Arborist Call #77 - Summary
Arborist Call is a bi-weekly call dedicated to developments in the Zcash protocol. In it, developers from ECC, ZF and engineers from third-party wallets like yWallet, Zingo, etc. come together to go over all the recent progress made on their projects, answering questions and proving transparency.This summary is focused on the last call that occurred on 27/05/2024.
Check out the recent updates on the Zcash protocol and stay up to date with what’s to come.
This Call happened after the awesome ZconV party, and the teams are regrouping and getting back to work, but plenty has happened behind the scenes in the Zcash Ecosystem, let’s see what’s new.
Enjoy! 😊
ECC Update - Binance TEX addresses / Zashi currency conversion
The guys at ECC have been working hard on Binance TEX addresses. They’re collaborating with Binance to add an RPC method that allows their zcashd setup to check TEX address conversions. Things have been a little bouncy, with Binance jumping in and out of the mission, so the ECC team decided to just go ahead and add the feature themselves.
Another matter they’re working on is on how currency conversion in Zashi Wallet is going to work.
They believe they can come up with an “approach that enables access to exchange rates in a verifiable way”, so they don’t have to rely on a lightwalletd cache that could be manipulated.
Also, they’re trying to do the conversion in a way that doesn’t reveal a lot of unnecessary data to the currency servers and that is resistant to exchange rate manipulation.
Zebra Update - Zebra 1.7.0 / Regtest tutorial
Alfredo told us about Zebra 1.7.0, which was released right before the start of ZconV. This release mostly focused on adding regtest and custom testnet support.
Zebra team is working on a tutorial for people to start using regtest on Zebra, and they’re also upgrading some ECC dependencies, like zcash primitive, zcash proofs, and all those dependencies coming from ECC.
Finally, they’re adressing a bug reported by Andrew Arnott about me gettreestate method.
ECC & ZF - Zcashd Deprecation
The work on moving away from zcashd keeps going, with the team working on getting the Rust library as up to date and stable as possible before moving away from C++.
They’re also fixing bugs on the backend and its dependencies, in order to start working on an eventual full node wallet.
Also, Str4d has been working on making the Sapling code and its dependencies non-necessary or obligatory, so that developers don’t have to include them if they’re not going to use them.
He puts Brave Wallet as an example. Since the browser is working on deploying transparent and Orchard pools, but won’t be enabling the ability to use the Sapling pool.
The goal is to make things easier for developers who want to deploy both a shielded and a transparent pool, so they can focus in Orchard without having the obligation to handle Sapling as well.
Research & Implementation Updates - i) Zcash Shielded Assets ZIPs
The ZSAs team has been discussing about note encryption and halo2 gadgets chances, both matters needed to start making ZSAs a reality. Some interesting questions were made, like “can asset desc be zero-length?” “What data do nodes need to store and what states do they need to track.
There’s also the discussion about asset definition and asset issuance. Should defining an asset have a different fee from issuing an already defined asset? What impact would tracking all these states have on the nodes and the network?
Many important question, especially when it comes to how wallets handle ZSAs.
Research & Implementation Updates - ii) FROST demo
FROST is almost ready! Conrado mentioned the release of a FROST demo that, after some final work, should be ready to be ran by everyone interested in trying it.
The demo makes it possible to run FROST in different machines across different places by using a server that helps people sending messages back and forth. They need to implement some user registration mechanism, add encryption, authentication and other user related functions.
Research & Implementation Updates - iii) TFL presentation
Daira Emma just pointed us to their ZconV presentation about Zcash’s TFL, this and other presentations can be found at the Zcash Foundation’s Youtube Channel
Open Announcements - i) My First Zcash Workbook
Jack went on to announce My First Zcash, the open source workbook created by Elise and crafted with the help of all the Zcash Community that talks about money, decentralized finances and Zcash.
Open Discussion - i) Memo Bundle Design
The discussion about Memo Bundling came back to life again. Daira Emma, Str4d and Kris discussed about the two possible ways to implement the feature.
The alternatives are one previously considered: replacing the plaintext of a note with a key that can be used to decrypt bundle data stored in a different place in the transaction. With this approach, it would be possible to share memos between recipients and shielded pools.
The other alternative is to use a Key Derivation Function, or KDF. This would complicate things a bit more, and make transactions as a whole a bit heavier, but would add the benefit of granularity, where a user could then choose between revealing all data inside a transaction, or only the financial data, without revealing the memo.
So far, the team seems to be leaning to the prior, simpler approach considered, since it would also be cheaper on network cost, but a final decision is yet to be made.
Daira Emma closed with an awesome message from a fortune cookie:
The secret of success is to have a constant goal. The constant goal is privacy