Zcash Shielded News | Vol.12
Zodl 3.2.0 update, Zebra 4.3.0 is Live! Zcomm Recap, ZCG inviting 2-3 Zcash representatives to DWeb Camp, Exit the system | ZODL update & Zcash Engineering Office Hours #7: Zcash Names
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!
📩 In today’s edition:
🚀 ZODL Update 3.2.0
• ZODL released version 3.2.0, bringing continued improvements and updates to its censorship-resistant digital money experience.
🦓 Zebra 4.3.0 is live!
• Zcash Foundation announced Zebra 4.3.0, featuring critical security fixes, ZIP-235 support, and performance improvements.
🎤 Zcomm Recap
• Zcomm brought together speakers from across the privacy ecosystem for a series of community-focused workshops, with strong engagement across livestreams and community channels.
🌿 ZCG is inviting a team of 2–3 individuals to represent Zcash at DWeb
• ZCG is looking for a small team to represent Zcash at DWeb Camp 2026: Root Systems, a gathering focused on building a more private, resilient, and decentralized web.
🔐 Exit the System | ZODL Update
• Josh’s message this week focused on the growing concentration of power over data, identity, money, and freedom, calling for faster adoption and development of private, secure, and censorship-resistant tools.
🛠️ Zcash Engineering Office Hours #7: Zcash Names
• Julian and James will present Zcash Names, an on-chain naming service that connects .zcash names to Zcash addresses, followed by a live Q&A.Fact of the Week 💡
Orchard hides more than just balances. In Zcash’s Orchard protocol, each action is structured as both a spend and an output, helping hide transaction structure more effectively
A More Polished ZODL Experience, Now Live 🚀
Last week, ZODL released its latest update, centered on a simple idea: make the product people already use feel even better.
This release brings smarter swaps and a more polished, unified experience across iOS and Android. It is not about adding noise. It's about improving the details that shape the experience of the products people use every day.
A key change in this update is how swaps to ZEC are handled. In the past, a swap could fail if a deposit arrived just below the quoted amount because of fee fluctuations or rounding. Now, instead of failing, the swap completes with a proportionally adjusted output. It is a small change on the surface, but an important one in practice: fewer unnecessary failures, and a more forgiving experience for users.
The team has also shipped a substantial round of fixes and platform improvements designed to bring iOS and Android into closer alignment. Terminology, colors, layouts, behaviors, and localization have been made more consistent across both platforms. For users who use both, the experience should now feel noticeably more seamless.
The cumulative effect of these improvements is a ZODL experience that is more consistent, more polished, and more resilient where it matters most.
The update is now available on the App Store and Google Play. Check it out!
For devs and Zebra node operators, here is an important update from the Zcash Foundation.
Zebra 4.3.0 is now available and includes critical security fixes. All Zebra node operators are strongly encouraged to upgrade immediately.
This release fixes two important vulnerabilities in Zebra’s V5 transaction handling. One could allow a specially crafted transaction to crash a Zebra node remotely. The other affected the transaction verification cache and could, in a narrow edge case, have led to a chain split between Zebra nodes and the rest of the network. Test coverage was also expanded to help prevent regressions in these areas.
Beyond the security fixes, Zebra 4.3.0 adds initial support for the Network Sustainability Mechanism (ZIP-235) behind a feature flag, introduces improved profiling tooling and documentation for developers, fixes block propagation on Regtest, corrects the pre-Canopy block subsidy calculation in getblocksubsidy, and resolves a Testnet performance regression caused by repeated checkpoint parsing.
A few editions ago, we announced Zcomm, ZF’s newest community event focused on workshops, which was hosted for the first time last Tuesday.
The event featured influential speakers from a range of privacy-focused projects, and it was simultaneously streamed across multiple community channels. On X, communities such as ZK AV Club, ZK Radio, & Zcash Brazil helped amplify the event, doubling its reach and bringing the combined live viewership to 500 viewers across all streams. It was a great success.
Each presentation ran for over an hour and covered highly relevant topics aimed at expanding community knowledge and supporting growth across the ecosystem.
The featured sessions included:
PG, Web3 Privacy Now — How to Build Strong Partnerships with Aligned Communities and Organizations (1h22)
Harsh, Aztec — Zypherpunk: How We Ran the World’s Biggest Privacy Hackathon Ever (51m42s)
Mai Ishikawa, DWeb — Designing Engaging Workshops & Roundtables: Tools for Inclusive, Action-Driven Sessions (1h28)
Naomi Brockwell — Building Online Communities Around Privacy and Shared Values (1h22)
The presentations were also followed by questions submitted by the community on Discord and asked live by moderators such as Neal (ZODL), Squirrel (ZecHub), Dismad (ZecHub) and Ryan (ZK AV).
If you are part of the Spanish-speaking community or understand the language, here is a great recap by Zcast.
Are you interested in representing Zcash at an event?
If so, ZCG is inviting a team of 2–3 individuals to represent Zcash at DWeb Camp, July 8-12.
In case you’re not familiar with it yet, DWeb Camp 2026: Root Systems is a five-day immersive gathering held in nature that brings together builders, researchers, and visionaries committed to creating a more decentralized web.
The event is centered on the idea of strengthening an internet that is more private, resilient, and less dependent on the control of large centralized powers.
The theme, “Root Systems,” draws an analogy to forests: just as trees rely on dense underground networks that share resources and keep the ecosystem alive even when some parts disappear, decentralized systems also find their strength in invisible, distributed, and non-hierarchical connections beneath the surface.
Send your application to grants@fpriv.org, including:
Total USD amount requested for the team (travel, ticket, accommodation)
A brief summary of your team and your qualifications to represent Zcash
Any additional information you’d like ZCG to consider
The ZK AV Club team will also be there, covering the event’s audiovisual production.
Josh’s message this week is about how today’s digital system is increasingly concentrating power over our data, identity, money, and freedom in the hands of a few. There is an urgent need to build and adopt private, secure, and censorship-resistant tools before this level of control grows even further. In short, his message is a call to accelerate the development and use of privacy-preserving technologies as a real alternative to the current system, which is especially important today.
ZODL
Released Zodl 3.2.0 on iOS and Android with cross-platform UX/UI improvements, bug fixes, and Spanish translation updates.
iOS shipped with Swift SDK 2.4.8.
Android 3.2.0 shipped with FLEX_INPUT for swaps and a Tor protection widget prompt.
Continued Keystone hardware wallet follow-up: Disconnect Keystone, Connect Keystone with Wallet Birthday Height, and Resync Wallet.
Advanced product and design work for Maya, Ledger, Send+Pay integration, Send MAX, and Address Rotation.
Kicked off the Engineering/Product Roadmap.
Signed an additional iOS developer.
Metrics
🍎 | iOS: 39.5k unique installs (+0.3k), 46.5k downloads (+0.3k), 4.9★ rating.
🤖 | Android: 15.6k install base, 47k total installs (+0.4k), 4.26★ rating (-0.02).
Zcash Core
Completed ZIP 316 Revision 2; Revision 1 was formally withdrawn.
Key ZIP 316 changes included disallowing transparent items in Revision 2 UAs, adding P2SH support to unified viewing keys for FROST multisig, creating registry tables, and documenting jumbling motivation.
Shipped ZIP 48 OVK derivation, enabling P2SH multisig-to-shielded payments with view capability.
Merged PCZT generalization and reviewed PCZT RPC methods for Zallet.
Unblocked most remaining Zallet alpha.4 scope, which is now progressing.
Returned from the High Assurance Cryptography Symposium and Real World Crypto in Taipei with increased confidence in Zcash’s path toward full post-quantum security.
Reviewed a proposed PIR ZIP and identified parameter changes that could reduce private nullifier lookup bandwidth by requiring one query instead of two.
Other
Continued operationalizing policy and regulatory activities.
Held meetings with key stakeholders ahead of EthCC side meetings, including an initial conversation with the Near General Counsel.
Met with a recent appointee to the Federal Reserve’s Innovation Policy & Research team to explore engagement opportunities for Zodl.
Continued collaboration with Kenbak on Zectix integration with Luma and CipherPay to enable Zcash payments for Luma events.
Grayscale published Advancing Privacy in the Age of AI.
Cypherpunk Holdings’ CIO made the case for $4,000 ZEC based on capturing 2% of Bitcoin and gold markets.
Messaging emphasized that Zcash’s TAM dwarfs Swiss bank accounts.
Josh will be speaking at Consensus Miami (May 5–7).
Join us for Zcash Engineering Office Hours where Julian and James (the team behind Zcash.me and ZcashNames) will walk through their latest venture: an on-chain naming service that maps human-readable .zcash names to Zcash addresses.
Topics:
How the on-chain registry works and how wallets can resolve names without relying on a centralized lookup
The identity layer connecting ZcashNames to Zcash.me profiles for sender/receiver verification
The “Log in with Zcash” authentication flow using one-time passcodes sent to shielded addresses
Then they will open the floor for live Q&A.
Save The Date
📅 | Date: Monday, April 7
⏰ | Time: 1:00 PM UTC
📍 | Where: Zcash Discord Stage
Recording: available afterward via ZecHub / Zcash Brazil