Hi everyone,
This is the Zcash Foundation’s Engineering update for Sprint 9 (April 28th - May 9th) of 2025.
During this sprint we focused on releasing Zebra 2.3.0 which was unfortunately delayed due to issues with our CI integration tests with lightwalletd which was preventing us from ensuring that the latest release would not break anything there.
Other work this sprint included finishing off the work to refactor the RPCs related to block template generation in Zebra. We also merged the PR to add the size and time fields to the getrawtransaction RPC which completes the getrawtransaction RPC work in Zebra and we are looking into updating the validateaddress RPC method to be able to support all types of addresses, including Unified and TEX address. In preparation for zcashd deprecation, we have been working on integrating Zaino, Zallet and Zebra to be able to start running automated tests. We have also started working on constructing shielded coinbase transactions, starting with unified orchard addresses and updating the getblock RPC to return data on value pools and chain supply. Finally we have been working on a new RPC method mempool_transactions to notify RPC clients when transactions have been added or removed from the mempool.
Other requested fixes this sprint included the work to ensure the getblockchaininfo RPC response returns chain upgrades in order to match zcashd, updating the z_gettreestate RPC to make the finalState field optional and improving the error message returned by zebra when it crashes on start up due to not being able to create or open its state database.
Finally, in order to allow downstream zebra crate consumers to have more control over the versions of their dependencies, we have changed our dependabot settings to only update the Cargo.lock file going forward.
With the latest favourable audit on the FROST server and client components, we have now concluded our development work on the FROST reference implementation, frost-core, and the frost server, frostd, and frost-client until such a time as wallets wishing to integrate FROST provide additional feature requests or request help in using the FROST reference implementation. A blog post highlighting this milestone and next steps will be published later this week.
On DevOps, we spent some time investigating the issues with the lightwalletd tests in CI and also started looking into optimising CI compilation times.
Thank you for reading!