Hi everyone,
This is the Zcash Foundation’s Engineering update for Sprint 23 (November 5th - November 18th.)
During this sprint we continued to work on supporting zcashd deprecation with the implementation of the getblockheader RPC which is needed for block explorer support and has been requested by a mining pool. We have also been working on updating our implementation of the getblock RPC and getrawtransaction RPC to match zcashd. We also merged the work to support transactions with unmined inputs in the mempool, to ensure that Zebra can support TEX transactions.
We have been struggling with some CI issues in the past couple of weeks that have taken the focus away from zcashd deprecation and have prevented us from merging PRs as quickly as we would like.
The team has also been preparing for NU6 activation, which is happening this weekend.
Finally, we’ve been reviewing a number of external contributions, thank you to @elijahhampton, @idky137, @mariopil, @sellout and @zancas among others for those!
On FROST, we finished reviewing the external PR to add a new ciphersuite crate frost-secp256k1-tr to the FROST reference implementation. We have now merged this work and are planning to make a release of FROST that includes this in the coming weeks. We would like to thank everyone who worked on this PR as well as all other external contributors who have contributed to FROST over the past few weeks.
Finally we have been working on adding refresh share functionality to the DKG scenario and are looking to merge this work soon.
We have also continued working on the FROST for Zcash demo which, when completed, should provide a comprehensive example for how FROST might be integrated into a wallet for its use in Zcash. Over the past sprint we have finalized the work to add encryption and authentication to frost-client communications.
On the DevOps end we have been focusing on ensuring that all tests are passing in our CI and fixing failures due to broken tests. After spending some time on attempting to migrate from mergify to github merge queues, we had to abandon this project as it would have introduced additional manual processes into the Engineering team’s workflows.
Thank you for reading!