Zebra 1.0.0-rc.0

This is the first Zebra release candidate. Zebra's consensus rules, node sync, and lightwalletd RPCs are ready for user testing and experimental use. Zebra has not been audited yet.

This release also makes significant performance improvements to RPCs, and temporarily removes support for Rust 1.64.

Breaking Changes

This release has the following breaking changes:

• Rust 1.64 is unsupported due to a performance regression when downloading the Zcash parameters.
  Zebra currently builds with Rust 1.63 (#5251).
• Use correct TOML syntax in Docker zebrad.toml (#5320)

Major RPC Performance Improvements

This release improves RPC performance:

• Initial lightwalletd sync is about twice as fast (#5307)
• RPCs can run while a block is being committed to the state, previously they could be delayed by 5-15 seconds (#5134, #5257)

Security

• Make default command work in docker images, disable optional listener ports (#5313)
• Update yanked versions of cpufeatures (orchard/aes), ed25519 (tor), and quick-xml (flamegraph) (#5308)
• Bump rand_core from 0.6.3 to 0.6.4, fixes unsoundness bug (#5175)

Changed

• Log git metadata and platform info when zebrad starts up (#5200)
• Update mainnet and testnet checkpoints (#5360)
• Update README for the release candidate (#5314)
• change(docs): Add links to CI/CD docs in the zebra book's sidebar (#5355)

Fixed

• Use correct TOML syntax in Docker zebrad.toml (#5320)
• Look back up to 10,000 blocks on testnet for a legacy chain (#5133)

Performance

• Build zebrad with Rust 1.63 to avoid Zcash parameter download hangs (#5251)
• Write blocks to the state in a separate thread, to avoid network and RPC hangs (#5134, #5257)
• Fix slow getblock RPC (verbose=1) using transaction ID index (#5307)
• Open the database in a blocking tokio thread, which allows tokio to run other tasks (#5228)

Contributors

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release, we couldn't make Zebra without you:
@arya2, @gustavovalverde, @oxarbitrage, @teor2345 and @upbqdn.