Zebra Release Candidate
The Zcash Foundation is pleased to announce that we have recently tagged our first release candidate of Zebra (zebra 1.0.0-rc.0), the alternative Zcash node implementation written in Rust. This is the first time that there has been an alternative zcash node implementation running on mainnet and that we are excited to see some Zebra nodes […]
Announcing a New Version of FROST
We are pleased to announce an updated version of FROST, a Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold signature scheme. FROST is designed to reduce the interaction between participants who jointly own a private signing key and wish to use this private key to sign a message (in the case of Zcash, FROST will be used to sign transactions […]
Foundation DNS Seeders Are Live
The Zcash Foundation has launched its own DNS seeders for the Zcash network, as promised in our roadmap. This removes one of the network’s last sole dependencies on ECC while laying the groundwork for future improvements to Zcash network introductions. The code is freely licensed and available on GitHub along with instructions for running your own. With the rest […]
Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing with the TCN Coalition
Today the Zcash Foundation joins the TCN Coalition, a newly formed global group of collaborators who are working to design, implement, and deploy contract tracing without surveillance: Over the course of the past few weeks, the global community of technologists, privacy experts, and epidemiologists has worked tirelessly towards a secure, privacy-first, GDPR-compliant, and open-source approach to […]
Design Tradeoffs in Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing
In our previous post, we talked about how the problem of building decentralized, privacy-preserving contact tracing systems is an opportunity to meaningfully apply cryptography to a pressing public health problem. That post described one effort, TraceTogether, but there are several other efforts in development. In this post, we’ll describe a cryptographic perspective on the contact tracing problem, […]
Let’s Develop Decentralized, Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing
Over the last few months and especially the last few weeks, the spread of COVID-19 has created a massive health crisis at global scale. Healthcare infrastructure is being overwhelmed around the world. While data about the spread of the virus and its effects are still uncertain, projections about the potential effects of unchecked spread are […]
Decoding Bitcoin Messages with Tokio Codecs
In one of our previous posts, we wrote an overview of the structure of the asynchronous network stack we designed for Zebra, the Zcash Foundation’s forthcoming node implementation. This post will zoom in to take a close look at one small but interesting component: how we use Tokio’s codec functionality to implement the Bitcoin wire protocol used by Zcash. […]
Composable Futures-based Batch Verification
In a previous post, we shared details on the new, fully asynchronous network stack we designed for Zebra, the Zcash Foundation’s forthcoming node implementation. In this post, I want to share an idea we’re hoping will help us achieve high performance and high code quality in a different area: cryptographic verification of data on the Zcash blockchain. […]
A New Network Stack For Zcash
In the Foundation’s engineering roadmap for 2020, we overviewed our plans for Zebra, our Rust implementation of Zcash. Announced last summer at Zcon1, Zebra aims to support the core strength of Zcash – its best-in-class cryptography – by placing it on a solid foundation, providing a modern, modular implementation that can be broken into components and used […]
Engineering Roadmap 2020
At the beginning of this year, executive director Josh Cincinnati set goals for the Zcash Foundation, “with a renewed energy toward redistributing centers of unilateral power in the Zcash ecosystem.” At the time, Josh was actively recruiting for ZF’s tech team, which would tackle the following strategic goals: Meaningfully extend the capabilities of ecosystem participants to […]