Zcash Shielded News | Vol.10
ZODL Raises $25m+ in Seed Funding, Zcash Foundation | Engineering Update, Zcash Z3 Updates, Force Multipliers | ZODL Update & Zcash x Ledger Update
Zcash Shielded News is a community article format based on the weekly Zcash Ecosystem Digest Newsletter.
Providing insight on current events and informing the community about important news in the Zcash ecosystem.
Check out the best Highlights below!
Fact of the Week 💡
Zcash’s shielded protocol uses nullifiers to prevent double-spending without revealing which note was spent.
When a shielded note is used, the network checks whether its nullifier has appeared before, preserving privacy while still enforcing consensus.
📩 In today’s edition:
💰 ZODL raises $25m+ in seed funding
• Zcash Open Development Lab announced a $25M+ raise, backed by major investors and signaling growing confidence in shielded ZEC as private digital money.
🦓 Zcash Foundation | Engineering Update: Feb 23rd - March 8th
• The ZF engineering team shared progress across Zebra, including bug fixes, connection metric improvements, CI upgrades, Z3 integration work, and stronger integration testing.
👨💻 Zcash Z3 updates (formerly Zcashd Deprecation | March 13th 🔪
• New updates from Pacu highlighted resumed outreach efforts, release work on Zaino, continued progress on Zallet, and ongoing coordination across the Z3 transition stack.
🛡️ Force Multipliers | ZODL Update
• Josh reinforced that the recent fundraise is about more than capital — it is about bringing together more partners, support, and momentum to expand Zcash adoption globally.
🔐 Zcash x Ledger Update
• Ledger shared new progress on the Rust migration of the Zcash Device App, shielded balance sync for Ledger Wallet, and ongoing work toward stronger shielded and swap support.
Last week, Peacemonger announced that Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) had secured over $25 million in funding, a move that reinforces market confidence in the growth of shielded ZEC as a form of private digital money.
Among the investors are major names such as Paradigm, a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, and other notable participants from the crypto and technology sectors.
Founded by Josh and made up of much of the former ECC team, ZODL has been expanding its role as one of the main development hubs in our ecosystem. One of its highlights is the continued evolution of the Zodl wallet, formerly Zashi, originally launched in 2024. Since then, it has helped drive growth in the shielded pool and has facilitated more than $600 million in ZEC swaps since October.
Its main goal is to strengthen both protocol development, including core Zcash infrastructure, and the creation of products focused on usability and real-world adoption. The broader vision is to make ZODL a private, open-source, self-custodial financial platform capable of bringing shielded transactions to a wider audience and expanding adoption.
With this new capital, ZODL is expected to accelerate hiring and expand its execution capacity, helping deliver faster progress while continuing to attract serious attention from investors.
Congratulations to the entire ZODL team on this important milestone. We’re excited to see the next developments and the impact this work will have on the growth of our ecosystem. 👏🙂
Over the past few weeks, ZF focused on three main areas: improving Zebra correctness, advancing mining usability, and testing the Z3 stack. New versions of zcash_script were also released.
In Zebra, an important fix resolved a bug in the processing order of transactions that spend outputs from both the chain and the mempool. In practice, this prevents the validator from checking the wrong output during validation.
The team also fixed an issue in the connection counter, which had been reporting inaccurate peer metrics. In addition, a refactor simplified one of the main read routines in the state service, reducing its complexity.
On the infrastructure side, the team created a new reusable GitHub Action to set up Zebra’s build environment and added automated documentation checks. As a result, more than 80 files were improved, with fixes to links, spelling, and formatting.
Work on the Z3 stack is also moving forward, now with a stronger focus on testing and CI integration. Recent progress includes enabling Z3 integration tests to be triggered by changes in the Zebra codebase and adding an OpenRPC router to unify the RPC entry point.
It is also worth highlighting an external contribution from zmanian, who implemented the remaining filters for non-standard mempool transactions. With this, Zebra is now even more closely aligned with the behavior of zcashd.
It’s been a while since we last shared some of Pacu’s updates on Z3 (Zcashd Deprecation) here in the newsletter. Here is the latest update posted on Friday (13th🔪) to bring everyone up to speed.
Over the past week, progress continued across several parts of the Z3 effort, with outreach, release preparation, and integration testing all moving forward.
On the Outreach side, this work has now resumed. The team has started reaching out to exchanges to gather metrics that will help build a more realistic workload test for Zallet.
In Zebra, the ZF engineering team published a much more detailed update than what we usually cover here. A special shoutout goes to Alfredo, who has been doing a great deal of work to improve integration testing. This effort is a key part of increasing confidence in the tooling and making sure the ecosystem is truly ready for the eventual transition away from zcashd.
In Zaino, the ZingoLabs team continues working toward the upcoming 0.2.0 release. As often happens near release time, new issues have surfaced, but the team is putting in the work to improve sync times and smooth out the remaining problems. If you already tested RC4, keep an eye out for the next release candidate coming soon.
The Zallet full node wallet is still progressing toward alpha.4, with a strong focus on integration testing. The team has also put together detailed documentation for anyone interested in better understanding how those integration tests work.
Support for the Block Explorer is still planned, but this work remains paused until chain_state is wrapped up, helping avoid rework once those changes land.
Learn more about Pacu and his work in the ecosystem. 🙂
Josh opened this week’s update by highlighting the investment news mentioned above with the following message: expanding ZEC adoption requires collaboration, ambition, and joint effort.
With more partners, more capital, and more people involved, ZODL believes it is entering a new phase of growth, with greater capacity to expand Zcash’s reach and bring financial privacy to many more people.
If you’d like to read the full text, you can access it at this link.
Zodl (formerly Zashi)
Released Zodl 3.1.0 with Swap and CrossPay UX improvements
Improved cross-platform consistency, bug fixes, and future-focused research
Metrics
🍎 Zodl iOS: 38.7k unique installs (+900), 45.5k downloads (+1,100), 4.9★ rating
🤖 Zodl Android: 14k install base (+500), 46.2k total installs (+1,300), 4.22★ rating
Zcash Core
Reviewed Coinholder Polling architecture
Merged z_getbalances
Advanced Zallet alpha.4 scope, including P2SH redeem scripts and z_shieldcoinbase
Current Priorities
Coinholder Polling ZIPs
NU7 Engineering proposal
Zallet alpha.4
iOS SDK/FFI reunification
Other
Prepared a MiCA Privacy Deep Dive deck and EU Licensing report
Secured participation in EU/MiCA discussions at EthCC
8 days ago, we received new updates from Ledger after a few months.
The migration of the Zcash Device App to Rust has now been completed, and the new version has reached feature parity with the previous C implementation. An external security audit has also been completed, with only minor adjustments requested. After those fixes and final testing, the app is expected to be released on the My Ledger store.
There has also been progress on ZIP-32 support at the device system level. This should enable the next steps toward implementing UFVK sharing and Orchard Unified Address generation within the app.
On the Ledger Wallet desktop side, most of the work on shielded balance synchronization has already been completed, and a broader testing phase should begin soon. The team is also continuing to work on transaction building for different flows, including public, private, and mixed transactions.
As for Zcash Swap inside Ledger Wallet, support through the current transparent integration has already gone live with partners such as Near Intents, Exodus, and Changelly.
Some accounts with v4 Sapling inputs may still face issues when trying to transfer or swap fund, a limitation that is still being addressed and should be resolved as the shielded integration moves forward.
Stay tuned! 👀