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
On April 17th, the Zcash ecosystem entities — Zcash Foundation (ZCAP), Electric Coin Company (ZAC), ZecHub (DAO) — created their polls for voting on the future of the Dev Fund, along with a private poll for Coinholders.
Here are the results of each poll:
While NU7 may be postponed, the community is committed to enacting these changes on or before the current Dev Fund expires in November 2025.
Developing the Coinholder Grant Polling Mechanism:
Following the success of the recent voting process, the Zcash community will establish a formal system allowing coinholders to directly participate in grant funding decisions, giving ZEC holders a clear voice in fund allocation.
Planning for a Network Upgrade:
To implement the new funding model, a Zcash protocol upgrade is needed. The community will create a timeline to complete this upgrade before the current Dev Fund expires in November 2025.Continued Engagement:
The Zcash Community Forum will continue to serve as the central place for transparent and inclusive discussions. Community members are encouraged to actively participate and share their input as the new model evolves.
The Zcash community has shown strong unity in navigating complex decisions while upholding decentralization and privacy.
With a new funding model on the way, the ecosystem is set to become more resilient and inclusive, supporting Zcash’s role as a leading privacy tool.
The future looks promising, grounded in community resolve and shared purpose.
Zcash Community Grants | Meeting Notes (04/28/2025)Last Monday, Zcash Community Grants held another meeting and shared updates on the Open Grants program.
Attendance: 👥
Open Grant Proposals 🔓
-
Zondax aims to integrate the new Zcash Ledger Shielded app with Ledger Live, focusing first on transparent transaction support. Shielded transaction support may follow later.
They’ve requested $95,000, and the committee is still reviewing the grant. An update is expected soon.
**Zcash Lightwalletd Network Monitoring Service ❌
**A $75,000 proposal to build an automated, multi-region monitoring system for the Zcash network was unanimously rejected by ZCG.Feedback cited high cost, limited need, misalignment with decentralization goals, and existence of cheaper alternatives (e.g., similar work by Hanh for $6,000). Unanimous Rejection
Zcash Global Turkish (Q2 2025) ❓
A $10,400, 3-month initiative to grow Zcash awareness and community in Turkey through education, content creation, and local events.
Focus is on financial privacy and adoption. ZCG is awaiting results from a Turkish community poll before voting.
Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups 💡
Maya Protocol Update
- Maya is active, no end date yet, ZCG continues to monitor the situation.
Ledger
ZCG is in conversations with Ledger, hoping to receive a draft proposal this week.
It’s ZCG’s view that the Zcash community shouldn’t have to pay to fix anything but there may be a cost for feature development.
Zingo
- Need to restructure milestone 3. ZCG to discuss with Zancas.
BTCPayServer plugin:
Developer preparing to start work on the final milestone. Artkor will test in the coming days and then it will be released.
Delivery is more than a month ahead of the grant schedule. Documentation underway and then outreach to merchants will begin.
Shoutout
- Shoutout to Artkor for kicking off this thread on the Forum regarding transparent addresses.
🔗Link
Last week, we shared the Sprint 7 updates published by Pili, and just a few days later, more updates from Sprint 8, which took place April 14–25.
Here’s what the Zcash Foundation development team has been working on in Zebra, FROST, and DevOps:
During this sprint the Zebra team continued to make changes to existing RPC methods to ensure that we are covering as many of the current zcashd use cases as possible.
They are updating the getblock RPC to add the valuepools and chainSupply fields, the getaddressbalance RPC to return the received field, and the getrawtransaction RPC to return the size and time fields.
The team have been making changes to the z_gettreestate RPC to ensure we only return the finalstate field when available. ZF have also been refactoring the RPCs related to block template generation in Zebra In preparation for the work to enable support for shielded coinbase in the getblocktemplate RPC for Orchard Unified addresses.
Finally, they have been responding to requests to make Zebra easier to use for Zebra library consumers and improve error messages when Zebra crashes on start up.
On the FROST project, the team have continued to focus on the FROST demo code, merging the last couple of changes to address the findings reported by LeastAuthority’s security audit of the frost client and server, frostd: renaming functions and variables in participants and coordinator for improved clarity and improving HTTP error handling.
ZF have submitted changes for a final review and hope to share the final audit report very soon.
Additionally, they merged some fixes to the DKG protocol in FROST when there are only 2 participants.
The team have also updated the documentation for the FROST reference implementation to emphasise the need for using an encrypted channel when using DKG as well as making some other small fixes and refactors.
On the DevOps side, the developers continued to focus on our Docker images, and they managed to finish and merge the work to better test changes to our Docker images and docker-compose scripts.
On May 4th, Pacu published another update on the progress of Zcash Z3 (formerly Zcashd Deprecation).
🌐| Outreach
Z3 team is responding to partner RFIs to help prioritize integration of the new Zcash stack.
Zaino roadmap adjustments will be needed based on this work.
🦓| Zebra
Sprint 9 Week 1 is underway.
Zebra 2.3.0 is coming soon.
Continued work on Docker integration and aligning RPCs with Zcashd to support deprecation.
🛠️ | Zaino (ZingoLabs)
Status: almost back on track!
Milestone 3 is nearly complete (excluding RemoteStateService).
JSON RPC merged, enabling initial Block Explorer integration.
Hazel and Arlo will begin architecture redesign to support Zallet.
Next step: start the "Complete Zaino" follow-up grant.
💾 | In-Memory Backend
Status: Pending review.
PR needs attention: #1634.
💻 | Zallet Full Node Wallet
Status: Delayed, but catching up.
ECC announced a 2-month delay.
@str4d is building tools for Zcashd → Zebra migration, added OpenRPC support, and has z_sendmany under review.
ZeWIF integration ongoing with heavy collaboration across teams.
💡| Wallet Export Format + ZexCavator
Status: On track.
ZeWIF migration tool development continues.
Kris is integrating zmigrate into Zallet.
ZexCavator, a wallet recovery tool, is progressing.
Community contributions to ZeWIF are encouraged.
📦| Block Explorer Support
Integration with Zaino has begun via the maturing JSON RPC endpoint.
@emersonian submitted a generous PR updating the old Zcash Block Explorer tooling.
⚙️| Regtest Mode
Status: First round of review comments addressed
PR #986 on documenting Regtest mode has addressed initial feedback.
After a week at Token2049 in Dubai, Josh shared his experience with community members, investors, and builders.
Zcashers, Shielded Labs & other ecosystem players gathered in Dubai for a week of workshops, investor meetings, and community events. The vibe was energetic, with strong interest from new and existing players.
Project Tachyeon & Zashi were hot topics. Zashi, now at version 2.0, received praise for its improved UX and user guidance.
A landmark funding vote took place with participation from Coinholders, ZF, ECC & ZecHub DAO - over 1 million tokens were used to vote. The community chose the Community + Coinholder model, marking a major step in decentralizing Zcash governance.
Overall sentiment was strong — more energy, better coordination, and growing outside interest signal a fresh chapter for Zcash.
This week's progress from ECC:
Zashi
📱| Zashi Design
Reorganized all current Figma designs and set up new design files: Zashi Blueprint with all final app designs, PR Designs (2025) - a new design file for this quarter
Tweaked the Receive screen UI
Continuing in-depth cross-chain payment and swap design research
Implementing ad hoc changes requested by the team
🧑💻| Q&A and Dev Support
Massive Zashi 2.0 release testing & support
Release announcements, socials management + feedback sharing with the team
Email/Discord user support issues
Bug Fix release testing
🍎| Zashi iOS
📈Unique Installs: 7.57k
⬇️Total Downloads: 9.11k
⭐AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi 2.0:
Implemented final changes to the shielding flow
Investigated and fixed several issues, some reported by users
Fixed an issue with SDK initialization sometimes failing after Reset Zashi!
Zashi 2.0 Release + Zashi 2.0.1 Bug Fix Release
Pushed an updated PR with tx submission over Tor
Supported marketing with video promo
🤖| Zashi Android
📈Total Install Base: 3.79k
⬇️Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 18k
⭐PlayStore Rating: 4.509
Implemented final changes to the Shielding flow
Investigated and fixed several issues, some reported by users
Zashi 2.0 Release + Zashi 2.0.1 Bug Fix Release
Release process & documentation hand-over with Honza
Hand-over & discussion of tasks in progress
🦓| Zcash Core
Reviewed Namada airdrop protocol.
Added OpenRPC support to Zallet.
Contributed a bunch more work to the zewif and zewif-zcashd crates.
Two days ago, Vivek shared new updates on the ZSAs that are getting ready to be implemented in NU7.
ZIPs
The ZIP Editors merged PR#991 into the
zcash/zipsrepo, moving burn fields into Action Groups for the V6 transaction format. This update is now part of PR#987, covering all NU7 transaction and digest changes.QEDIT opened PR#1009 to restructure the Asset Identifier section of ZIP 227 for improved clarity and linear flow. This change is independent of other ongoing updates.
Changes to the halo2 and sinsemilla Crates
ECC merged our upstream PR#2 into the
sinsemillacrate to add support for the OrchardZSA protocol. They've updated dependencies to usezcash/sinsemillainstead of our fork.QEDIT submitted PR#823 to the
halo2repository, which ECC reviewed and requested changes on. The updates have been discussed, incorporated, and the PR is now ready for review again.
Changes to the orchard Crate
QEDIT has completed all updates to the ZSA ZIPs following recent ZIP changes. These include moving burn fields into the Action Group and replacing the Asset Description string with its hash.
QEDIT has merged the latest upstream changes into the
orchardcrate, bringing it fully up to date. This alignment should simplify the review and merging of the OrchardZSA commits.QEDIT is in the process of discussing some of the ZSA changes to
orchardwith the ECC, as a precursor to a formal review.
Changes to the librustzcash Crate
Changes to the Python Reference Implementation
QEDIT have similarly updated the
zcash_test_vectorsrepository to generate the test vectors after incorporating all the changes arising from the ZSA ZIP updates as well (see PR#25 and PR#28).The team has also created a PR to merge the upstream changes to this repository, which is being reviewed internally (PR#26).
Zebra
QEDIT's development of asset supply and state management in Zebra is progressing well and nearing internal review.
QEDIT is reviewing the necessary changes for Action Groups and other ZSA ZIP updates in this crate, as shown in PR#42 and PR#46.
The team is in the process of internal review for the infrastructure required to introduce OrchardZSA (extending
shieldedData) and TxV6 in Zebra (PR#37).
Updates to zcash_tx_tool
QEDIT has updated their tool to incorporate the ZSA ZIP changes implemented in other repositories.
The team has deployed a CI to the repository to ensure compatibility with the Zebra version, helping automate updates more efficiently.
They are developing tools to help users create their own test scenarios, now in the final stages of review, with more details coming soon.
PRs Ready for Review
QEDIT has submitted PR#823 to the
halo2repository and PR#429 to theorchardrepository, with more PRs planned after the initial review to build on this base.They also have suggested rearrangement of ZIP 227 for better flow of text in PR#1009 of the
zipsrepository.The
orchardcrate changes for ZSA are in PR#372.