1.0.15
Final reviews of pull requests for the 1.0.15 release are coming to a close. Overwinter ZIP drafts have also had some final editing and review (but are still open for review from others in the community, especially third-party services who might affected by the network upgrade). The activation mechanism code for Overwinter is merged and ready for the 1.0.15 RC which we plan to get out early next week once we merge in the remaining PRs. We’ll then release 1.0.15 next Thursday February 15th. This release will include all the code for Overwinter and the activation height on testnet which will allow us and others to test the activation process and subsequent network upgrade changes in that environment before committing to an activation height on the mainnet. The following release, 1.1.0 will include the mainnet activation height which we’re anticipating will be targeted for late June but a specific target date will be confirmed then.
Note that most of 1.0.15 is Overwinter code so the implementation will not be available until the mainnet activation but there are a few other PRs that will be implemented on this release including a getdeprecationinfo RPC (PR 2839) for showing the height at which the current version of zcashd will auto-senescence.
Sapling
We finished a preliminary version of the Sapling specifications. We’re reviewing it internally and plan to modify minor parts before releasing it publicly and sharing with contracted auditors for deeper review. We’ll also be comparing the existing code for Sapling to the spec for any necessary changes.
Website & Documentation
We made some changes to the Network Upgrade guidelines for developers and expect a few more changes as we finalize the ZIP drafts. Resources for users including general information about what to expect with a network upgrade and an activation countdown page are looking to be out next week.
We also updated our blog to a new infrastructure which allows us to manage and scale translations more easily. We moved all blog posts in English over but are still working on many older translated posts which currently redirect to the old blog versions. The new blog lives at https://blog.z.cash