We’re excited to announce that Zebra 2.5.0 was released on 08-07-2025, with the most notable update being the implementation and deployment of NU6.1 in the Zcash public Testnet. The network upgrade was successfully activated on 08-11-2025.
For full details, see the 2.5.0 release notes.
NU6.1 was scheduled to activate at Testnet block height 3,536,500, following thorough testing of the lockbox disbursement implementation in a private testnet environment. Now that it’s live on Testnet, it’s time for the Zcash community to perform further validation before Mainnet activation.
Breaking RPC Change
This release includes a breaking change to the output of the getblock and getblockinfo RPC methods, specifically in the valuePools field. The value pool identifier previously named deferred has been renamed to lockbox to match the zcashd implementation.
Improved Per-Crate Release Process
We’ve also improved how we handle per-crate releases in the Zebra monorepo. From now on, when a crate has API-breaking changes, it will receive its own major version bump, independent of the overall Zebra release. This should make it easier for Zebra consumers to track and adapt to upstream breaking changes.
As part of this change, each crate now has its own changelog in addition to the main Zebra changelog.
Examples:
We hope this more granular release process will make it easier for developers to integrate Zebra while managing breaking changes in upstream dependencies.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through code, reviews, testing, suggestions, and bug reports. Your work makes Zebra possible.
