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WebZjs

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A javascript client library for building Zcash browser wallets

Overview

WebZjs aims to make it simple to securely interact with Zcash from within the browser. This is primarily to support the development of web wallets and browser plugins.

Being a private blockchain Zcash places a lot more demands on the wallet than a public blockchain like Ethereum. WebZjs uses everything at its disposal to give efficient sync times and a good user experience.

Quickstart

Add the @webzjs/webz-wallet package to your javascript project.

Before using the library it is important to initialize the Wasm module and the thread pool.

Important

Make sure you call these functions exactly once. Failing to call them or calling them more than once per page load will result in an error

import initWasm, { initThreadPool, WebWallet } from "@webzjs/webz-wallet";

initWasm();
initThreadPool(8); // can set any number of threads here, ideally match it to window.navigator.hardwareConcurrency

Once this has been done we can create a WebWallet instance. You can theoretically have multiple of these per application but most cases will only want one. A single wallet can handle multiple Zcash accounts.

Important

When constructing a WebWallet it requires a lightwalletd URL. To work in the web these need to be a special gRPC-web proxy to a regular lightwalletd instance. Using an unproxied URL (e.g. https://zec.rocks) will NOT work. ChainSafe currently hosts a gRPC-web lightwalletd proxy and it is easy to deploy more. You can also run your own proxy locally by running docker-compose up in this repo.

let wallet = new WebWallet("main", "https://zcash-mainnet.chainsafe.dev", 1);

Once you have a wallet instance it needs an account. Accounts can be added in a number of different ways. Here an account will be added from a 24 word seed phrase

await wallet.create_account("<24 words here>", 0, birthdayHeight);

and once an account is added the wallet can sync to the network.

await wallet.sync();

The sync process can take a long time depending on the wallet age and usage. This runs in a webworker so will not block the main. It is safe to trigger the sync process and then interact with the wallet using other methods while the sync runs in the background.

For more details check out the hosted docs at https://chainsafe.github.io/WebZjs/

Building

Prerequisites

  • Rust and Cargo
  • This repo uses just as a command runner. Please install this first.
  • wasm-pack
  • Requires clang 17 or later
    • On Mac this can be installed by updating LLVM using your preferred package manager (e.g. macports, brew)
  • Tested with Rust nightly-2024-08-07

Building WebZjs

This just script uses wasm-pack to build a web-ready copy of webz-wallet and webz-keys into the packages directory

just build

Building and running the demo-wallet

Prerequisites

Install yarn

Building

First build WebZjs with

just build

Install js dependencies with

yarn i

Build the demo wallet with

yarn build

Serve it with

yarn serve

Important

For unknown reasons it is currently not possible to use the parcel dev server to serve the demo-wallet hence the build and then serve steps

Development

Testing

Browser tests are run in a headless browser environment and can be run with

just test-web

Known Issues

You might notice the demo-wallet builds using parcel despite being configured to use Vite for development. This is due to a known issue with vite where it cannot correctly handle what it deems to be a cyclic dependency introduced by wasm_bindgen_rayon webworkers. Other bundlers tested to not seem to be affected.

Security Warnings

These libraries are currently under development, have received no reviews or audit, and come with no guarantees whatsoever.

License

All code in this workspace is licensed under either of

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.