of cached disk to use (tip or checkpoint), the git source preference for the cached state (main branch, PR branch, any branch) and the network. This also allows the deployment of nodes without cached states (enabling the previous behavior), as some tests are expected to be done without a cached state attached. We also fixed a related bug in our CI whereby some tests were failing due to not finding a cached disk even though it was not required.

Finally we started looking into whether we could have Github Enterprise enabled as a non-profit, to take advantage of GitHub Advanced Security for ZF.

Thank you for reading!

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