Hi everyone,
This is the Zcash Foundation’s Engineering update for Sprint 22 (October 22nd - November 4th.)
During this sprint the team worked on publishing the NU6 Stable release (v2.0.1) and with that, finalizing all the work required for zebra to activate NU6 on mainnet in a couple of weeks time. We are still working on reviewing and revising the work on adding the spent outpoint and nullifier indices that a zcashd replacement wallet will need from Zebra and reviewing the work to support transactions with unmined inputs in the mempool, to ensure that Zebra can support TEX transactions. This is complex new functionality and we want to ensure that it works correctly before merging.
We’ve also continued working on implementing some of the RPC methods that have been requested by current zcashd users including the getblockheader RPC method and updates to the getblock RPC method and getrawtransaction RPC method so that they match zcashd output. As part of this focus on Zebra’s RPC support, we are tackling some technical debt to migrate from the currently un-maintained jsonrpc crate.
On the FROST project, we have continued to review and make updates to the external PR which adds a new ciphersuite crate frost-secp256k1-tr, and ensuring some of this work can also be leveraged in a Zcash context. We have also been reviewing the work to define the structure and semantics of the PCZT format, which is key in enabling the creation of shielded transactions offline and allowing for FROST to be easily applied in a Zcash context.
On the DevOps side this sprint we’ve been reviewing our GCP infrastructure costs with a view to reducing them and have also been working on ensuring that external contributor PRs are able to run CI without false negative failures due to missing parameters.
Thank you for reading!