UX research
This week we published our first UX survey of the Zcash ecosystem which includes a variety of reports about using Zcash specifically and cryptocurrencies in general. We are moving forward with the next UX project which will most likely involve studies on desktop clients and connecting through Tor for added privacy of transactions.
1.0.12 release
We’ve settled on some milestones for the upcoming 1.0.12 release which include August 31st for CI deployment, September 18th for the release candidate and September 25th for the full release. The release Github project gives an overview of our plans for 1.0.12 in addition to some initial planning for 1.0.13.
The “theme” for the 1.0.12 release is to focus on benchmarking for helping to understand how to make wallet performance better for users. Because most of the wallet performance issues reported to us have been due to heavy usage from some third-party wallet services and exchanges, it’s anticipated that this benchmarking will mostly focus on improving performance with transparent addresses.
Bitcore for Zcash
We had a topical meeting this week about the fork of bitcore that we unofficially maintain and the engineering requirements for pulling in some patches which would bring in more features. For now, we’ll be maintaining only the minimum support for the Zcash fork of bitcore due to a lack of engineering resources but are very well aware of at least a couple third-parties who depend on it and would like to include the updated patches when we have a more engineering time to allocate.
XCAT
Today we had a Show & Tell with a couple of ZcashCo engineers to demo our current implementation of XCAT using Zcash and Bitcoin blockchains. We’ll be releasing some updates on the roadmap for the project in the near future.
An added bonus for your weekend enjoyment, we decided to just go ahead and open the ZBXCAT repository. Note that it’s still very much in an experimental phase so play at your own risk. 