ZSAs in NU7, H2 2025 Extension

Community Grants Applications
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Dear Zcash community,

Hope all of you have had a great start to 2026! We’d like to share with you here our update on what we have been working on in the last few weeks.

The orchard crate

  • The ECC performed reviews on our OrchardZSA PR (PR#471). We have discussed the comments with them, and we are have made good progress in resolving those comments - progress which can be seen in our internal pull requests.

    Significant changes include:

    • Replacing k256 dependency with secp256k1 to be eco-system compatible.
    • Introduction of a zsa-issuance feature flag
    • Changes (mostly reductions) to visibility modifiers for various data structures.
    • Various fixes and changes requested by the reviewers.

The Python reference implementation

  • We had opened a new PR (PR#112) to upstream to perform some of the changes requested to be separated out into an independent PR in the review of our ZSA changes to the test vectors (PR#108). We are looking forward to the review of this PR so that we can submit further changes.
  • We are completed updating to upstream (PR#45 and PR#46). We are checking to see if we can reduce the difference with upstream further by shifting non-ZSA specific changes out into separate PRs as mentioned above.

Changes to the librustzcash crate

  • Changes to librustzcash are done to support the Orchard review fixes.
  • We updated the librustzcash crate to account for the updated test vectors after the upstream merge.
  • The test vectors now work with the addition of the zip233Amount to the transaction format.

Zebra

  • 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). We are also adding this functionality to the demo (PR#89).
  • We are continuing to discuss the changes in our pull request (PR#9560) to the upstream repository that covers partial support for ZSAs, via parsing, (de)serialisation and validation of V6 transactions with the Zcash Foundation.
  • The branch that syncs Zebra with the latest versions of our orchard and librustzcash crates can be looked at on this PR Link.
  • We have continued syncing with Zebra - v2.4.2 (PR#87, PR#88).

ZIPs

  • We have opened a minor pull request to remove some older definitions that were no longer used in our ZSA ZIPs.

Updates to zcash_tx_tool

  • Blockchain caching development is in progress - the tx_tool will cache the relevant data from the blockchain (block headers and notes) in order to avoid re-sync after shutdown, just like a real blockchain client.
  • We have continued with automatic pushes of the latest stable Docker images to the ECR.
  • The Docker images are currently being published to ECR at gallery.ecr.aws/j7v0v6n9/tx-tool

ZSA Single node testnet

  • The node for the ZSA single node testnet is now feature complete and includes
    • Issuance, Transfer, Burn, Finalize (due to the addition of the global state logic)

PRs ready for review

  • The zcash_test_vectors changes are in PR#112 for formatting, and in PR#108 for the ZSA changes.
  • The orchard crate changes for ZSA are in PR#471.
  • The librustzcash crate changes for ZSA are in PR#1931.
  • The initial ZSA changes for zebra are in PR#9560.

Best,

The QEDIT Team.

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