Zcash Shielded News | Vol.28
They Grow Up So Fast - Zashi 2.0, Engineering Update: 2025 Sprint 7, Zcash Z3 Update, A Path Forward Ledger and Zcash & ''Design to Scale'' - ECC 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
Zashi celebrated its one-year anniversary this Monday, and to mark the occasion in the best way possible, the team released its latest version, featuring several exciting interface updates, bug fixes, and much more — all built from community feedback and, of course, the team's hard work.
The goal is simple: to walk you through your wallet step-by-step, so you're always informed and in control.
Whether you're shielding assets, backing up your wallet, or syncing, Zashi now makes your current status clear—along with the smartest next move.
What the Status Widget Helps With:
Shielding Reminders: Zashi protects your privacy by not allowing spending of transparent ZEC directly. Instead, it requires you to shield those coins first—and the wallet’s status widget makes the process simple and clear. It will:
Remind you when you have transparent funds that need shielding.
Provide a shortcut to shield your ZEC instantly
Restoring & Syncing Progress: See exactly where you are in the restore or sync process—no more staring at the screen wondering when the funds will become available.
Other Smart Prompts: Get helpful reminders to back up your wallet, opt into features like currency conversion, and more.
More Improvements
Zashi 2.0 includes a bunch of other upgrades designed to make every part of your experience smoother and more intuitive:
New Navigation Layout: ECC rebuilt Zashi’s navigation to make key actions like Send, Receive, and Scan faster and easier to find. Integrations like Coinbase, Flexa, and Keystone are now just two taps away under the “More” button.
Simplified Wallet Creation: Creating a new wallet shouldn’t feel like a chore, so ECC made it faster and cleaner. No need to worry about backing up your seed phrase before your first transaction.
Better Wallet Backup Flow: ECC improved the backup experience to better guide you through this important step—and to make sure you understand the risks involved.
Smarter Balance Displays: ECC’ve updated the UI for displaying your spendable ZEC balance.
Quick Explainer Elements: Tap on different parts of the new UI to see quick pop-up explainers that won’t clutter your screen.
Zashi has made a strong entrance and is currently the wallet that most pleases the community in terms of development, interface design, and support.
Download it now and enjoy all these amazing features!
Few days ago, Pili shared with us updates from the Sprint 7 (March 31st - April 11th) of 2025.
These updates include the development on Zebra, FROST & DevOps
Check it out! 🙂
During this sprint the team continued to focus on improving Zebra’s RPC methods to match current zcashd usage in order to enable zcashd deprecation. To that effect, the team added support for negative heights as a parameter for a number of RPC methods, fixed the way we parse ranges for the getaddresstxids RPC method and we finally merged a number of fixes, one to ensure that the getpeerinfo RPC reports inbound connections as well as outbound ones and another to add additional fields to the getrawtransaction RPC.
The team has been working on a series of fixes and cleanups. One of the issues, reported by @AloeareV, involved errors occurring during synchronization when a secondary RocksDB instance lagged behind the primary. They also resolved a panic that could occur when executing various commands on the Zebra database while the Zebra process was running, along with a fix for a startup warning that could appear when Zebra was launched.
On the FROST project, they have been working on the last few suggestions reported from the security audit of the frost client and server, frostd, including a suggestion to rename functions and variables in participants and coordinator for improved clarity and a suggestion to improve HTTP error handling.
The DevOps team made several Docker-related improvements, including better image testing, setting the HOME environment variable to fix cache paths, and adding a default test-stage command to avoid gosu errors. They also cleaned up release images by removing experimental features, updated documentation to reflect changes in optional Zebra features, and resolved a flaky lightwalletd acceptance test that was disrupting CI.
🔗Link
Progress on the development of Zcash Z3 continues. Pacu published another update 5 days ago (April 25th).
Check it out!
🌐Outreach
The Z3 team is responding to integration-related info requests from partners to help them plan around the new Zcash stack.
🛠️ | Zaino (ZingoLabs)
Status: Almost back on track
Zallet integration uncovered gaps in Zcashd deprecation planning. Teams are adjusting priorities to fit within current grants and timelines.
💾 In-Memory Backend
Status: Pending review ⚠️
Review needed for this PR. Help appreciated!
💻 | Zallet Full Node Wallet
Status: Delayed ⚠️ (2 months)
Despite the delay, rapid progress is being made. New PRs include config commands, CLI tests, and RPC improvements. Contributors welcome!
💡| Wallet Export Format (ZeWIF)
Status: On-track
Tool development is active. As issues are fixed during integration, community PRs are needed to polish wallet content abstractions.
⚙️ Regtest Mode
Status: Under review
First review round done—more feedback coming in on this PR. Open for community comments!
The Zcash community has faced long-standing issues with Ledger hardware wallets. Recently, a major problem caused Binance to pause ZEC withdrawals because funds got stuck on Ledger devices. Although that specific issue was resolved, other problems remain. One major issue is that Ledger still doesn’t support shielded Zcash transactions through Ledger Live, even after two grants were given to fix it.
The main reason for these problems is that Zcash support on Ledger has mostly been handled by outside developers, not Ledger’s own team. But Ledger is a major hardware wallet provider, trusted by both individual users and big institutions. People expect Zcash to work as well as other cryptocurrencies on Ledger devices.
Thankfully, things may be changing. Zcash community leaders, including Zooko, have recently gotten Ledger’s attention. They’ve been talking directly with Ledger’s top executives and developers, who are now working on fixes. There's now a dedicated communication channel between the Zcash team and Ledger.
The Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) group believes that the best way forward is a direct partnership between Ledger and Zcash. This would allow problems to be fixed faster, improve long-term support, and make sure the right teams are responsible when issues come up.
Ledger has admitted privately that Zcash support hasn’t been good enough and expressed a desire to do better. They say they respect Zcash’s mission of privacy and want to help. But ZCG says Ledger needs to publicly commit to improving support and show that Zcash is a priority.
This is especially important because some large investors are interested in buying ZEC, but only if it’s well supported by Ledger. These investors use Ledger
This week, Josh shared his experience in Dubai for the Token2049 event, where some important members of the community are participating, also taking the opportunity to comment on the improvement of the user experience in the Zcash ecosystem.
Josh also shared a recent NPS polling of several Zcash users conducted by peacemongerZ over the past few years, in which she categorized users into two types: Holders and those who use ZEC for transactions, also comparing them with those who use Zashi.
2023 was not an easy year for our ecosystem, and this significant leap was due to updates in wallets and improvements in the user experience, making them easier and faster to use. Zashi has been instrumental in driving Zcash adoption.
This week's progress from ECC:
Zashi
📱| Zashi Design
Continued work on Crosschain Payments designs
Research on swap/cross-chain payment experience
Finalizing Multi-Account & Address Rotation designs
Small ad hoc product and engineering requested edits
Final touches to Wallet Status Widget designs
🧑💻| Q&A and Dev Support
User Support & debugging - email/forum/Discord
Socials Management & Content Creation
Community Management and participation in community calls
Massive End-to-End release testing of Zashi 2.0
🍎| Zashi iOS
📈Unique Installs: 7.49k
⬇️Total Downloads: 8.99k
⭐AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi 2.0:
Implemented the whole wallet backup flow UI/UX/logic
Finished all Keystone UI/UX differences (added Buy instead of More option to allow users to use Coinbase Onramp, etc.)
Implemented many, many 2.0 design changes and bug fixes
Tested Zashi & fixed all reported bugs/feedback
SDK
WIP: Refactoring the TOR implementation so we can get correlation issues under control
Released SDK 2.2.12 for Zashi 2.0 adoption
🤖| Zashi Android
📈Total Install Base: 3.82k
⬇️Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 17.8k
⭐PlayStore Rating: 4.509
New Crash Reporting Opt-in/out screen has been added
:rocket: Released new Zashi version 1.5.2 (932) with Firebase Crashlytics opt-in/out
ZIP321: Scanning hotfix + error handling hotfix, addressed a bug where preferences observers were not notified about key/value pair deletion - this fixed a few issues, added a screen that shows up after opening app with a system camera
Copy changed on the Transaction Detail screen
Adopted SDK changes regarding sync progress reporting
Implemented many, many 2.0 design changes and bug fixes
Fixed issue with local env to build SDK - which took a lot of time
Changed Sapling parameters download server
Prepared new universal networking communication using new Tor APIs in the SDK
🦓| Zcash Core
This week, the core engineering team focused on integrating community projects into Zallet, continuing last week’s work. Their efforts involved identifying and fixing bugs and API issues in Zaino, Zebrad, and the Zewif crate.
Zallet development is progressing, with the
z_sendmanyfeature now fully implemented. However, testing was delayed due to integration issues with Zebrad via Zaino. To support alpha testers, Str4d added a default configuration file generator and improved documentation for the Zallet setup process.The core team also provided some support to the Zashi 2.0 release, improving sync reporting and helping with the release process
🌐| Other
Polling has begun on Zcash funding governance and will run through May 1st. ECC, Shielded Labs, and the Zcash Foundation have all endorsed the C&C mode, as has Zancas from Zingo Labs.
Binance did not delist Zcash, but it apparently has not removed the monitoring flag
Josh participated in a Brave Community Call 🦁
Josh will be speaking on a privacy panel at Consensus in Toronto.