Zcash Shielded News | Vol.35 ⓩ
ZexCavator: How to Recover Your Lost ZEC by ZingoLabs, ZF Enginering Update | 2025 Sprint (May 26 - Jun 6), Zcash Z3 Updates - Friday 13th, Run Free: Update on Zcash & ZK AV Club | Zcash Podcast EP #1
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 the crypto world, it’s very common to hear about users losing their funds, and most of the time, it can be a major challenge to recover them.
On the Zcash community, it happens sometimes, especially with old users that were used to use old wallets like ZecWallet or damaged files. To fix this problem, the ZingoLabs developed a feature called ZexCavator.
By adopting the ZeWIF format (Zcash Extensible Wallet Interchange Format), the tool transforms your wallet files into an internal representation that allows for thorough analysis and secure recovery.
The project uses specialized libraries like zingolib and pepper-sync to ensure accurate, efficient data synchronization and lossless fund migration. It’s currently focused on ZecWallet Lite but is architected for future expansion, including support for multiple wallet types and more intuitive user interfaces.
This initiative was born through a collaboration between community members — developers, security experts, and cryptocurrency enthusiasts actively contribute ideas, issue reports, and improvement proposals (ZIPs).
ZExCavator goes beyond being a simple technical tool. It is a solution that allows you to regain control over your digital assets. In the face of the volatility and challenges of the crypto market, ZExCavator offers accuracy and confidence.
You can help the development running a cargo run from your terminal. Every contribution strengthens the tool and the ecosystem.
Learn more about ZExCavator here.
Install Zingo!🍃
🤖 | Google Play
🍏 | App Store
💻 | Zingo-PC
✅ | GitHub
This sprint focused on finalizing RPC methods for Zebra to replace zcashd, adding ZIP-213 support, improving RPC responses, and addressing a potential DoS issue.
They are close to making the zebra-rpc crate usable by clients like Zaino, working to support both server and client functionality, and are still developing a way to notify clients of mempool changes.
Finally, ZF implemented an optimisation to cache the sighash context so that it can be reused when validating transactions.
They focused on DevOps tasks, fixing test breakages from the latest lightwalletd release, addressing cached state issues in CI, and extending a timing-out test to investigate its longer runtime.
The team improved how CI handles PRs from external forks, preventing GCP workflow failures and enabling individual contributors to run jobs on their own forks.
Friday 13th Updates! Pacu published new notes on the development of Z3 (Formerly Zcashd Deprecation).
The team improved how CI handles PRs from external forks, preventing GCP workflow failures and enabling individual contributors to run jobs on their own forks.
📣 | Outreach
Status: Paused
The team will discuss this further in the next sections but we are getting closer to having artifacts and containers that Zcash partners can start testing so they will pivot to the next phase of outreach when those are almost done.
🦓 | Zebra
The Zebra team completed another sprint, with key progress on block explorer support, shielded pool mining, and RPC tests with Zallet.
🟢 | Zaino (ZingoLabs)
Status: Refactoring
Zaino folks continue
💾 | In-Memory backend wrap up
Status: pending review
This has been falling through the cracks a bit, they still need to provide reviews to this PR https://github.com/zcash/librustzcash/pull/1634
Kris Nuttycombe will try to make some room on his schedule to complete this review.
🔗 | Zallet Full Node Wallet
Status: delayed (but rapidly catching up)
ECC has notified a deviation of 2 months from the original schedule.Tracking work on this repository.
Kris and Str4d are enhancing Zallet with sync improvements, wallet.dat imports, and API collaboration with Zaino. ECC devs are finalizing pieces for Zallet’s Alpha release, announced in the June 12th Arborist Call.
📞 | Call for Developers!
If you’re looking to get involved with Zcash development but aren’t sure where to begin, Zallet is a great entry point for contributing to Zcash. With many RPC methods already in place, it’s ready for community contributions. Fork the repo and start hacking!
🔍 | Block Explorer Support
Status: in progress
Pacu began working on Zcash block explorer support, opened issues to add missing data in Zebra’s transaction object, and submitted a pull request for one of the needed fields, which was promptly reviewed. 🙂
Pending reviews:
This week's update, Josh reflects on a heavy emotional period, shaped by both personal struggles and the distressing global events filling news feeds and social media.
Aware of the toll doom-scrolling takes on his mental health, he draws inspiration from a story his mother told about his sisyste wanting to run free at a high school dance, a metaphor he uses to describe his own longing for mental and emotional release.
Choosing to focus on hope and positivity, Josh medidates on the values found in Philippians 4:8: truth, nobility, righteousness, purity, loveliness, and admirability. He highlights real examples from the Zcash and ECC communities that embody these values:
An ECC teammate trying to save a friend's life.
A doctor offering help across borders and embracing Zcash for financial freedom.
Community members spreading joy through storytelling and sticker-making.
The deeper mission of Zcash to empower personal freedom & privacy.
In the end, he emphasizes that what the community is building isnt just technology, it's a legacy rooted in goodness, freedom, and mutual support.
On the same context, Josh invites others to ''run free'' with him, away from fear, control, and division, and toward a shared vision of liberation and purpose.
Zashi
Progress Made ✔️
Transaction Submission over Tor: Completed on both iOS & Android.
Swap or Pay with NEAR: Designs for both flows have been finalized and approved by the team.
Decoy Wallet & Multisig: Started the exploratory design phase for Decoy Wallet feature and Multisig Support.
Upcoming ⏭️
Run Testing and QA the Tor Implementation.,
SDK release migration on Android.,
Swap or Pay with Near - Continue building the initial testing prototype.,
Plan the next steps for Maya integration.
🍎 │ IOS Analytics:
📈Unique Installs: 8.34k (prev. 8.25k)
⬇️Total Downloads: 10k (prev. 9.93k)
⭐AppStore Rating: 4.9*
🤖 │ Android Analytics:
📈Total Install Base: 3.85k (prev. 3.82k)
⬇️Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 19.5k (prev.19.2k)
⭐PlayStore Rating: 4.373 (prev. 4.362)
🦓 | Zcash Core
Progress made ✔️
The team worked on debugging and integrating Tor support for Zashi.
Added full-block scanning capability to zcash_client_backend to support Zallet.
Collaborated with the Zaino team to align development priorities.
Introduced a Docker build for Zallet.
Implemented z_gettotalbalance and improved z_listunspent to include transparent UTXOs.
Continued work on the Rust implementation of zcash_script.
Fixed high CPU usage and bugs related to coinbase input handling in Zallet.
Upcoming ⏭️
Completed Zcashd key import for Zallet (currently in debugging).
Finished full-block scanning support in zcash_client_backend.
Prepared Zcashd NU6.1 testnet release, pending a P2SH key from keyholder orgs.
🌐 | Other
Tony is taking over her operational responsibilities while Janie is on maternity.,
They started work on a grant package to submit to coin holders later this year.,
Tune into PGP for Crypto this Thursday, which will include a roudtable discussion on Tornado Cash & Samourai Wallet.,
ECC is finalizing the agenda and sesion leaders for the upcoming Z ECC Summit.
Last week, we talked about the podcast that the ZK AV Club was planning to record if they reached 100 ZEC. Well, they did it! 🚀 During the event, the team recorded a ton of interviews and livestreams through their mobile recording station, which they had to move constantly to capture conversations in different locations. Just imagine setting up and tearing down cables, monitors, microphones, and more every single day. Crazy, right?
“Almost every privacy talk I’ve been to in the last few weeks has had Zcash mentioned at least once.” — Zerodartz
So, on Monday (one week after the Pre-Show Stream), Ryan and Squirrel got together to record the Zcash Podcast, sharing everything that happened over the past week and teasing the content that’s coming soon. In this episode, they reflect on their experiences, attending presentations about Cypherpunks, Chris Goes at ProtoConBerg, Dappcon, and more (all of which will be available on YouTube soon!).
Some recorded shorts were also shown during the episode, giving a sneak peek at what’s coming next on the ZK AV Club channel.
John (Trippleyou) also joined Ryan to share his perspective on the interviews, expressing his passion for the project and the freedom they gave attendees — not just for formal interviews, but for open conversations on whatever they cared about. It was also a chance to educate people about privacy throughout the event.
You can learn a lot from them! Check out the first episode for more info, and don’t miss their posts on X — they’re sharing a ton of content from the event there.
Shout out to Robmar for the hard work! You rock!
Onward!
