July 2, 2021 - weekly forum update

[janie]

Hello Zcashers,

Janie here, stepping in for Elena to deliver your forum update this week.

Here are your Zcash updates:

• Zcash was a topic of conversation among central bankers at a Policy 4.0 event this week
• Sean Bowe shared a brief history of Halo
• You can watch Zooko’s discussion with Aztec co-founder Thomas Walton-Pocock about the power of Zcash and what the future holds
• The ECC newsletter went out. If you’re not on the list, head over to electriccoin.co to subscribe!
• Z.cash got a facelift here, here and here. We hope this helps improve the Zcash onboarding experience.

Work full-time in the Zcash ecosystem

• ECC is hiring!

DevInf

• Responded and resolved GCP exploit on cloud infrastructure
• Fixed remaining smoke tests bugs causing random failures and removed Sprout logic
• Responded to Tekton load issue
• Completed core-file process audit / research for existing / future production environments
• Gathered metrics for end of June statistics used by growth team

Core - The team is still heads-down working on NU5

• [ZIP 213] Shielded Coinbase
  • Add for_action method for constructing an OrchardDomain (link)
  • Make note encryption OrchardDomain type public (link)
• [ZIP 224] Orchard Shielded Protocol
  • Merkle hash chip (link)
  • Orchard commitment and nullifier integration & consensus rules (link)
  • Orchard note commitment tree digests (link)
  • Sinsemilla Hash gadget (link)
  • Add short range check to lookup_range_check util (link)
  • Introduce LookupRangeCheckConfigs for each Sinsemilla advice column (link)
  • Implement Orchard commitment tree logic (link)
• [ZIP 225] Version 5 Transaction Format
  • Add Bundle<Authorized, _>::dynamic_usage method (link)
  • Include Orchard bundle in transaction dynamic usage (link)
  • Version 5 transaction consensus rules (link)

Wallet

• Shipped iOS update with autoshielding workflows
• Shipped new Android (1.3.0-beta16) and iOS SDKs (0.12.0-alpha.6)
• Delivered wireframes for the navigation of the new ECC Reference Wallet and UA screens
• Updated Unstoppable Android app to the latest SDK, which paves the way for better t-addr support and autoshielding
• Created LCWG project management github repo

In the news, coin prices are down, a new payments law in Ukraine considers CBDC similar to cash, the number of active bitcoin addresses are low, and watered down articles are catering to the crypto-curious middle aged.

Bon week-end!