💡 Fact of the Week
Zcash’s 21 million supply limit includes ZEC held in shielded pools. Full nodes do not need to see private transaction amounts: they verify zero-knowledge proofs and enforce consensus rules that preserve value while keeping transaction amounts private.
📩 In today’s edition
📱 Zodl 3.8.0: Enabling Ironwood
• Brings full Ironwood compatibility, wallet repair improvements, and new tools to support the network transition.
🗳️ ZCG Approves Five New Proposals
• Funds new education, security, community, and onboarding initiatives while continuing to review three additional proposals.
⚙️ ZF Engineering Update: 13th July – 26th July 2026
• Delivers four Zebra releases, infrastructure improvements, and continued work on faster synchronization and light wallet support.
🌸 Zakura 1.0.5 Released
• Improves stability, synchronization reliability, and peer connectivity ahead of the Ironwood network upgrade.
⚡ Sovright Relay Launches to Improve Block Propagation
• Introduces a public low-latency relay network designed to help mining pools receive new blocks more quickly.
Zodl 3.8.0: Enabling Ironwood
Unsurprisingly, Ironwood has been the biggest topic across the Zcash ecosystem this week. While much of the focus has been on the network upgrade itself, Zodl 3.8.0 is one of the most important releases for users, bringing full compatibility with Ironwood and preparing wallets for the transition.
What's new:
Full Ironwood support: Zodl 3.8.0 is fully compatible with the Ironwood (NU6.3) network upgrade. After activation, users must update to version 3.8.0 or later to continue using the app without interruption.
View balances by shielded pool: Users can now tap their balance on the home screen to see how funds are distributed across Zcash’s shielded pools, including Ironwood. This makes it easier to track migration progress.
Automatic wallet repairs: The release fixes an issue that could cause incorrect balances or prevent shielding. Affected wallets are automatically detected and repaired after updating.
Migration support: An in-app guided Orchard-to-Ironwood migration experience is planned for a future release. Until then, Orchard funds remain safe and spendable, and users can either migrate manually using the official guide or wait for the guided experience.
Update recommended: Updating before (or as soon as possible after) the Ironwood network upgrade ensures uninterrupted access to your wallet and the latest compatibility improvements.
ZCG Approves Five New Proposals
The ZCG committee approved five new proposals during its latest review, while three remain under discussion and several others were declined.
🟢 Approved
Zcash in the Privacy Stack - A six-part educational series exploring Zcash’s role within the broader privacy ecosystem.
Offensive Security - Penetration testing aimed at strengthening the security of Zcash ecosystem infrastructure.
ZECsy Team in Amsterdam - Community outreach and wallet onboarding during Cypherpunk Week Amsterdam.
Zcash Türkiye RLAY HUB Event - A three-day event featuring technical talks, wallet onboarding, and a hackathon.
Zcash Onboarding @ Web3Lagos Conference 2026 - Developer workshops, technical sessions, and ecosystem outreach at Web3Lagos.
🟡 Still under review
🔴 Not approved
Several other proposals were not approved this round, including projects focused on hardware wallet integrations, developer tooling, educational initiatives, and infrastructure.
Throughout the discussions, committee members consistently emphasized the importance of demonstrating clear ecosystem demand, close collaboration with core development teams, and a sustainable path toward long-term adoption.
ZF Engineering Update: 13th July - 26th July 2026
The Zcash Foundation published four Zebra releases over the past two weeks (v6.1.0, v6.2.0, v6.2.1, and v6.2.2), delivering security improvements, an experimental compatibility mode for services migrating away from zcashd, and the first releases produced through Zebra’s new automated release pipeline.
The latest updates address several issues that could temporarily slow node synchronization or consume unnecessary resources. None of the issues affected consensus or put user funds at risk, and node operators are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version.
Zebra also introduced an experimental zcashd compatibility mode, allowing exchanges and other services that still rely on zcashd’s wallet interfaces to transition more easily now that zcashd has reached end of support.
Development also continues on two major features currently in progress: a built-in lightwalletd-compatible gRPC server, which would allow light wallets to connect directly to Zebra nodes, and a significantly faster initial synchronization engine. Early testing reduced the time required to sync the first 1.7 million Mainnet blocks to around 90 minutes.
Release: Zakura 1.0.5
Zakura 1.0.5 was released as a stability and performance update, introducing improvements to peer connectivity, synchronization reliability, and overall node efficiency ahead of the Ironwood (NU6.3) network upgrade.
The release fixes two issues that could prevent a fresh node from completing synchronization and also addresses a recently discovered Testnet bug that affected both Zakura and Zebra, preventing nodes from reconnecting to honest peers after a large chain reorganization. The issue was resolved through coordinated updates released ahead of the network upgrade.
The update also improves peer discovery and recovery, reduces CPU overhead through optimizations to address book and metrics processing, and includes several networking refinements designed to make nodes more resilient. Node operators are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version.
Sovright Relay launches to improve block propagation for mining pools
Following the Sovright Mining Pool testnet, the Sovright Relay is now live, targeting another aspect of mining centralization at the network level. It is a public, low-latency relay network designed to deliver newly mined Zcash blocks to participating mining pools more quickly.
According to the announcement, pools that receive new blocks later spend more time mining on outdated chain tips, placing smaller operators without specialized network infrastructure at a disadvantage. The Sovright Relay is designed to reduce that gap by providing a shared low-latency relay network, allowing mining pools to compete more closely on mining performance rather than private infrastructure.
The Relay operates alongside Zcash’s existing peer-to-peer network without introducing protocol or consensus changes, allowing pools to adopt or remove it without affecting their normal peer-to-peer connections. The project has also been released as open source, with the goal of encouraging independently operated public relays rather than relying on a single operator.