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 02/08.
Check out the recent updates on the Zcash protocol and stay up to date with what’s to come.
Enjoy! 😊
@ZcashFoundation released Zebra 1.5.2.
Zebra team keeps working on shielded scanning support. Developing a gRPC front end that will allow users to submit their viewing keys so the scanner can start the trial decription and, then, users can fetch the results.
They’re also working on new Docker compose files that make easier for developers to setup Zebrad together with Lightwalletd and to run locally the same tests they can run in CI.
We moved on to know about Mobile SKD 2.1.
ECC has been working on support for Orchard pool, since they consider they’re done with performance changes for the next release.
Right now, the plan is to work on feature and rust compiler flags that allows developers to upgrade to this version with performance improvements without including Orchard support. Then, when ready, they can focus on including that with upcoming releases.
Their main goal is to put out there all the funcionality needed for launching Zashi 1.0.
Qedit team is working on a transaction testing tool for developers to be able to set up a single node, get the blockchain state and run tests transactions on it. It only works on v5 right now, with PoW swtiched off.
The plan is to move to v6 later and test if it is possible to keep PoW on. Also, they were asked if this could be launched “outside of ZSAs”, to which they responded that they will work on that possibility.
They also submitted a PR with an early draft for asset swapping over Orchard, ZIP 228. Being early work, they make clear there’s a lot of work to do before formally implementing anything, but the work keeps moving forward.
FROST team has finished setting up coordinator and participant so that the first works as server and the second one as client. This will help them talk to each other with no effort and without having to enter all the manual input they need right now. They’re in a review stage while working of the second of their 3 phases process.
This second phase is to decouple the coordinator from the server so such server can run independently. A stable release should arrive as soon as this week.
@feministPLT mentions that ECC is still looking for something useful to show for the Trailing Finality Layer and how long would it take them to come up with it.
The plan right now is to build an abstraction layer for working on a dummy BFT protocol, but that is also useful to build and test different options for that BFT protocol.
However, nothing’s been decided yet.
@feministPLT also announced that she has become the new R&D Engineering Manager for ECC, so she’s stepping down as a ZIP editor to avoid any possible conflicts of interest.
She will still attend ZIP sync meetings and share her knowlegde, but not as a formal editor.
Jon from QEDIT shared the announcement of the ZKProof 6 event.
Event will be held May 22 to 24 in Berlin, and they’re already accepting and reviewing the papers of everyone who want to join and share their advancements in anything ZK.
Also, Jack announced the ZconV, the 5th installment on the Zcash annual conference. This one will be a virtual event, while the next in-person one will be held in Q1 of 2025.