Another week, another @Zcash Z3 development update! forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/z…

Allegedly. 😂

BREAKING: @cozymaximalist is joining ZODL (@zodl_co) to lead content and communications.

🧵 1/6 We are thrilled to announce that applications to attend Zcon7 are officially OPEN! 🌴🛡️ Join the Zcash community in Cancún, Mexico from October 27–29, 2026, for an all-inclusive, in-person gathering. Apply to attend here 👇 zcashfoundationevents.regfox…

Quick update on the last ~48 hours of Zcash Ironwood! 1. Protocol devs from across all the orgs met twice to discuss specification and implementation progress. Agreement on a couple additional changes: disabling Orchard pool bundles in coinbases, anchors as auth data for migration UX with hardware wallets, and the order that ZIPs and specs will be handled. 2. Ironwood circuit and ZIP 2005 integration drafts are going through the review process. @ValarGroup has already spun up testnets and his team has done a wonderful job scoping out and implementing some of the wallet-facing changes. We are beginning an Ironwood upgrade book for eventual consumption by auditors, wallets, protocol developers, etc.. 3. Formal verification work on Ironwood continues. A collection of different individuals who either have or will continue to work on formalization efforts will be meeting tomorrow where we'll settle on the specific strategy for getting the Ironwood SNARK formally verified. I'm hosting this and will post minutes and details after. Efforts from teams will be ideally combined where useful, existing approaches and progress unified and we'll figure out the easiest path for the next couple weeks. I've paused my own work on this to do Ironwood circuit stuff, but I'll be resuming on that tomorrow. These are the big pieces, there are also some major security auditing tasks taking place in the background -- at least three major firms are auditing Orchard currently, and multiple new AI auditing suites are hammering the codebases to ensure nothing else critical is sitting around anywhere. So far so good! Really proud of how much progress is being made every hour on this by all five of our major teams/orgs and our supporters inside and outside the community. Also love the general wartime vibe shift. Let's go!

Zcash community: I recorded a candidate video for the June 2026 ZCG election. We have a rare window to accelerate adoption of private digital cash. ZCG can help the ecosystem move faster with focus, accountability, and support for builders. Onward. AI Summary of Transcript Paul Brigner introduces himself as the Chief Policy and Regulatory Officer at ZODL, the Zcash Open Development Lab, and explains that he has been part of the Zcash ecosystem for roughly five years. He also describes his broader background in cryptocurrency policy, technology policy, telecommunications, media, internet policy, and software development. In response to the question about how ZCG should adapt now that its annual funding has increased significantly in dollar terms, Paul says that ZCG has already done important work and that he has personally seen the value of ZCG grants. He does not offer a broad critique of ZCG’s past operations, but argues that the committee should focus on helping the ecosystem move faster. In particular, he emphasizes adoption, visibility, awareness, ecosystem growth, and support for builders. Paul highlights what he sees as a unique political and regulatory window for Zcash and financial privacy. From his work in Washington, D.C., he says he is seeing greater openness to privacy and crypto policy arguments across agencies and policymakers. He believes this window may not remain open for long, so Zcash should act with urgency. On Zcash’s biggest opportunity, Paul argues that Zcash can become unstoppable private digital cash, or private encrypted money, at scale. He points to the ecosystem’s response to a recent vulnerability, as well as work on Ironwood and Tachyon, as examples of decentralized teams collaborating effectively and moving quickly. He sees these efforts as important foundations for resilience, scalability, adoption, and long-term success. When asked what he would change about Zcash, Paul says he approaches the question with an open mind. He discusses a recent conversation about the possibility of a private stablecoin on Zcash and explains that, while his own long-term vision is for Zcash to become crypto-native private money for the world, a private stablecoin or ZSA could potentially help accelerate adoption in the nearer term. At the same time, Paul stresses that any stablecoin-related effort would need to be pursued carefully and in a Zcash-aligned way. He does not want a stablecoin issuer, outside entity, or token to gain undue influence over Zcash, the protocol, or the ecosystem. He frames this as a complex issue that ZCG would need to evaluate thoughtfully, with open discussion and a clear focus on Zcash’s mission. Paul closes by thanking the Zcash community and ZCAP voters for their consideration and says it would be a great honor to serve on the Zcash Community Grants Committee.

Zcash brought zk to life. We made it fast. We made it usable. Now we make the supply trustlessly verifiable. Then we scale. Then quantum secure. Private digital cash. ZEC for billions.

Great to see DCG subsidiaries @Grayscale and @FoundryServices on the inaugural @FortuneMagazine Crypto 100 list, along with many of our portfolio companies, such as @krakenfx, @BitGo, @Figure, @Uniswap, @Circle, @Paxos, @Chainalysis, @Ledger, @OndoFinance & more. Zcash $ZEC recognized as a Top 10 protocol. Our fantastic companies have been building essential infrastructure for more than a decade fortune.com/ranking/crypto/2…

New Zebrad update improves sync performance. github.com/ZcashFoundation/z…

Shielded Labs has extended Taylor Hornby's (@DefuseSec) agreement through the end of 2026. Taylor will continue serving as a Security Consultant, where his primary focus will be identifying security vulnerabilities and supporting remediation efforts for Zcash. Taylor will also contribute to the Ironwood upgrade. He'll focus on assurance, including security review and formal verification. His goal is to help ensure the protocol and code receive rigorous scrutiny before deployment and that significant issues are identified and addressed as early as possible. This work is crucial. We believe the number of security vulnerabilities being discovered across the industry will continue to increase as AI-assisted security research becomes more sophisticated. Our goal is to stay ahead of that curve. Taylor has spent years working on the security of Zcash, and his discovery of the Orchard vulnerability demonstrated the value of his experience. There’s no one we’d rather have helping us improve the security of Zcash.

BERLIN. The legendary Blockspäti is back June 17-19. @zcash takes over the club. Three days. 12 side events. Open daily from 11am-4am. One mission: make privacy sexy.🦓

UPDATE: The various orgs and protocol developers mentioned have agreed on the specific consensus rule changes for Ironwood, after settling the finer details. Here's a summary: 1. Ironwood introduces a new pool using the Orchard protocol, just like the existing pool. 2. The circuit for the Orchard protocol—which applies to both the existing Orchard pool and the new Ironwood pool—will have a flag that consensus rules can toggle. This flag disables payments to *other* users within that pool, while maintaining the ability to create change notes. (This enables a privacy safeguard.) 3. The old Orchard pool will have this flag enabled after the network upgrade, and payments to the old pool will also be disabled by constraining valueBalance. 4. Because payments are disabled on the old pool, wallets must send new payments to Orchard receivers (inside existing unified addresses) via the new pool, and they should also migrate funds away from the old pool. This combination enforces a bound on the circulating supply of ZEC through the use of the existing turnstile mechanism; the amount of ZEC that anyone can transact with is no more than the amount that is supposed to exist. Meanwhile, users' wallets can migrate funds to protect them from risk, which also gradually provides evidence that counterfeiting never took place. Now that we have this decided, we'll collectively move on to the implementations, specifications, and ecosystem support/outreach. (We also have many different auditing and formal verification efforts taking place behind the scenes to provide assurance about the circuit correctness. More on that soon!)

We will be ready at @Gemini for Ironwood

Another week, another @Zcash Z3 update! Zcashd deprecation is happening and the timeline is described in this post below Thanks for reading! Onward.

To get ahead of scams, if you're interested in donating to me for finding the Zcash bug, my addresses are in this post or in my replies below (be careful to check the exact username for lookalike scammers). Nothing else has been approved by me. Note: I intend to apply for a bounty through a Zcash coinholder grant, so donations are much appreciated but not necessary! Zcash: u1k6y9wpyc5m5ec3wz49ny9chewklyexn8rdj7928n3zswh0gwl0gh3zwwg37p76j7vrrv8s0dj8rhjfc49pg9yv9mjdea2sn86tnjh99a9424cdvw3aadyz8v40ddancr7e4kjzw07qhrcdez3d9sycx89f87vjw7eaxys2aktsm57tkp t1eykDAemzff7oPAA2E43Z47iawATB4bZRy Solana: D6c34hRcmhkHMXaAhoPXgVw9JYrh84saeSfYnk7ZSjeW ETH: 0x1b8203102aE3469a67E78FF9a78d8A5cC7E7e769 BTC: bc1qtxqv8fzj2pnewj2y5l8nh4ur4rkrvm2kv6mlp9

It's still Zcash or communism.