Hello friends! This update is a few days delayed on account of ETH Denver and President’s Day. Here are the latest updates from ECC:
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ECC released a new update to zcashd 2.1.1-1. It includes a soft-fork change to the consensus rules to address a security vulnerability. Kudos to the ECC team for preparing, releasing, and communicating this important update.
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There’s been quite a bit of discussion in the forum! Thanks everyone for your engagement. Topics include Zcash chat chat, the Foundation latest update, an open call for community editors and of course, the final text of 1014. Check out the new community discord chat.
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Zcash updates: ZEC is now available to NYC residents on Coinbase. Zcash got lots of love at ETH Denver, including from Vitalik! We enjoyed pancakes at the conference and Eth-friends dropped by the ECC office earlier that week.
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Dates to remember
- Tues, 2/18 - ECC Live Stream, link here
- Tues, 2/25 - February Zeal call, register here
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Community Shout Outs - This new section is to celebrate and highlight the contributions to Zcash made by folks outside of ECC. Ping me if you have suggestions for next week.
- Shout out to oxarbitrage (3), rex4539 (2), and zancas (1) for submitting community PRs that got pulled this week.
- Shout out to @ZcashVR for launching zecpages.com and doing this video tutorial.
- Shout out to Zer0 Knowledg3, Fireice_uk, TM3K, Pete, admins of the zcash Telegram channel
Development Infrastructure Team
- Completed major Python2 to Python3 upgrade for infrastructure
- Completed documentation generation for Android and Lightwalletd
- Smoke testing Loki for production log management
- Completed initial re-design of download.z.cash (falco, flexible/robust downloads resource, etc.); undergoing review before initial deployment
- Continued work on Dockerhub migration
- Completed Android CI/CD research; undergoing implementation
Core Team
- Made good progress on Data Access API for Wallet
- Made excellent progress on Halo paper
Security Team
- Internal review of shielded coinbase implementation
- Community work with grin
- AFL GKE fuzz cluster PoC working
Wallet Team
- Lightwalletd: finished up unit tests with a mocking layer that simulates zcashd connection, working on integration tests, stress testing research
- Android: seed import, bug fixes, and robust logging for the zECC app
- iOS: send and receive and QR code generation for the zECC app
- Documentation: iOS demo app build testing and documentation done. Lightwalletd API reference calls documented, others on the way.
This week in privacy, Washington Post had a phenomenal story on the CIA and its secretly owned global encryption company. Mozilla has a plan for internet privacy. Signal continues to grow, reaching mainstream audiences. NYT had an op-ed on China hacking. I shared some thoughts on privacy and consent. Automated license plate readers are a privacy problem. Don’t miss the privacy/ encryption policy debate going on in India. E-voting is controversial. MIT released a damning report about startup Voatz and privacy advocate Sarah Jamie Lewis gave an interesting counter-argument.
In crypto related news, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell sees the need for private transactions of digital currencies in the United States. Coinbase surveyed over 2000 people and published a report on how Black Americans think about crypto.