Zingo Labs Accelerates Zcashd Deprecation, With Zaino

Why Zingo Labs is Not Going to Deliver a Deliverable

Zingo Labs is not going to complete the Remote ReadStateService feature as we had planned in Zaino MS3.

For the last 6 months Zingo Labs has been maximally engaged with Z3 coordination efforts. We’ve announced our intentions in the form of community reviewed grant proposals, and our core developers have attended most (if not all) of the relevant weekly meetings.

Our development itself is open-source on github, and @pacu has published a weekly summary of it.

In short, we’ve done our very best to develop in a maximally open and informative way, and to be responsive to all feedback offered.

In spite of this, it’s now clear that a non-trivial effort on the part of Zingo Labs, diverged from some expectations.

Since March 20th @str4d has opened these very insightful issues (3/4 in the last week) (Thanks @Str4d !).

I’ve spoken with stakeholders like @aquietinvestor @daira @nuttycom @idky137 and @joshs about how we can coordinate more effectively.

So.. here’s the first question:

  • What’s the right question?

I think the right question is:

  • How can we maximize velocity towards Zcashd deprecation?

I think the answer is that we need closer collaboration including more reciprocal code review among the teams, but as I mentioned above, that’s already occurring.

So the next question is:

  • What else (if anything) needs to change going forward?

I think a goal of the Z3 effort is to expand the set of “core” developers. This is a knowledge transfer process. The more time Zaino developers spend pair-programming with other Zcash developers, the better. We should schedule the time.

It’s important to remember that some folks have been working in this space for almost 10 consecutive years!! And others have entered in the last 9 months.

That’s the actual structure of some of our collaborations, let’s take that into account and properly transmit the knowledge of our lineage.

Now.. for the retrospective.. would I change anything if I could go back in time?

Maybe not.. the fact is that the “divergent” work that’s been done by the Zaino team has allowed us to greatly improve our understanding of the space. While we were doing that other teams were working on other priorities for their own reasons.

That having been said, let’s be aware of the realities on the ground, and properly invest in expanding the set of core contributors!

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Hey folks!

I am thrilled to announce that we’ve completed Zaino MS3!

Details can be found here:

The key takeaways:

Added the ReadStateService
  • Implemented lightwallet indexing capability for the read state service.
  • Made zainod/zaino indexer configurable to allow state service backend.
Added the JsonRpSee
  • Updated jsonrpc backend/client to use JsonRpSee, now has parity with zebra and zallet.
  • Added jsonrpc server.
Additional Rearchitecture

As mentioned previously we are now rearchitecting some pieces that were mis-specified in the earlier version of Zaino. This will require significant additional development.

We have scoped the new requirements and reallocated developers such that we will be able to keep Zaino on schedule (by parallelizing this rearchitecture work, with the previously planned Zaino Completion Grant.

In order to complete the rearchitecting work in parallel with the continuation grant, and keep Zaino on schedule, we anticipate asking for more funding from the @ZCG.

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