Happy Holidays Zcashers. This is the last update for 2020. Updates will resume on January 8th. On behalf of the team at ECC, we wish everyone a happy, healthy and restful holiday season.
Here are the updates from this week.
- ECC’s Head of Security published a blog on Fuzzing Zcash with Kubernetes.
- Watch the replay of ECC’s Livestream AMA.
- ECC’s Head of Regulatory Affairs Jack Gavigan participated in a panel discussion on Privacy and Regulation. The panel was organized by Least Authority and the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
- Mark your calendars, Zeal Calls will resume Jan 26, Gardening Club will resume Feb 2 and Arborist calls will resume Feb 11.
Community Shout outs - Shout out to the anonymous donor who contributed 150 ZEC to CodetoInspire, a nonprofit teaching Afghan women how to code. Shout out to rex4539 and Herou for your community PRs this week. Shout out to Unstoppable and Nighthawk for contributing to improving mobile SDKs.
DevInfra
- Updated, deployed, and verified Testnet Seeder
- Updated, deployed, and verified Mainnet Seeder
- Fixed Testnetinabox issue
- Completed entire infrastructure update from Debian 8
- Completed removal/update of monitor causing alarm fatigue throughout infra
Core
- Made an improvement to getblocktemplate performance for shielded coinbase
- Finalized the majority of the design for the Pollard protocol
- Completed refactorings of Halo 2 prover and verifier to reduce size of implementations
- Migrated from the Tweedle curves to the Pasta curves for the Halo 2 implementation
- Implemented generic lookups in PLONK (the Lookup Argument implementation for Halo 2)
Security
- Fuzzing Blog
- Reviewing material on Halo2, Pollard and Sinsemilla
Wallet
- ZIP 313 (fee reduction) in both wallets
- ZIP 212 Sapling transaction format V1-V2 testing work yielded some great results
- User testing on how long it takes to buy Zcash
- Clear road to autoshielding, demo for autoshield is close using UTXO stored in current sql db on iOS.
- iOS SDK improvements thanks to feedback from Unstoppable
This week in privacy, The MarkUp published a round-up of algos behaving badly. Data&Society published research on Poverty Lawgorithms that show how algos are trapping individuals into cycles of poverty. Mozilla congratulates Apple on Anti-Tracking plans. Apple fans rejoice, Facebook pushes back. The Boston Celtics stand against facial recognition technology in policing. Multiple US government agencies have been impacted by a state-level malware attack.
This week in crypto, Bitcoin hit ATHs. Crypto businesses react to US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s proposed regulations regarding self-hosted wallets. Coincenter has a good overview of the regulations.