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!
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Fact of the Week 💡
Red-Bridge is a Zcash–Avalanche bridge project being built by red·dev to connect Zcash to Avalanche via an Avalanche L1, with the goal of extending Zcash’s privacy and selective disclosure features beyond its native chain.
📩 In today’s edition: 🛡️ Crosslink Milestone 5 Has Been Completed• Crosslink Milestone 5 has been completed, closing an important transition from prototype work to a more production-ready foundation. The update also marks the launch of the incentivized Crosslink Feature Net, with Season 1 now live. 🔐 Loofta Adds Private P2P ZEC Off-Ramp Through Peer• Loofta announced a private P2P off-ramp for Zcash built with Peer, giving users a more direct and private way to move from ZEC to fiat without relying on the usual bank or exchange flow. 👥 ZCG Meeting Minutes 4/13/2026• The latest Zcash Community Grants meeting included decisions across education, tooling, infrastructure, and ecosystem growth, with approvals for projects such as Rhea Zcash Gateway, Open Wallet Standard integration, and the Mastering Zcash Video Series. 🦓 Zebra 4.3.1: Critical Security Fixes, Dockerized Mining and CI Hardening• Zebra 4.3.1 is now live with critical security fixes, including patches for consensus-related vulnerabilities, denial-of-service risks, and transaction verification issues. The release also adds Dockerized mining, automated checkpoint management, and stronger CI security checks. 🌐 Zcash Browser Wallet Library | Update• A new update from ChainSafe highlights progress on WebZ.js and MetaMask Snap, including expanded wallet functionality, faster note lookups, balance calculation fixes, and improved stability for WASM environments. 📱 ZODL Update: Zodl 3.4.0 and Wallet Progress• The latest ZODL update highlights completed Keystone follow-up work for Zodl 3.4.0, fixes for swaps and balance display, ongoing Zallet migration work, and continued progress on future wallet features and integrations.
Crosslink Milestone 5 Has Been Completed
Crosslink Milestone 5 has been successfully completed, closing an important transition phase between the prototype stage and a more stable foundation for production. This cycle focused on reducing technical debt, refactoring critical parts of the system, and preparing the project for continuous operation throughout 2026.
The clearest outcome of that work is the launch of the incentivized Crosslink Feature Net, which went live on April 15 with the start of Season 1.
The Feature Net is a network designed to test and evolve Crosslink under real conditions. Instead of relying on short-lived demo nets, the project is now moving to a seasonal model, with a new network each cycle and real economic incentives for participants. cTAZ earned through mining or staking will convert pro rata into ZEC at the end of each season. In total, the program has allocated 500 ZEC, with 25 ZEC reserved for the first season.
This milestone also included the release of Monolith for macOS, Linux, and Windows, bringing the miner, finalizer, wallet, and node together into a single desktop app; a persistent Feature Net that is already live; and the foundation of the incentive economy operating end to end, including cTAZ issuance, BFT finalization, staking, and a faucet.
This work took longer than originally planned because the team had to rewrite the network transport layer from scratch. The previous implementation could not keep up with Tendermint’s finality cadence during PoW block sync, which blocked the rest of the stack. That work was carried out in collaboration with Nym, the Zcash Foundation, and with contributions from the Tachyon team.
More than the completion of a milestone, M5 marks the beginning of a new phase: a network that is more durable, more testable, and much closer to real operating conditions.
Loofta Adds Private P2P ZEC Off-Ramp Through Peer
Last week, ZEC’s integration with Peer was announced. Today, that rollout gets an important addition.
On April 15, Loofta announced the launch of a private P2P off-ramp for Zcash, built in integration with Peer. The goal is to make it easier to move from $ZEC to fiat in a more direct and private way, without relying on the traditional flow of banks or centralized exchanges.
In practice, the process is straightforward: the user creates an off-ramp order, sends the ZEC, receives an email confirmation once the transaction is ready to move into escrow, and the settlement is completed by a peer through Peer.
This expands on what was already introduced with ZEC’s arrival on Peer by adding a more practical exit path for users who want to preserve privacy at that stage of the experience as well. Rather than limiting the asset’s use to the crypto environment, the integration now also covers the path back to fiat in a way that feels more aligned with the privacy values of the ecosystem.
With this, Loofta and Peer are offering a more complete experience for Zcash users: entry into the P2P flow, use of the asset, and now an off-ramp option centered on discretion and autonomy.
ZCG Meeting Minutes 4/13/2026
🟢 Approved Proposals
**Rhea Zcash Gateway — $54,200 | Browser extension wallet bringing ZEC into DeFi through shielded transactions, lending, routing, and dApp support.
Zcash Ecosystem Onboarding At Women in DeFi Summit 2026 — **$4,960 | Zcash education and outreach at Nigeria’s Women in DeFi Summit through sponsorship, booth presence, and presentations.
Zcash Ghana (April 2026 - June 2026) — **$12,600 | Continued community growth in Ghana through meetups, workshops, hackathons, and online content.
Marketing at Berlin Blockchain Week & 2-Day Event with WebZero — $63,820 | Zcash-focused event and outreach campaign during Berlin Blockchain Week aimed at onboarding new users.
Zcash Integration for the Open Wallet Standard — **$25,000 | Integration of Zcash into the Open Wallet Standard, making it the first privacy chain supported by the framework.
Mastering Zcash Video Series — $23,500 | Educational video and podcast series expanding the existing Mastering Zcash resource.
🔴 Declined Proposals
Zecret Ballots by Gnosis Guild — $100,000 | Private voting app for ZEC holders using encryption, homomorphic tallying, threshold decryption, and ZK proofs.
Launching the First Zcash Privacy and Developer Education Initiative Across Kenyan Universities and Tech Communities 2026 — **$41,000 | Education and developer outreach program across Kenyan universities and tech communities.
Zallet ↔ zcashd Wallet RPC Parity Harness: Reproducible Diff Reports for Migration Testing — $20,000 | Testing tool comparing wallet RPC behavior between zcashd and Zallet.
Reputrans — $45,000 | Privacy-preserving reputation system for gig workers using zero-knowledge proofs.
ZAP1 Protocol Hardening and Zaino Integration — $18,000 | Protocol hardening and wallet-oriented integration work for the ZAP1 memo protocol.
F-PoC: Fair Proof-of-Contribution for Zcash — $48,000 | Research prototype exploring a proof-of-capacity style mining approach for Zcash.
Zecboat Bridge: FROST-Secured Wrapped Asset (wSOL) — $99,000 | Bridge for bringing Solana assets into Zcash’s Orchard shielded pool using FROST-secured custody.
ZecShield: Universal Privacy Bridge between Solana and Zcash — $48,000 | Privacy bridge for shielding SPL tokens from Solana into Zcash.
Zcash CIS Media & Community Growth Program 2026 — $9,000 | Russian-language media and community growth campaign across Telegram, YouTube, and livestreams.
🟡 Under Review / Remains Open
Formal Verification of Halo 2 in Lean 4 — $201,600 | Formal verification of Orchard and Halo 2 circuits in Lean 4, including protocol and security analysis.
Feature Branch Testnet and Compatible Developer Tooling — $412,410 | Dedicated testnet and tooling for NU7-deferred features like ZSA and NSM.
Zcash Network School — $13,600 | Three-month educational hub near Singapore focused on onboarding, workshops, and merchant adoption.
Zecret Ballots_2 — $132,391 | Revised version of a coercion-resistant private voting system for ZEC holders.
BTCPayServer Multi-Account and 0conf Mempool Support — $42,000 | Upgrade to the BTCPayServer Zcash plugin adding zero-conf payments and multi-account support.
Zebra 4.3.1: Critical Security Fixes, Dockerized Mining and Cl Hardening
Zebra 4.3.1 is out now, and node operators should upgrade immediately. This release fixes multiple vulnerabilities, including consensus-related bugs that could have caused Zebra nodes to diverge from the rest of the Zcash network, as well as denial-of-service and resource exhaustion issues.
The most serious risk involved transaction verification and sighash handling. In some cases, Zebra could accept transactions that other Zcash nodes would reject — or reject transactions that other nodes would accept — creating the possibility of a consensus split. Another issue could allow oversized peer address messages to push a node toward out-of-memory failure, and a separate bug allowed a crafted Orchard transaction to crash the node during verification.
Version 4.3.1 also fixes a JSON-RPC denial-of-service vulnerability affecting authenticated clients, where interrupting a request mid-transfer could crash the Zebra process. In addition, the release includes several security hardening improvements in CI, including dependency advisory scanning, license compliance checks, and supply-chain auditing.
Beyond the security fixes, this release adds a new Dockerized mining setup, automates checkpoint and end-of-support updates in CI, and includes several infrastructure and testing improvements.
Bottom line: there are no known workarounds for the consensus issues in this release. Upgrading to Zebra 4.3.1 is the only way to ensure nodes stay on the correct chain and remain protected.
Zcash Browser Wallet Library | Update
Last week, ColinSchwarz (ChainSafe) published a new update on work related to WebZ.js + MetaMask Snap during February and March 2026, with a focus on internal infrastructure, performance, and reliability improvements.
Among the main updates, several important gaps in zcash_client_memory were addressed, including support for storing incoming Sapling and Orchard transactions, tracking transparent address metadata, and implementing previously incomplete WalletRead API methods such as list_addresses, get_last_generated_address_matching, and utxo_query_height.
The update also included performance improvements and bug fixes. Received note lookups were optimized from O(n) linear scans to O(1) indexed lookups, and balance calculation issues related to expired unmined transactions and unscanned range filtering were fixed.
Finally, both zcash_client_memory and zcash_client_backend received an important stability upgrade: all block scanner panics caused by .unwrap() and assert!() were replaced with proper Result-based error propagation, a particularly important change for WASM environments, where those kinds of failures are not recoverable.
The Shot. Update from ZODL
This week marked the 251st anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, a turning point in the American fight against government overreach and the erosion of basic rights. It serves as a reminder that the struggle to defend liberty did not end there.
The tools may look different today, but the principle remains the same. Instead of muskets, the modern tools of resistance are math and code — tools that help defend privacy, self-sovereignty, and freedom against abuse.
Josh’s message was clear: if people are to remain free, the right to use those tools must be protected.
ZODL
Completed the remaining Keystone follow-up work for Zodl 3.4.0, including Connect Keystone, Wallet Birthday Height, and Resync Wallet
Finished connect-flow polish on iOS and Android
Resync Wallet is now in review on both platforms, alongside fixes for failed transaction displays and post-resync connectivity errors
Shipped an urgent swap crash fix and a de-duplication fix for Swap/Pay asset lists
Fixed the long-standing fractional ZEC truncation bug for comma-decimal locales
Zodl 3.3.1 (Android) is moving through release pipelines
Finalized designs for Maya integration, Ledger integration, and UIVK/UFVK export
Continued progress on Time to Spendability
Next steps include releasing Zodl 3.4.0, beginning Coinholder Polling, planning performance improvements, and continuing work on multi-recipient payments and multi-account support
Metrics
🍎 | iOS: 40.4k unique installs (+0.4k), 47.7k total downloads (+0.4k), 4.9★ App Store rating.
🤖 | Android: 15.4k install base (no change), 48.4k total installs including Open Beta (+0.4k), 4.26★ Play Store rating (+0.04).
Zcash Core
Completed investigation and response for the recent security incident, with a public write-up now live on the Zodl blog
Resolved the core2 dependency breakage by implementing corez, unblocking Core builds
Continued work on zcashd to Zallet wallet migration, including BerkeleyDB vendoring and fixes for watch-only addresses, imported keys, imported P2PKH/P2SH addresses, and Sapling view keys
Moved a critical SDK fix into review to ensure stabilized notes remain spendable after truncation
Fixed and updated EIP-681 API PRs
Collaborated with the dev team on performance improvement plans and NU7 scope
Next up: continued focus on the Zallet alpha.4 release scope, along with in-flight prerequisites for switching to the Zaino ChainIndex data flow and full-block scanning in Zallet
Other
ZODL is hiring, with open roles including Core Engineer, Product R&D, Marketing Assistant, and QA Lead
Continued policy and regulatory work across the People, Product, and Protocol protection pillars, with expanded engagement with U.S. and EU counsel
Internal findings showed that reducing block times to 25 seconds does not degrade sync performance
The Zcash network hash rate reached a new all-time high of roughly 16.54 GS/s, reflecting continued miner commitment
The Foundry institutional ZEC mining pool now accounts for roughly 30% of network hashrate, and Foundry also launched zcashinfo.com, a real-time network and mining explorer