Zcash is getting closer towards NU7 deployment as the days go by, and we had shared an update on our usual thread on what we have done so far, and what we hope to do over the next half of the year. This work will engage all the QEDIT team for the second half of 2025 at $118k/month, until Zcash has deployed ZSA.
We are sharing here a link to our grant proposal on GitHub. We’re looking forward to see our development work bring value to this community, and as mentioned, we are working with first issuers towards that goal as well!
This is a big monetary ask at a time when Zcash is struggling to increase adoption for its core purpose (private financial transactions) and limiting damage to privacy caused by transparent transaction data being leaked through the way Unified Addresses were implemented in wallets. Zcash users still have funds stuck in Ledger wallets.
Long term funding for things like ZSAs is still uncertain and they will be expensive to maintain.
Lets focus on our core needs first (usable private currency) before we expand to another area with heavy competition (see newly launched Tari for example) and uncertain demand.
For the good of Zcash (and responsible usage of limited development funds) lets pause all ZSA spending.
PLEASE don’t require community members to sacrifice their privacy and/or values by forcing them into using Google Services to see your slide deck.
Can you provide the information here as well (or host it on a privacy preserving platform)? This is a community that puts a high value on privacy. Lets work harder to respect the privacy of the community members supporting your (highly paid) work.
@vivek at the most recent meeting, ZCG voted to approve this proposal. Congratulations!
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We’d like to share with you here our update on what we have been working on in the last few weeks.
ZIPs
The pull request PR#1048, open for review from the ZIP Editors, has been subsumed by PR#1053 created by the ZIP Editors with some clarifying changes. We reviewed this PR and suggested minor changes, and was recently merged.
The ZIP Editors also created PR#1056 which specifies versioning of the SIGHASH to the transaction format. We are in the process of reviewing this work to confirm it will work for ZSAs and their extension to Swaps.
Changes to the halo2 crate
We currently have open a pull request, PR#845, to upstream, that builds on that initial framework and adds in the chunk of changes that need to be made for ZSA support.
This PR has recently been approved by the ECC, and we are looking forward to it being merged.
Changes to the orchard crate
We are looking forward to receiving feedback from the ECC based on discussions we had about the ZSA changes to orchard. (Link to discussion)
We simplified the circuit and witness management (PR Link, PR Link) and also performed some refactoring to reduce the diff with the upstream so as to simplify the code review process (PR Link).
Further simplification and clean up is still in progress. We are currently working on simplifying the Orchard Flavors and reducing the diff with upstream further (PR Link).
Implementation of the changes that have been made in the ZIPs (as mentioned above) are also being implemented (PR Link). The specific change is the addition of an “algorithm specifying byte” to the encoding of ik and issueAuthSig , and renaming the issuance validating key to issuer in certain portions as described in the ZIPs.
We also completed updates to the PCZT section of the OrchardZSA protocol to better support the way PCZT is implemented in librustzcash (PR Link).
Changes to the librustzcash crate
Just as in orchard, we will be implementing the latest changes that have been made in the ZIPs.
In parallel, we are continuing to progress with the merge of the changes from upstream into our work. For this, we have been understanding the changes to the newly added PCZT section in upstream and make the changes to correctly support the OrchardZSA changes. (PR Link).
We will be discussing the changes required with the ECC once this is ready to get their initial reviews on it.
The Python reference implementation
The ZIP changes also necessitate an update to the Python reference implementation and the test vectors they generate. This is also in progress (PR Link).
Zebra
We had prepared a pull request (PR#9560) to the upstream repository that covers partial support for ZSAs, via parsing, (de)serialisation and validation of V6 transactions. We have received some reviews on this PR, and we are discussing with the Zcash Foundation while making those changes.
This PR uses ZSA capable forks of the various crates (such as orchard, librustzcash and others) down the stack, and therefore merging post review will depend on those forks being merged in those crates.
We have also prepared a branch that syncs Zebra with the latest versions of our orchard and librustzcash crates (PR Link).
We have drafted a sync with a more recent version of upstream to proactively reduce merge conflicts (PR Link).
The state management work continues to progress, and we will submit a subsequent PR with those changes post the review of the current PR. (PR Link)
Updates to zcash_tx_tool
There has been further progress on improving the CI/CD of the repository, and allowing for automatic pushes of the latest stable Docker images to the ECR.
Ongoing work to adapt to the recent changes in librustzcash due to the significant upstream merge.
PRs ready for review
We have submitted PR#845 to the halo2 repository (and PR#429 to the orchard repository as a reference to support the halo2 gadget changes merged in PR#823).