Hi everyone,
This is the Zcash Foundation’s Engineering update for Sprint 2 of 2025 (January 20th - January 31st.)
During this sprint, the Zebra team has continued to focus on Zcashd deprecation work and helping out ecosystem partners as they start to integrate with and hack on Zebra. In particular, we have been working on an issue reported by Zingolabs whereby Zebra’s ReadStateService does not return transparent receipts that are less than a 100 blocks from the chain tip in regtest mode and fixed a bug with blocks mined by Zebra not being advertised in some cases. To ensure that misbehaving nodes are excluded from the zcash network, we have been working on a scoring mechanism for peers, similar to what zcashd currently has.
We also reviewed and merged a PR by an external contributor to respond to getblockchaininfo requests when the state is empty. Thank you @elijahhampton! Finally, we reviewed and merged an initial rust implementation of zcash_script by @sellout.
We also merged the work to add the spent outpoint and nullifier indices that a zcashd replacement wallet will need from Zebra. We have continued to work on fixing the issue whereby we were not enforcing using the correct consensus branch ID in the SIGHASH computation. Due to constraints with the way Rust conditional compilation work, we have found it tricky to test for this issue in CI which has delayed us in merging this work.
In FROST, we reviewed a merged a number of clean ups for the FROST demo, including the change to no longer send participant identifiers, adding a broadcast channel to be used during distributed key generation (DKG), fixing a failure in DKG when someone’s own contact is missing and fixing port handing in the frost-client code. We also made some updates to the zcash-sign tool to fix the name of the binary and update with the latest updated crates.
On DevOps, we finished and published a high level overview of our CI architecture.
Thank you for reading!