Edition #16Sunday, July 5, 2026

Zcash Weekly — July 5, 2026

Ironwood lands on testnet — mainnet target July 21. New ZCG members seated. KeepKey files for Orchard hardware signing. ZecBlock ships full Ironwood integration.

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Archive note: this edition uses the current ZecBlock name and links. Reporting and publication dates are unchanged.

Ironwood Lands on Testnet — Mainnet Target: July 21

Zebra 6.0.0-rc.0 shipped July 2 with full NU6.3 "Ironwood" support, activating at testnet block 4,134,000. The new shielded pool is now live on testnet — wallets can route transactions to it, and the Orchard-to-Ironwood turnstile is operational. Ironwood's state DB migrates in-place (no resync from genesis). Mainnet activation is targeted for July 21, though Shielded Labs flagged that exchange, mining pool, and wallet readiness will determine whether the date holds. Zebra 6.0.0-rc.0 · Forum #56521

Zebra 6.0.0-rc.0

New ZCG Composition — Paul Brigner and GGuy Elected

ZCAP election results announced June 29: Paul Brigner (ZODL's Chief Policy & Regulatory Officer) and GGuy (incumbent) take the two open seats, effective July 1. Brigner brings direct DC policy-layer expertise — he's also building PGPZ. This committee will evaluate the largest grant pipeline ZCG has ever faced through H2 2026. ZF Announcement

ZF Announcement

KeepKey Files for Orchard Shielded Signing on Hardware

KeepKey submitted grant #341 for full Orchard shielded transaction signing directly on hardware, with integrations into Zingo and ZODL wallets. If approved, KeepKey joins Hito (Milestone 1 submitted for real-device testing) and Ledger's pending Orchard support. The hardware wallet story for shielded Zcash went from nothing to three active efforts in under a year. GitHub #341

GitHub #341

Ecosystem

Vizor Wallet now on iOS and Android.

The macOS-first wallet expanded to mobile this week. Another entrant alongside ZODL, Zingo, Noir, and the growing wallet ecosystem.

ZODL shipped iOS v3.7.2

(July 2) with Keystone disconnect fix and security improvements. Android v3.7.1 (June 30) fixed BTC swap "Quote unavailable" errors. Steady polish ahead of Ironwood.

zecd open-sourced.

Cypherpunk announced that @emers0nian released zecd — a drop-in zcashd alternative built for scale. Relevant for operators still on zcashd ahead of deprecation. Tweet

BTCPay Server Zcash plugin: multi-store support in progress.

Developer 1337bytes confirmed multi-account and mempool notifications working locally. Building multi-store upfront to avoid a double migration for merchants. Forum #55316/22

Forum #55316/22

Sovright announces Argos for ZEC recovery

from ZecHub's weekly digest, alongside the Ironwood testnet and Vizor launches.

Governance & Grants

Under Review

- ZECsy Team Amsterdam (#344
$30K — privacy tour at Cypherpunk Week
Aug 31–Sep 6)

New (no labels yet)

- KeepKey Orchard Shielded Signing (#341)

New ZCG members Paul Brigner and GGuy seated July 1. The pipeline is historically large — 14 grants under active review.

Protocol & Development

Zebra 6.0.0-rc.0

Full Ironwood/NU6.3 support. State DB format 28.0.0 with in-place migration. Ironwood note commitment trees via RPC. New FindForkPoint read request and non-finalized block subscription resume for reorg handling. Pre-built binaries via cargo binstall, Sigstore attestation, Cosign signatures. Release

Release

Zaino Ships Ironwood Path — 0.4.2 → 0.5.1 → 0.6.0-rc.1

Three releases in one week: 0.4.2 stable (June 30) — the recommended production version. 0.5.1 stable (July 3) — first stable 0.5.x, drops unreleased Zebra git patches, uses crates.io only. 0.6.0-rc.1 (July 5) — Ironwood pre-release for testing. The "do not upgrade from 0.4.x" blocker from last month is cleared. 0.5.1 Release

0.5.1 Release

Ironwood Crate Pre-releases

zcash_primitives 0.29.0-pre.0 (July 1) — up from 0.28.0 stable
zcash_keys 0.15.0-pre.0 (July 1) — up from 0.14.0 stable
orchard 0.15.0-pre.1 (June 30) — Ironwood circuit changes

Not production-ready, but they signal the shape of API changes coming for every Zcash Rust project.

ZIP 256 Merged

Retrospective documentation of NU6.1→NU6.2 consensus and DoS fixes. ZIP 257 (Orchard counterfeiting mitigation formal spec) is next.

ZF Engineering Update (June 28)

Zebra binaries now reproducible and signed. Sync stall near chain tip fixed. Read-only secondary DB access for indexers. Early Ironwood work underway. Forum #56472

Forum #56472

Tweets of the Week

"Ironwood/NU6.3 testnet was deployed today, Thursday, July 2. This is the first step toward activating the next Zcash network upgrade on mainnet later this month."
— @zodl_co · link

"Bitcoin's job is to be the thing that does not change. But quantum is coming. Post-quantum signatures are needed more than ever + they require massive scaling since they're far larger and will bloat the chain. Stay in a pre-ossification mindset. The job isn't done. Zcash."
— @cypherpunk · link

"YOUR WALLET SHOULDN'T BE A SURVEILLANCE DEVICE."
— @zodl_app · link

Forum Highlights

Ironwood supply soundness thread

(#56044) — 1,899 views, 187 likes. Multi-team convergence confirmed: ZODL, Shielded Labs, ZF all actively contributing to implementation. This thread remains the closest thing to a public coordination channel for the upgrade.

BTCPay Zcash plugin

(#55316) — New activity from 1337bytes. Multi-store support working locally. The decision to build multi-store before shipping single-store reflects maturity in merchant tooling, even if it delays the timeline.

ZecForge

(#56399) — Creator distribution network for privacy education launched June 30. Positioned as the distribution complement to ZecHub's content creation.

Privacy Corner

The Encryption Precedent

Inspired by Mastering Zcash by Maxime Desalle — Chapter 5

In the early 1990s, the U.S. government classified strong encryption as a munition — illegal to export, like a missile. Phil Zimmermann faced a federal investigation for releasing PGP. The argument was familiar: if ordinary people can encrypt their communications, law enforcement goes blind.

The cypherpunks won that fight. Not by proving encryption had no downsides — it does — but by demonstrating that the alternative was worse. A world without strong encryption is a world without secure banking, without private medical records, without e-commerce. Today HTTPS is mandatory on every browser. Nobody argues that your connection to your bank should be cleartext.

Financial privacy is in the same position encryption was in 1993. The objections are identical: "Only criminals need it." "Law enforcement can't function." But infrastructure built on surveillance defaults always loses to infrastructure built on privacy defaults — not because privacy is costless, but because transparency is catastrophically expensive when applied universally.

Zcash is building the HTTPS of money. The question isn't whether it will be adopted. It's how much damage the cleartext era causes before it is.

Network Snapshot

ZEC Price

$464.58 · +21.8%

Market Cap

$7.78B · —

24h Volume

$232.8M · —

Block Height

3,402,085 · +7,449

Network Upgrade

NU6.2 (Ironwood mainnet target: July 21) · —

Chain Size

256.9 GB · +0.1 GB

Zcash Privacy Index

Privacy Score

29 · 29

Shielded Pool

4,412,463 ZEC · 4,421,399 ZEC

Shielded % of Supply

26.3% · 26.3%

Orchard Pool

3,766,748 ZEC · —

Sapling Pool

620,306 ZEC · —

Privacy Metrics

Privacy Score

29 · 29

Shielded Pool

4,412,463 ZEC · 4,421,399 ZEC

Shielded % of Supply

26.3% · 26.3%

Orchard Pool

3,766,748 ZEC · —

Sapling Pool

620,306 ZEC · —

Cross-Chain Activity (24h)

Inflows

Solana ($63K), Ethereum ($62K)

Outflows

Ethereum ($176K), Bitcoin ($166K)

24h Volume

$898K across 294 swaps

All-Time Swaps

153,935

Network Health

Active Nodes

303 (+0.3% WoW)

Countries

Tor Nodes

The shielded pool shed ~9K ZEC this week — noise, not signal. The real story is that node count stabilized for the first time in a month (+0.3% after weeks of decline). Operators who are going to upgrade have upgraded; the remaining 303 active nodes are the Ironwood-ready core. Price jumped 21.8% — the strongest weekly gain since the post-NU6.2 recovery — likely driven by Ironwood testnet confidence and the ZODL Bankless interview continuing to circulate. ZEC is now back above its pre-incident level.

Privacy Risk Monitoring: ZecBlock flagged 3,359 potentially linkable shield/deshield patterns this week (436 high-risk, 1,683 medium, 1,240 low). High-risk patterns concentrate in rapid shield-then-deshield sequences with matching amounts — exactly the behavior Ironwood's new pool design aims to reduce.

Live data →

Tool Updates

ZecBlock

Shipped full Ironwood pool integration: backend indexing for the new pool across all layers, frontend display on address pages and protocol stats, fork monitor with fork depth and common ancestor detection for testnet nodes, and Ironwood migration tracking. ZecBlock testnet is now Ironwood-ready ahead of mainnet activation.

What's Ahead

July 8–10ZODL Summit, Prague.
~July 15ZecHub Hackathon 3.0 closes.
July 21 (target)Ironwood/NU6.3 mainnet activation.
Aug 31–Sep 6Cypherpunk Week Amsterdam (ZECsy privacy tour, if funded).
October 27–29Zcon7, Cancún. Zcash turns 10.