Zcash Avalanche RedBridge

The Zcash Avalanche RedBridge is a decentralized bridge that enables interoperability between the Zcash (ZEC) and Avalanche (AVAX) blockchains. This bridge is designed to facilitate the seamless transfer of ZEC onto the Avalanche blockchain, leveraging the high throughput, low fees, and ecofriendly consensus mechanisms of Avalanche while preserving the privacy centric features of Zcash.

The RedBridge supports a wide array of use cases, including crosschain decentralized finance (DeFi), private transactions, and liquidity sharing, empowering Zcash holders with expanded accessibility to the Avalanche ecosystem. This bridge is operated through a set of decentralized nodes and an oracle, known as ZavaX, which ensures reliable data transfer and price verification between Zcash and Avalanche.

Key Features

Privacy Preserving Interoperability: Allows Zcash users to maintain privacy while utilizing DeFi applications on Avalanche. Decentralized Oracle ZavaX: Integrates an oracle system to ensure accurate ZEC/AVAX price data, allowing trustless crosschain operations. Scalable and Eco Friendly: Utilizes Avalanches consensus model, providing high speed transactions with minimal environmental impact. Support for DeFi and DApps: Zcash holders can now participate in various DeFi platforms on Avalanche without compromising on privacy.

Technical Components

Decentralized ZavaX Oracle Description: The ZavaX oracle is crucial to the bridge, providing crosschain price feeds and enabling trustless ZEC to AVAX conversions. Link to Oracle

Cross Chain Bridge Contract Description: The smart contract architecture supporting the Zcash Avalanche bridge, handling deposits, conversions, and withdrawals of ZEC.

Privacy Layer Integration Description: Ensures that Zcash privacy features are preserved throughout the bridging process, allowing for private crosschain transactions.

Deliverables and Documentation

Zcash Elastic Subnet Bridge on Avalanche: Grant Proposal Below are the key deliverables and technical resources completed for the Zcash Avalanche RedBridge project:

Deliverable 1.1: Preliminary PoC that supports querying testnet Zcash transactions from a testnet Avalanche subnet with a CLI, published on Github and with a one node subnet on the Avalanche testnet. https://github.com/red-dev-inc/zavax-oracle

Deliverable 2.1: Architecture

Milestone 3 March 31, 2024

Deliverable 3.1 is complete, presenting our analysis on adopting FROST over BLS for threshold signatures in the ZavaX bridge. This shift leverages audited libraries from the Zcash Foundation and facilitates better integration and security. https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/frost

Deliverable 3.2 UX and UI design for GUI completed, detailing our security enhancements for the ZavaX Oracle subnet, supported by penetration testing results. For more details, including server configuration and testing outcomes Security Assesment Audit Report Additionally, the team rebranded from ZavaX to redbridge and changing our staking token from ZAX to RBR.

Milestone 4 April 30, 2024

Deliverable 4.1 Fully functional deployment to Zcash and Avalanche testnets, with a 3 validator Subnet, with CLI support

Milestone 5 May 31, 2024

Deliverable 5.1 GUI: bridge integration into Core or Webapp

Milestone 6 June 30, 2024 Deliverable 6.1 Successful pass of software audit Deliverable 6.2 Publishing of the audited source code to a public Github repo

Take a look at the Github repo

For more technical details, users are encouraged to review the repository and documentation for the RedBridge project to explore the integration specifics, testing frameworks, and security protocols.

• Deliverables: In Q1 2025, the team announced the launch of the red·bridge demo website , where anyone can try the user experience, give feedback, and suggest improvements. It also serves as an easy way to introduce non-technical people to the project.

• The team used Zebra for the final version of red·bridge. To test it, they upgraded two of the three nodes in their test blockchain, ZavaX Oracle, which runs on Avalanche’s Fuji testnet. The last node was upgraded successfully, now Zavax Oracle now runs on ZEBRA!

• In Q1 of 2025, the red.bridge website was coded to offer four views from red, Dark, Light, and Zebra as opposed to the initial version, which was red.

• Another point is that the team will activate the red·bridge L1 live on the Avalanche mainnet in December 2025. Initially, it will serve as an oracle for the Zcash blockchain and then, soon after, for Bitcoin as well. Wherein, each request will cost 0.001 AVAX in gas token. This build will enable any L1 or smart contract on Avalanche to inexpensively query data from Zcash and Bitcoin in a decentralized manner.

• In Q2, the team submitted a milestone ACP-77 (known as Avalanche9000) to the Avalanche Foundation to make the running of a red.bridge guardian earlier and more affordable for everyone. Initially, validators needed to stake around 2000 AVAX; however, with the Avalanche9000costs, validators only needed 1 AVAX (month). Additionally, this milestone also finalizes the plan to use ZF’s FROST implementation, which gives each Guardian a signing share for secure, distributed control of the bridge wallet.

• Come Q1 and Q2 of 2026, red.bridge would host its RBR token (formerly ZAX) airdrop for the Zcash and Avalanche community members. According to the founder of red.dev, they shall host an incentivized testnet where users will have a chance to earn RBR while helping to test out the bridge.