Zcash Shielded News | Vol.18
Introducing a New Zcash Trademark Policy, So What’cha Want? | ECC Updates, Zcashd Deprecation Update | 14 February, Librustzcash Crates Walkthrough
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
The Zcash Foundation (ZF) has adopted a new trademark policy to support the growing decentralization of the Zcash ecosystem.
The policy simplifies the process of using the Zcash trademarks, making it more permissive and easier for community members to create and sell Zcash-branded merchandise without the need for explicit licenses.
It also eliminates the trademark’s role in governance, which previously required approval from both ECC and ZF for network upgrades.
This shift reflects Zcash’s open-source, decentralized nature. The ZF remains committed to adapting its approach as the ecosystem continues to evolve, ensuring ongoing decentralization and inviting community feedback.
🔗 |Learn more
Last week, Kris led a great community call, providing a walkthrough and explanation of librustzcash, a repository containing a set of Rust crates for working with Zcash.
If you are a Rust dev or have curiosities about it, here’s the recording with all the details.
The ECC is facing a critical funding decision, with its financial resources projected to run out before the end of 2024 due to a recent drop in ZEC’s price.
Over the past year, the organization has made significant progress on key initiatives, including eliminating the direct development funding model, dissolving the trademark agreement, and improving ZEC’s user experience.
Now, the Zcash community must decide on ECC’s future funding, including whether to continue Lockbox funding beyond November 2025 and whether to open it for ECC’s use in 2025. These decisions are urgent, as they will impact ECC’s ability to plan and could affect the NU7 development timeline.
Josh supports the Community + Coin Holder Funding Model, and polling on funding proposals is set to begin after ZconIV in early March.
ECC Progress
Zashi ( Andrea )
Zashi Design:
Onboarding Redesign:
Continue revisions for Seed Phrase Backup, Restore and Create Wallet flows.
App Home Screen (Empty State and Seed Phrase Backup Banner)
Adhoc stakeholder and engineering edits and improvements
Adjustsments to Advanced Settings and Tax Data Export designs.
👨🏻💻| Q&A and Dev Support ( decentralistdan )
Testing iOS & Android Internal BUilds
Tested FOSS Android Build (F-Droid) - QR Scanning, & Keystone Scanning
User Support: Discord, X, & Email
Zashi Website planning
Zashi Release Comms
Zashi Socials & Content Creations
🍎| Zashi iOS ( Lukas )
Released 1.3.3 with fixes, optimizations and improvements around Keystone & Reset of Zashi.
Investigated Seed Backup Options for IOS
Prepared per account user metadata data storage, waiting on encryption.
Bug troubleshooting:
missing sapling params for the Keystone transactions
crashes of the BG task.
Implemented Keystone UI/UX improvements for canceling and rejecting a transaction + added a new confirmation step.
📱| Zashi Android ( Milan )
Added FOSS build environment for F-Droid
Added mechanism to remove and override non-open source libraries
Removed non-open-source libraries for F-droid (FOSS build only)
ECC’s with Yasser on GitHub releases which will allow the team to distribute the .apk file directly.
Implemented Keystone UI/UX improvements for canceling and rejecting a transaction + added a new confirmation step.
🦓| Zcash Core ( nuttycom )
Kris led a community walkthrough of the librustzcash crate stack.
The core team worked on ZIP editing for NU7 and updated ZIP 32 to replace the “Arbitrary Key Derivation” spec with “Registered Child Key Derivation,” which will be used for encrypting wallet metadata in a future Keystone Zashi firmware release without relying on unrecoverable keys.
@str4d set up comprehensive CI infrastructure for the Zallet codebase & fixed some outstanding CI issues in the light client FFI repository.
Str4d finished up some long-running work on the equihash crate, which unblocks the ZF team for adding internal (testnet) miner functionality to Zebrad.
Current in-progress work includes implementation of the Registered Child Key Derivation protocol in the Rust crates, and fixing a longstanding note commitment tree corruption bug.
Other
@peacemonger completed the ZURE and ZAC surveys along with initial user interviews for Zashi Vault, providing valuable insights, with more details to come and a community-wide survey launching next week.
ECC`s actively interviewing for a Strategic Marketing Manager and making good progress.
Dan has been coordinating with the ZF on ZconVI, and supporting comms, including the new DEX provided by NEAR.
The Bootstrap met for ECC quarterly meeting and reviewed financials and plans.
🔗 | Learn more
The Zebra team is making progress on several key initiatives, including Tier-1 outreach, improvements to the network such as "score and drop" mechanisms for peer connections, and updates to the RPC functionality (e.g., getrawmempool, getpeerinfo).
Zaino, though slightly delayed, is advancing with Milestone 2, focusing on replacing Lightwalletd and implementing necessary PRs. T
The Zallet (Zcash Wallet CLI) is delayed but catching up, with notable work on modularizing Zcash libraries.
The Wallet Export format project is ahead of schedule, and a new repository, zmigrate, is being developed for importing wallet data.
Testing and feedback are needed for zmigrate, especially for shielded transactions. The Regtest feature is on track, with ongoing discussions to define its functionality and write a draft ZIP for it.
Today, the FROST team will be hosting a community call on Zoom about FROST Server at 4PM UTC/ 11AM EST. Click here to get access to the call or just join us on Zcash Global Discord.
Next day, ZF`s @GustavoValverde will host a DevOps Community Call: Using Zebra with Docker and CI/CD.
Same to the FROST Server Call, we will be streaming on Discord as well. Very important topic, so don’t miss it :)
The recording will be posted on media and in this article once ZF publishes it.
Congratulations on each new edition!