Specs

Protocol changes go through SIPs. Each page here is rendered from sips/ in the repository. Number 5 is unused.

SIP	Title	Status	What it does
SIP-1	Burn transaction format	Frozen	What a burn is: one transparent Zcash transaction that pays ZEC to an unspendable script and names the EVM address to credit. Frozen after a burn was relayed through public Zcash testnet peers and mined by an unrelated miner (txid 641cc306…, height 4,383,754).
SIP-2	Epochs, rewards and settlement	Draft	One Zcash block is one epoch. Burners rank by weight, the top burner seals, and rewards land as the block’s withdrawals, re-derived by every node. Implemented; proven on regtest.
SIP-3	Emission schedule	Accepted	6,250 SOVA per epoch after a 20,000-epoch slow start, halving every 1,680,000 epochs, Zcash’s own interval. Numbers locked; the schedule starts at mainnet. The public testnet mints a flat 6,250 SOVA per epoch.
SIP-4	Zcash state precompile	Draft	Contracts read transparent Zcash state, as of the Zcash block each Sova block commits to. Built; live on the public testnet.
SIP-6	Sealer signatures	Accepted	The sealer signs its block with the key its burn credits, so every block names its sealer and light clients get a signature to verify. Accepted and built; live on the public testnet.
SIP-7	Zcash pool state and events	Accepted	Contracts read the value in each shielded pool and every change to it; each Sova block records a summary of its Zcash block in state. Accepted and built; live on the public testnet.
SIP-8	Anchored burns	Accepted	Each burn also names the Sova block it builds on, so Zcash records which history the miners chose, and rewriting it means out-burning them. Accepted. Required for mainnet; on testnet after SIP-6.

A SIP starts as an idea in the SIPs category of Discussions, then opens as a pull request to sips/. See CONTRIBUTING.md.