Navigating the Zcash developer ecosystem
Zcash documentation is spread across multiple legacy and in-progress sources, and the ongoing transition from zcashd to zebrad leaves many workflows fragmented. Getting reliable Orchard scanning, UFVK handling and consensus-exact behavior required deep dives into the protocol spec and source code.

Implementing FROST MPC over Pallas
Zcash Orchard uses the Pallas curve, but there’s no off-the-shelf Rust crate providing FROST support for Pallas. To build our threshold-signing MPC, we had to implement custom curve integrations and adapt existing FROST frameworks to work natively with Orchard pool's curve requirements. This added significant cryptographic engineering work before we could even begin to wire MPC into the key generation and withdrawal flow.

Integrating Arcium (still in testnet)
Arcium’s confidential compute layer is powerful, but still early. Documentation is sparse and APIs are evolving. We had to work closely with the Arcium team, test multiple iterations of encrypted instruction flows and design a custom MXE to route deposit attestations and withdrawal intents through their encrypted compute later. After considerable iteration, many internal components are now working, though the current live demo does not yet use Arcium for routing.

Overall, these challenges forced us to build deeper technical understanding of the Zcash protocol, extend cryptographic tooling ourselves and co-develop workflows with a new confidential compute platform.