Zcash Arborist Call Summary
Research & Development updates - December 13th 2023
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 12/13.
Check out the recent updates on the Zcash protocol and stay up to date with what’s to come.
Enjoy! 😊
@ZcashFoundation released Zebra 1.5.0.
It contains networking improvements & Fixes, some of which reported by Ziggurat team. Main addition introduces support for shielded scanning!
You can now add multiple sapling viewing keys to Zebra's config file. 🔍
Zebra then scans the blockchain, storing results such as Txid's/associated keys in persistent storage
They also have a tool which prints memos of these transactions. 💬
Please Note the warning present in release notes for the prototype design. ⚠️
The implementation uses synchronous communication between the scanning + rest of the node, leaking information.
The scanning implementation created is a Minimum Viable Product.
Intended to raise discussion around ideal deisgns & imrpovements.
Consumers of the future API & users of the scanning are welcome to request adjustments for their needs.
@jackgavigan clarifying @ZcashFoundation work on Zebra is not to build a wallet.
Intention is to provide functionality in Zebra that will support external clients, including wallets entirely separate from Zebra.
Kris led the ECC core team updates.
Extraction of sapling crypto crate from librustzash is now complete.
The GitHub Zcash sapling crypto repository has the updated version of all of the sapling code. Now restructured to follow the model developed for #Orchard.🌳
This will allow for @Brave's use of @Zcash client backend. 🦁.
Sapling capabilities will be feature flagged off.
A new release of Zcashd is also expected very soon!.
@nuttycom announcing plans to organize a task force to help review & potentially take over maintainership of zcashd.
Moving forward, ECC's future work will shift towards Zebra.
In order to avoid a chain fork at halving zcashd & zebrad have to implement the same consensus rules.
There is therefore some urgency to shift the network repidly to zebrad.
Good set of consensus rules uniformly distributed across the network also required for NU6
@nate_zec led the update on Trailing Finality Layer research.
The last big milestone was sort of publishing TFL book v.0.1.0
This was done while completing an initial core consensus constructions - Cross Link
3 Ongoing Tasks:
Transition all Crosslink writing into once document.
Creating a simulator to model consensus rules that can model different kinds of attacks or edge cases.
Creating a prototype that mashes together Zebra and Coment BFT.
@feministPLT recently made good progress on the Streamlet implementation mentioned in an earlier summary.
It works and tests are correctly detecting safety violations. ✅
Consideration is to record a proof on chain whenever a BFT safety violation occurs. ⛓️
Anyone with feedback on the design is welcome to visit the forum thread.
Or leave a ticket on the TFL book GitHub / PoS channel in Zcash R&D Discord.
@equilibrium_co have created a few PR's:
Tornek wrote a simple tool to estimate transactions fees based on past 100,000 blocks to check ZSF's 60/40 fee split.
A simplified ZIP-317 model was used which gave a result of 800 coins being sent to ZSF per year.
Nate stating this change can be impactful if aggregate fees go up in future - ideal to pursue.
ZSF is a mechanism that could be purposed for new types of fees.
Options being ZSA's, bridging & possible PoS or DeFi related protocol features.
FROST team continuing to add communication to the demo.
@chelseakomlo wrote a security proof for FROST itself with @conradoplg contributing, likely published to eprint soon!
A PR opened on FROST crates will add the #Bitcoin compatible cipher suite.
ZIPs for the ZSA protocol on Orchard have been mostly stable, almost ready to be merged.
Some initial work being done for v6 transactions.
At the moment it appears that no circuit changes are necessary beyond the changes already in place for ZSAs ☑️
We welcome additional comments from Vivek on the asset swap proposal!
Due to Binance’s recent regulatory action, Jonrouach raised a proposal for the ZSA Roadmap aimed at working with exchanges and offering a robust compliance solution.
Essentially based on consent tied to a user’s transaction.
Jon is encouraging anyone who has opinions on this topic to add to the community forum post while they are actively searching.
Brief mention that transparent transactions may be heading towards regulatory scrutiny.
Watch the recent ZKProof panel!