A new Zcash technology Stack

Zcash was created from a bitcoin-core fork from 2015. Zcashd has been the main consensus node over 9 years. A complex machinery that combines legacy C++ code from Satoshi’s Era, cutting edge Zero Knowledge Proofs, RustLang code, a full-node wallet, mining and blockchain indexing RPCs.

That’s a lot! It all came to the point where the community voted that developers focus on making Zcash Shielded Assets a reality. But after an in-depth analysis, it was determined that in order to be able to keep advancing the protocol, Zcashd would have to be replaced because the effort of adding new features was huge and deemed an inefficient allocation of the development resources of the Zcash development budget. ECC core developers made the decision of starting to deprecate Zcashd in favor of a new technology stack composed of Zebra, a RustLang modern consensus node developed by the Zcash Foundation engineering team and, Zaino an indexer called developed by ZingoLabs. ECC would be in charge of developing the full-node wallet that would connect to Zaino and Zebra called Zallet.

Zcashd deprecation is a cross-team ecosystem-wide effort which is targeted for end of 2025.

Zcashd Deprecation is now Z^3

Zcashd Deprecation was deemed a negative narrative. In order to focus in the positive aspects of the outcomes of this proces, it was then renamed to Z^3 (Zebra x Zaino x Zallet). If you’d like to contribute to Z3, check out the contributing section.

“Zee Three” or “Zee to the Three” is an original idea from Zancas (ZingoLabs).

Credits to Dismad from ZecHub