March was an atypical month. It started with ZconVI, an invigorating but still very demanding event. The ecosystem got together virtually and a lot of work was shown. And would finish with 10 days full of Zero-Knowledge content started by ZF’s Zcash Dev Summit, HACS, ZkProof7 and Real World Crypto 2025.
I want to begin this diaries by apologizing because due to some personal problems I couldn’t prepare as I had for other summits. I always like to be grateful and reciprocate good gestures that others have towards myself, my luggage often travels light on clothings and heavy on presents like local sweets and munchies from my country, personalized engraved mate cups and straws and things of that kind to organizers and attendants to these meetups. Due to very disruptive and unexpected events that almost endanger my presence in Sofia, I couldn’t manage to wrap all the logistics I had originally planned for my trip.
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If I can be writing this is thanks to Zcash Foundation inviting me to the Summit and Zcash Community Grants funding it.
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Sofia is the main city of Bulgaria and very far away from where I live. Combined with the trip to the airport and the requirements for international flights it takes 25 hours of travel to go from EZE to SOF airport.
My day started with getting early on to the airport lounge so that I could host the Light Client Working Group #94 meeting prior to flying to the EU. That’s when I realized that I had forgotten my mate bag at home. A theme that would be recurring for this trip.
I got the chance to fly on this huge plane. The queen of air. A 2-level 747 plane with 4 engines of a size that it not common to be seen and that according to the flight commander’s message would be “deprecated” soon.
I couldn’t avoid thinking about Zcashd, our intercontinental airliner that has reliably served Zcash all of these years accommodating a lot of blocks, shielded pools and network upgrades that will cease to traverse the skies when Network Upgrade 7 is deployed.
I did some research (aka I asked Brave’s AI) and these big planes are awesome but they require specialized maintenance, facilities and resources. I don’t find unusual that the airline is looking to move forward to more lightweight, efficient and maintainable airplanes, or in our case our “winning horses” Zebra and Zaino. Traversing hemispheres is complicated. Going from summer to winter, fall to spring.
A note of colour is that I always wear masks on planes also not to carry or catch any flu viruses that might be floating around. Unlike Zcash shielded pool transactions that have millions, my flight passenger look has an anonymity set of 1.
My first stop was Frankfurt, Germany. I forgot my cosmetic bag that had my bruxism mouth guard, contact lenses kit, tooth brush and paste, etc. I’d be really biting the dust the next days (of my own teeth).
I couldn’t sleep at night. I knew that the day to come would be long.
