Release
We progressed more on issues targeted for the 1.0.14 release including testing and review. There’s a bunch of candidates to go into the release including experimental features like payment offloading and viewing keys but as with previous releases, we tend to load up on tickets then narrow the scope as the time to review and edit permits.
Network upgrades
Today we released an overview roadmap of the upcoming network upgrades in 2018 and our intentions to make Zcash For Everyone. The work for the first network upgrade (NU0 AKA Overwinter) is currently in progress some of which will be introduced in the releases prior including 1.0.14. This has the explicit goal of making future network upgrades safer and simpler. The second network upgrade (NU1 AKA Sapling) is a major version release and will introduce all of the great security and efficiency improvements we’ve been talking about over the last few months since the new faster zk-SNARK research was announced.
We intend to post a more specific roadmap and visual accompaniment to the website in the coming weeks and will be communicating what the user experience will look like during these upgrades.
UX
In addition to researching methods for the best user experience during network upgrades, we’re working on finishing up a general UX guide for wallet creators based on our prior surveys of cryptocurrency wallets and service evaluations. This will be a general guide and should support the greater cryptocurrency ecosystem but as we approach the Sapling upgrade and better support for shielded addresses in the ecosystem, we’ll focus on guides which target the unique properties of shielded addresses such as payment disclosure and viewing keys.
Research, auditing, AMA & hiring
We’re progressing on consulting for the next round of audits we intend to have for Zcash and the upcoming upgrades.
We also got to see a great empirical analysis of the Zcash transaction graph which we responded to in a blog post.
We just finished our end of the year AMA, thanks everyone for joining us!
And finally, we posted new engineering jobs to our website.