This week marks the 1st of a 3-week sprint. Check out last week’s update for a recap of the last sprint.
Zcashd Team
This team focuses on development of the zcashd client. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #zcashd-team channel.
During this sprint, zcashd engineers are focused on testnet testing of existing Sapling RPC functionality and implementing remaining RPC functionality for the 2.0.1 release.
Some exciting benchmarks are coming out of the testnet transactions:
-
Transparent to shielded:
"execution_secs": 0.503406032 -
Fully shielded:
4.8 secs for a fully shielded tx with one input note to 2 outputs
7.3 seconds for 2 input notes to 2 output notes
Much of the RPC implementation work is going through review at this point. The curious can check out the wallet related pull requests pending review here: Pull requests · zcash/zcash · GitHub
We recommend the community follow along with the testing and wallet development in the #zcashd-team channel linked above.
Additionally, the protocol team that was merged with the Zcashd-team to focus on the 2.0.0 release is now spinning up into it’s own team again starting next sprint. The focus of the team over the next couple months will be protocol code cleanup/refactoring and eventually doing some research groups to study potential improvements in the next network upgrades.
Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures application developers have the tools and infrastructure they need to efficiently collaborate, design, implement, review, test, and ship high quality projects. These responsibilities include: CI/CD, release automation & execution, coverage reporting, simulations and testnets and “spin-up-a-box-for-arbitrary-work-tasks” service for engineers.
During the middle of a release cycle is when we target updates to dev infrastructure. We’re also making a lot of progress on build support for other platforms including Windows and MacOS.
A new channel was created in the community chat to follow along with development infrastructure progress: #dev-infrastructure.
Ecosystem Team
For the time being this team handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.
We completed a second round of outreach to third-parties this week after an initial draft of the Sapling network upgrade integration guide was published.
Documentation Team
This team works on improving the accessibility of zcashd and Zcash overall by creating and moderating documentation. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #documentation channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.
This team has been working with ecosystem team to get developer documentation out regarding Sapling (as mentioned in the ecosystem team section). We’re also doing a lot of work cleaning up and organizing the documentation. And we’ve got some preliminary support for translations working.
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.
So far, the wallet team has been focused on design and UX but with 2.0.0 out the door, we have some engineering resources available for the backend light client protocol design which is ramping up this sprint. We’re also making progress on an Android developer hire and hope to have that finalized so we can start implementation work in a timely fashion.
Community & Communication
We published another two videos from the Perspectives video series this week.
We also outlined some user expectations and developer guidelines for the Sapling activation which is just under 2 months away!
In the coming weeks leading up to Sapling activation, we plan on releasing some educational blog posts about new features and user experiences that the upgrade brings so stay tuned!
Finally, shout out to Lamassu for being the first third-party to announce their Sapling-readiness! Feel free to ask wallets, exchanges and other services you use that support Zcash to make a similar public statement!
