This is our fortnightly engineering update which happens after the conclusion of each 2-week engineering sprint. You can check out last week’s update for recent news on community and communications.
Arborist Team
This team focuses on development of the zcashd client, lightwalletd, librustzcash and protocol upgrades. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #arborist-team channel.
We submitted ZIP Drafts for NU3 and began reviewing ECC and community-submitted ZIP Drafts for NU3. We completed the Blossom specification audit, reviewed the results and did some initial work so we can start coding the protocol changes for Blossom. We are continuing to work on the Sapling to Sprout migration tool and it is currently on track to be included in 2.0.5. The team has also been reviewing PRs for the Ecosystem team to merge Insight code into the main zcashd code base.
See the Miscellaneous section below for more info on this team’s naming and community chat.
Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures developers have the tools and infrastructure they need. Join this team in the #dev-infrastructure chat channel.
We are working on a build factory to run the zcash test suite on windows workers. We are also working to set up the website at the new domain for the company name change.
Ecosystem Team
This team is intended to work on projects that interface with external parties not including the zcashd core client and handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.
Insight explorer code is continuing to be reviewed and merged into Zcash, which will, in the near future, allow block explorers and the insight api to operate more reliably.
We have begun looking into the Zcash testnet faucet issues along with our dev-infra team, they are working to fix deployment and SSL certificate issues and we are working on making the faucet Sapling compatible.
Documentation Team
This team drives the curation and assists in the creation of documentation. Follow along in the #documentation chat channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.
We added a new Blossom page which will eventually house the activation countdown once a block height is decided. Updates to the content such as more details on the included features and additional resources will be ongoing. Overall, this is a good central resource for Blossom info.
We updated the styling on docs.z.cash to fit with Zcash branding and updated the ZIPs page with language from ZIP0 (and removed stale ZIPs).
Reference Wallet Team
This teams current charter is to build a Zcash reference wallet. Deliverables will be a series of MVPs where Android is the first target platform.
We publicly released the Android reference code: GitHub - zcash/zcash-android-wallet-poc: Frontend Android code for the reference wallet and posted a blog post about the reference wallet. We continue to work on code cleanup, code review and merging, and code documentation.
Miscellaneous
The team previously referred to as the Zcashd team is now the Arborist team. They are now responsible for not only zcashd and protocol developments but also the lightclientd and librustzcash libraries.
We have new chat rooms in the Zcash community chat which bridge to the internal ECC Slack. More info:
Zcon1 applications are open! Zcon1: June 22 – 24 in Split, Croatia