Hosted by the Zcash Foundation on July 23, the latest Arborist Call centered on the final preparations for Network Upgrade 6.3 (Ironwood), scheduled to activate tomorrow, July 28.
Developers shared progress across consensus software, infrastructure, wallets, and supporting services as the ecosystem completes one of its largest coordinated transitions in recent years.
Alongside Ironwood, the discussion highlighted another major milestone: the completion of the long-planned retirement of zcashd, continued migration to Zebra, and steady progress on research and protocol improvements that extend well beyond the upcoming network upgrade.
Ironwood Nears Activation
Current efforts are focused on ensuring the ecosystem is fully prepared for deployment.
Recent work has centered on ecosystem readiness, with wallet developers, exchanges, mining pools, infrastructure providers, and node operators continuing software updates and compatibility testing. The objective is straightforward: ensure the network upgrade is deployed smoothly across the ecosystem.
Ironwood introduces a new shielded pool following the successful remediation of the Orchard soundness vulnerability earlier this year. Rather than revisiting the protocol itself, this stage is focused on deployment, migration, and ensuring the network is ready for activation.
Once live, newly shielded funds will be created in the Ironwood pool, while existing Orchard funds will migrate through the Turnstile mechanism under consensus rules, restoring user-verifiable supply without changing Zcash’s privacy guarantees.
Infrastructure Is Ready for the Transition
The work surrounding Ironwood extends well beyond the network upgrade itself.
A major milestone reached this month is the official retirement of zcashd. After serving as Zcash’s original full node implementation for nearly a decade, its repository has now been archived, bringing active development to a close as the ecosystem completes its migration to modern infrastructure.
That transition is centered around Zebra, which now serves as the network’s primary consensus implementation. Recent development has focused on Ironwood compatibility, synchronization improvements, transaction validation, and long-term maintainability as it assumes responsibility for future network upgrades.
Migration efforts also continue across wallets, SDKs, RPC services, blockchain explorers, and supporting infrastructure. While much of this work happens behind the scenes, it reduces reliance on a single implementation and strengthens the overall resilience of the network.
Development Continues Beyond Ironwood
Although Ironwood remains the ecosystem’s immediate priority, development continues across several initiatives that will shape future versions of the protocol.
Crosslink research is advancing through ongoing work on protocol design, recovery mechanisms, testing infrastructure, and future consensus technologies aimed at improving scalability and long-term resilience.
Development is also progressing on Dynamic Fees, an initiative designed to make transaction fees more responsive to network conditions. Current work continues to improve fee estimation while laying the groundwork for capabilities such as transaction acceleration and Priority Lane services.
Together, these efforts demonstrate that current development is focused not only on delivering the next network upgrade, but also on strengthening the technical foundations that will support Zcash well beyond Ironwood.
Looking Ahead
Once Ironwood is live, attention will turn to ecosystem migration, continued infrastructure improvements, and the next wave of protocol research.
The progress shared throughout this Arborist Call reflects an ecosystem that is not only preparing for its next upgrade, but steadily building the tools, infrastructure, and research needed to support Zcash’s long-term evolution.