Shielded ZEC on Brave, ZF Engineering Updates, Zcash Z3 Updates, Results from the Coin Vote, Everything Everywhere All At Once - ECC Updates & Zcash and NYM Hangout.
Providing insight on current events and informing the community about important news in the Zcash ecosystem.
Check out the best Highlights below
After a considerable amount of hard work, meetings, and brainstorming sessions, ECC proudly announced last week the integration of Shielded ZEC into Brave Wallet, a browser-based wallet. You can see how it started here
Brave Wallet now supports Shielded ZEC, marking a major milestone for Zcash and the broader push for privacy in Web3. This integration is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Electric Coin Co. (ECC), Brave, and the Filecoin Foundation, which started informally at a barbecue in Austin and evolved into a sustained, deep partnership.
This is the first time zero-knowledge support has been built into a browser-based wallet, allowing users to store and spend shielded ZEC directly in Brave—making private, accessible web payments a reality.
The announcement emphasizes that this was not a one-off project, but a long-term effort built on shared values: privacy as a fundamental right, not a luxury. The teams from ECC and Brave have worked closely over the past 3 years, meeting regularly and collaborating at all levels.
This is a major privacy win for users, the Web3 ecosystem, and anyone who believes in financial freedom online.
Here’s a simple step-by-step of this amazing integration from brave’s announcements.
Click Send in the sidebar menu.
Select an asset to send.
Choose a recipient.
Confirm the transaction.
Brave is one of the best browser for privacy ever, and having them as part of the shielded ecosystem is a good achieve for a better world.
Onward.
Following to the protocol development we have news from the Zcash Foundation team of the Sprints 5 & 6.
Sprint 5
Pili kicked off the update sharing that Sprint 5 started with ZconVI with the team engaging in the event participating in the ZF’s engineering update and the as well as helping to moderate sessions and provide session timestamps and resources.
During the remainder of the Sprint 5, the Zebra Team looked into an issue ZingoLabs have been experiencing when syncing coinbase spend.
This issue was fixed during Sprint 6 when the team got together with Zingolabs engineers in Sofia, Bulgaria during the Zcash Dev Summit. They also worked on adding the size field to the getblock RPC method response, at verbosity level 2.
During Sprint 6, the Engineering team travelled to Sofia, Bulgaria for a team retreat and the Zcash Dev Summit as well as a number of cryptography conferences happening there, including Real World Crypto.
On FROST, the team continued to address findings from the security audit of the frost client and server, frostd.
On devops the team fixed an issue that was incorrectly preventing tests from passing and have been hindering our ability to merge work to our main branch.
After the trip to ZF Dev Summit and conferences in Sofia, the teams are back. Pacu shared new updates of Zcash Z3 and said that the last Arborist Call already showed a lot of progress made on all fronts, recommending interested people to check out the recording for more details.
Here’s the updates of April 4th.
🦓| Zebra Development
Bug Fix: A persistent TrustedChainSync error affecting Zaino was fixed. Kudos to Zaino and Zebra devs!
CI Issues Resolved: Marek resolved major CI (Continuous Integration) infrastructure issues, which had been slowing development.
Ongoing Work:
Shielded coinbase support in getblocktemplate for Orchard Unified addresses.
Improvements to getblock, getaddresstxids, and getaddressdeltas.
🛠️ | Zaino (ZingoLabs)
Status: Almost back on track!
Milestone 3: Progressing well.
Follow-up Grant: A new grant proposal submitted for additional unscheduled work.
In Progress:
Compact block fetch-by-hash (get_block gRPC).
Fix for get_latest_block issue.
In-memory backend PR is pending review — reviewers needed!
🪙 | Zallet (Full Node Wallet)
Status: Delayed by 2 months but catching up fast.
Progress:
Transparent Gap Limit implemented.
Chain sync with Zaino successful.
ZeWIF import of wallet.dat files.
Working on z_sendmany RPC and wallet export format.
📁 | Wallet Export (ZeWIF)
Status: On track.
Note: Still looking for wallet files to test.
Update: @shannon-bc shared the latest progress (link included in original post).
🧪 | Regtest
Status: First review round addressed.
PR is still open and receiving feedback. Community invited to review and comment.
In a nutshell, multiple Zcash-related projects are progressing steadily, with some delays and challenges being actively resolved. Strong collaboration is driving continuous improvements across wallets, infrastructure, and developer tools.
This allows Zcash to scale through Orchard proof aggregation and oblivious syncing. ECC will embrace this work and, at least, contribute to research and development on out-of-band payments.
Hybrid PoW/PoS will unlock yield generation, decentralize mining, provide finality guarantees, improve interoperability, and improve coinholder participation in governance and funding decisions.
As part of the update, Josh approached good things about the sentiment of the Zcash community over the years and how we are growing now, due to the right choices.
Part 1: Facing Harsh Truths
ECC and the community took a hard look at what wasn’t working:
ZEC price was declining, hurting sentiment.
User losses due to ASICs, poor wallet UX, lack of yield opportunities, and attacks.
The legacy zcashd codebase was slowing down innovation.
Wallets weren’t user-friendly enough for mainstream adoption.
Shielded pool growth stalled, indicating weak new user onboarding.
Governance was too centralized, and decision-making lacked transparency.
Scaling issues persisted, even if other problems were solved.
Part 2: Choosing Hope and Taking Action
Rather than giving in to pessimism, the community took bold steps:
Embraced that ZEC’s price does matter.
Crosslink became a priority at Shielded Labs.
Multiple orgs collaborated to retire zcashd.
ECC launched Zashi, a modern ZEC wallet.
Zashi team and Keystone released the first shielded hardware wallet.
ECC rejected guaranteed funding and dropped the trademark deal with the Zcash Foundation—shifting governance.
Transparency and collaboration reached new highs.
Orchard protocol and new research paved the way for scalability.
Part 3: Everything, All at Once
Zcash momentum is now undeniable:
Big announcements on April 2nd.
Governance and funding models being reimagined to empower the community.
Final app redesignw ork progressed, focusing on the Wallet Status Widget and cross-chain paymenets for Maya and NEAR. Ad Hoc edits were made perproduct and engineering needs. Receive ZEC designs were improved to support address rotation and multiple accounts.
🧑💻| Q&A and Dev Support
Testing & QA
Tracking issues for the devs in GitHub
User Support queries & Discord
Socials Management
Community Engagement
🍎| Zashi iOS
The Restore Wallet flow was redesigned, adding features like seed word suggestions, manual birthday input, and SDK-based height estimation. MnemonicSwift 2.0.5 was released with BIP39 dictionary support. The Crate wallet flow was refactored to streamline onboarding and handle existing databases. Progress was also made on the Wallet Status Widget, with business logic complete and UI in Development
🤖| Zashi Android
Released Zashi v1.5-1.5.2 along with Zcash SDK updates v2.2.9-2.2.11. Finalized and merged a major Restore flow redesign. Identified a bug and helped fix it in Flexa (SDK v1.0.12). Began work on a new SDK API for estimating wallet birthday from a date. Completed UI and navigation for the Wallet Status Widget and bottom sheet. Delivered hotfixes for keyboard and bottom sheet behavior during navigation, and refactored UI components and bottom sheets for better reusability and reduced code duplication.
🦓| Zcash Core
A proposal has been written for NU7 to enhance note encryption with post-quantum resilience. This small protocol change would make new notes unforgeable by quantum adversaries, offering protection before a full post-quantum-safe proving system is in place. Wallets will implement the change, and Daira-Emma is preparing to present it to the community next week.
Released zcash_transparent 0.2.2 and zcash_client_sqlite 0.16.2 to fix issues in transparent wallet recovery.
Updated zcash-devtool and zallet to the latest crate stacks & did other dependency upgrade work, and in the process made contributions to zaino and zebrad.
Work on Zingo and Zewif integration is ongoing. ECC is actively upstreaming contributions to both as friction points appear in integration.
🌐| Other
@peacemonger’s designed a killer advert for Brave.
Attended the American Innovation Project (a Blockchain Association Initiative) & Digital Currency Group Dinner with Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA-10) and a number of Capitol Hill staffers with a small group of industry leaders.
Josh participated in an Agoric Board meeting on behalf of Bootstrap.
Recently, we had the first experiment with the Coin-Holder system created by Han and organized by Jason McGee & Dismad.
Similar to previous polls, coinholders needs to move their ZEC into the Orchard pool during a designated registration window and then apply their vote.
If you aren’t aware about it, The Coin Voting 2.0 application is a standalone system for elections, separate from YWallet. It involves four steps:
Creation (defining vote parameters), hosting (logistics and ballot submission)
Voting (with Orchard funds and vote delegation)
Auditing (verification using a seed phrase to confirm results). Users need to download the app separately,
Auditors validate the final results after the election.
Once the deadline has passed, the results are made live, marking the conclusion of the election process.
This mechanism is very important (and will continue to be) for future decisions in the ecosystem. If you want to try it out, check the entire thread to learn more.
As part of our mission to expand Zcash and the shielded ecosystem, in partnership with NYM, we held a live stream on YouTube for a discussion on privacy, technologies, and much more.
During the chat, we shared the history of Zcash, explained how it works, how our community operates on Discord with events and bounties, and covered other unmissable topics.
We highly recommend everyone take a look at this session. 🙂
Shot out to Squirrel & NYM Squad who nailed this talk.
