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October 23, 2025

Foundation News

Zebra 3.0.0-rc.0 Release

The Zcash Foundation is pleased to announce the release of Zebra 3.0.0-rc.0.

This release candidate includes the mainnet activation height for the Zcash Network Upgrade 6.1 (NU6.1) which will activate at block height 3,146,400. 

Support for this release is set to expire before the NU6.1 activation height. If we find no issues with this release version, we will make a final release based on this candidate prior to NU6.1 activation.

This release also includes significant updates to Zebra’s CI and Docker setup, as well as performance optimizations.

Finally, the release includes the following breaking changes: 

  1. In order to standardise configuration of key infrastructure components across the ecosystem, we’ve migrated zebrad to use a layered configuration using config.rs. This has changed a number of environment variables which will need to be updated in any scripts or configuration files that are using the old names.
  2. In order to simplify the Docker entrypoint, we are no longer generating a zebrad.toml file or translating legacy Docker environment variables. Node operators relying on any of the above must switch to the new config.rs equivalents.
  3. We have made block template generation part of the default zebra build and have cleaned up zebrad/Cargo.toml to remove the getblocktemplate-rpcs feature flag. As a result, the following build command is no longer supported: cargo build --features getblocktemplate-rpcs

You can see a full copy of the included changes in the v3.0.0-rc.0 Release Notes on GitHub.