This is our fortnightly community and communications update; last week’s engineering update is available here.
A happy announcement to kick-off this week’s update! Electric Coin Co, The Ethereum Foundation and The ZcashFoundation are jointly sponsoring a bounty to add BLAKE2 into Istanbul. This will help with interoperability between Ethereum and other projects (including Zcash) that use BLAKE2. Champion wanted: learn more!
Zcash side-chains! Electric Coin Co, Keep, the Ethereum Foundation and iqlusion (a Cosmos validator) are funding the addition of FlyClient proofs in Zcash. Are you wondering what a FlyClient is and what it enables? For starters: Interop, IoT … More info available here: [ZIP 221] FlyClient - Consensus-Layer Changes by therealyingtong · Pull Request #220 · zcash/zips · GitHub
TODAY! Hope you’re planning to participate in the technical AMA. Do you have a 
for our engineering team? We hope so! Join the discussion at 12:00 PT/15:00 ET/19:00 UTC.
The ECC Team: Out and About
@paige presented “Zcash - Private Transactions on a Public, Open Blockchain“at Blockchain Rome last week and…while in Rome…she was interviewed by a local reporter about Zcash, key points and future perspectives. A great quote from Paige in that article, “I think the main driving force of the Zcash community is the awareness that privacy is a fundamental concept when it comes to communication, it is not something that can only be thought of later.”
@dodger was announced as co-leader of the Global Digital Finance KYC/AML/CTF working group, aimed at helping to shape policy and articulating best practices.
Product Updates
This week the product team did our bi-weekly sync-up geared toward housekeeping and product priority check-ins following Zcon1. We went through all of the current product priorities to confirm status and move items through their lifecycle. We also identified two additional product items to be discussed in detail in upcoming team deep dive discussions, namely Rollback Protection and Detection Keys.
Completed Product Items:
- Lightwalletd reorg issues were partially fixed for the zcon1 swag app
- 0mq replaced with RPC calls in lightwalletd
- Retargeting Debian Stable is complete and ready for release
Current Top 10 Goals:
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Retarget Debian Stable
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Release Versioning for Ref Wallet
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Librustzcash on iOS
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T↔ Z addr interoperability on light clients
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Partner specific integration work (C++ wrapper and decreasing size of library)
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Test and verify reference wallet on mainnet
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Shorter Blocktimes
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NU3 ZIP Feature Selection
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Improve CI system
Spotlight
ZecPaperWallet continues to innovate! This week the project announced that users can generate shielded zcash z-addresses in a web browser.
eToro released a Beginner’s Guide to Zcash. Check it out!