I had the honor to attend Zeboot once more. It was a very impressive experience. I'd like to thank Josh Swihart for welcoming me once again and letting me be part of these important discussions. I hope this article can help the community have an insight of the technical discussions held during the summit that will certainly shape the near and distant future of Zcash
I would like to thank ZCG for funding my travel expenses and their continuous support and confidence
Photo: Lukas Korba
Day 1 rename(“Z|ECC”, “Zeboot 2026”)
The meeting room is full, this is the most attended summit by large. There’s one question thrown out to the room: “who were in the first Zeboot?”. I raise my hand with a dozen other people. Following an introductory welcome speech we were asked to turn off our devices and we were briefed on the situation of the former ECC team now “ZnewCo” folks and there were extensive debates that can’t be disclosed but some of them have been shared publicly already.
After some good couple of hours of conversations the started with why we gathered originally
State of the wallets
The ZnewCo team had prepared a “state of the Union” kind of presentation for their flagship wallet projects. Here’s the condensed version of it
Zallet
The Zallet developers did a rundown on the wallet features that are already completed which was a list of around 20 items and consisted of sending, receiving, keystore encryption, OpenRPC support, Zcashd configuration migration, wallet initialization and a list of completed RPCs. In terms of deployment the docker support, debian builds and reproducible builds are ready.
What’s missing?
- Zcashd key data import
- Zaino ChainIndex integration (provided Zaino completes this)
- Spending coinbase outputs (shielding and spending)
- Auditable releases
- YubiKey Support
The Roadmap to Zallet Beta
What to expect on the next alphas:
- Alpha 4: High priority things that make Zallet usable
- Alpha 5: Things that exchanges have signaled as requirements
- Alphas 6 and 7: backward compatibility stuff we hope not having to implement
Zashi
Andrea took the mic and started talking about Zcash’s latest and greatest success: the Zashi wallet.
Zashi already has been through 27 Android and 30 iOS app releases. Totaling almost 60k installs altogether. Zashi 2.0 has a conversion ratio of 40% compared to its previous version.
The success of Zashi was the only certainty floating in the room. Making millions in Swap fees and a growing userbase, there was no single disagreement on its role in Zcash's comeback. The questions were phrased in the future tense.
Could the team retain the stewardship of the Zashi wallet or would they have to build a new wallet from scratch? The difference in the roadmap of those two possible paths was very noticeable. While the Zashi roadmap featured Keystone and Swap/Pay improvements, multi-account support, DEX, Ledger, On/Off ramp integrations and much more, the “new app” path was a big regression although Send Max was there which is the most wanted feature for those who fancy throwaway wallets. In short the feature list was cut by half for the alternate scenario.
Tachyon
The next session an engineer from Tachyon stepped up to talk about their progress and forecast of the next milestones. For those who haven’t heard of it, Tachyon introduces a new shielded pool and proof system and it’s the biggest scalability improvement in Zcash. It’s based on HALO2’s aggregation of proofs instead of batch verification. Currently, Sapling and Orchard proofs are verified in batches and that is more efficient than doing so individually. Ragú is the mechanism that combines n proofs into an extra proof for an entire batch, so what before was verifying n proofs quicker this is verifying all of those n in the time of verifying a single proof.
This is a major breakthrough because it solves a very pressing scalability problem in the shielded note model. Nullifiers must be kept tracked in order to guarantee that shielded funds are not double spent. This means that the nullifier set is ever-growing perpetually. Tachyon would enable the ability to combine them in a way that it can be proven succinctly that a specific nullifier was spent (or not) reducing the amount of computation that wallets (and nodes) have to perform.
One of the breakthroughs is the possibility of implementing an oblivious syncing service which allows a non-trusted third party to provide a service to sync your wallet’s nullifier set without learning anything from it and preserving all privacy guarantees that Zcashers know and love and even more since it provides a tighter model than currently the lightclient-protocol offers. This service will enable wallets to outsource the ability to proof their funds are unspent.
Consequences of Tachyon
There are many things that change with the implementation of this protocol, Ragú and the Oblivious Syncing Service. This means that the blockchain is no longer where you would find all the information needed to reconstruct your wallet’s history like you do today because the proof aggregation is able to split the nullifier set in parts and make some part of the blockchain data to be fairly dismissable. This is great in terms of Quantum resistance because quantum computers can’t break what doesn’t exist. On the other hand it changes the mental models that we actually use to think about the Zcash blockchain (and blockchains in general).
Why decoupling the shielded protocol from the payment protocol?
The current protocol has a high-coupling between these two parts. This poses a complexity problem. Complexity means code that’s harder to review, maintain, audit, understand, change, etc.
One of the main problems with post-quantum addresses is that they are more than 1KB long and they don’t fit in a single QR code and there is a substantial UX challenge around how these QR codes could work although there are many research teams in the blockchain space working on this problem already (like animated QRs). Another approach would be that users share the addresses off-band via Signal or a similar medium of communication. Addresses will change regardless of what the choice is so it’s a good approach to detach this decision from the shielded protocol so it’s agnostic to the choices made on the payment side.
WHEN
Sean’s team estimates they could have the new shielded protocol by the end of this year! Their plan is to deploy in on mainnet and figure the rest of the details later which had a significant rebuttal and long faces around the room given how negatively that was for NU5.
Zcash Foundation
The next team presenting was ZF. They went through their 2026 objectives which they have just published. Their focus will be around making the Z3 stack operational, focusing on Zebra performance by developing baseline measurements that let them both measure improvements and catch regressions. In terms of NU7 they will commit to develop what the community finds consensus for in terms of its contents, improve Tor support, write a new DNS seeded (which has been done already)
They identified a set of Problems and Opportunies:
Z3:
- How do we make the experience of upgrading the Z3 experience painless?
- Can we provide as close to a drop in replacement for Zcashd as possible?
NU7
- How can we ensure that we implement the full consensus of coinholders and the community?
Performance
- How does Zebra perform currently?
- How can we reliably identify performance regressions?
- How can we make it faster for downstream applications to access Zebra’s state?
Network Level Anonymity
- Can we provide end-to-end network level anonymity for wallets using Tor?
- Can we encourage more people to run Zcash nodes if they know they can do so privately?
Trial Decryption
- What alternatives are there to download and trial decryption in order to find relevant transactions?
Lightclient protocol and infrastructure
- How do we further decentralize the lightclient server infrastructure?
- What are the incentives for honest servers operators?
- How do we make the lightclient server infrastructure trustless?
FROST 2026 objectives
ZF will be focusing on making FROST easy to use with Zcash so that wallets support it widely and it can be also used for lockbox funds distribution. For this ZF will release FROST v3, move ZIP-312 out of draft status and finish its specification, integrate it with the zcash-dev tool (which has a PR up already by Conrado) and finally implement ZIP-312 with ChillDKG.
Shielded Labs
The crosslink folks went over their motivations and intentions with the new Hybrid PoS PoW protocol. The first goal is decentralization to lower economies of scale and making that more people earn with PoS.
Their second goal is to reduce the risks of rollbacks and reorgs. These events are part of the PoW protocol but yet risky and disruptive when it comes to connecting Zcash to DeFi and also poses risks for those using ZEC as a means of exchange. Everyone sets their own confirmation policy and there’s a fragmentation of the ecosystem in terms of finality.
Design Goals
Shielded Labs also propose a cultural change to switch the ecosystem from the yearly development cycle to a rapid development one. For that they’ve been presenting the workshops with their prototypes so that there are many of them before settling with an implementation for the protocol. Their philosophy is to keep it as simple as possible while preserving all the privacy guarantees that the Zcash protocol currently has and also bringing them to the PoS world.
In terms of privacy this means that:
- Privacy of non-staking people is not affected
- Stake must come from the orchard protocol and return to it
- Unrevealed: staker addresses, linkage between staking positions
- Revealed: amount, action: stake/unstake, endorse finalizer
- Time and Amount quantization as privacy mitigation
They also leave a few open questions:
- How much does staking incentivize t-addr to Orchard migration?
- How much does staking incentivize Orchard infrastructure support?
They also announced this workshop for which you can watch the recording. If you’d like to be part of the next workshop make sure you follow Shielded Labs on X.