July 31, 2020 - weekly forum update

Ecosystem Updates Weekly Forum Updates
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Greetings earthlings. Here are the updates from this week:

  • Code preparations for the Canopy network upgrade (NU4) are finished and included in Release 3.1.0. Canopy will activate to testnet next week and activate on mainnet at height 1046400 — mid-November.

  • ECC announced Crypto in Context, partners include Binance, Brave, DCG, Flexa, Gemini, Local Bitcoins, Messari and Reciprocity. The story was picked up by Decrypt and Cointelegraph.

  • A fond and heartfelt farewell to Josh Cincinnati, founding Executive Director of Zcash Foundation. You’ll be missed @acityinohio!

  • Zcash is one of the most commonly donated currencies through The Giving Block network. Hats off to our generous community.

  • ECC is hiring a Growth / HR Coordinator.

  • ICYMI, here are the recordings from past events this week

Mark your calendars,

Community Shout Outs - Shout out to ZcashRu, for consistently accurate and good Russian-language tweets.

Core Updates

  • Released version 3.1.0 which includes all NU4 zip implementations
  • Debugged and diagnosed a ZecWallet issue on Windows platforms that occurred post-Heartwood activation. Bug caused by inconsistent build environments and processes
  • Made progress switching to Clang on Linux, macOS from a mixture of GCC and Clang
    • Clang is a much better compiler - support for security features, better error messages, same backend as Rust compiler (LLVM)
    • Removes variability across user environments

DevInfra Updates

  • Completed v3.1.0 release
  • Fixed testnet seeder
  • Implemented new chain tip alerting
  • Created Docker container for handling zcash core-dumps
  • Delivering initial Testnetinabox to Bolt
  • Completed initial docs for “up and running with zcashd in 30 mins or less”
  • Completed initial zfaucet reimplementation

Security Updates

  • Implementation audit for Canopy starts August 4th

Wallet Updates

  • Lightwalletd mempool access research made tremendous progress and remains ongoing
  • ECC Wallet t-address support research concluded
  • iOS Send Feedback implemented
  • Hardware and Software Minimums research complete
  • Localization research 90% complete
  • Numerous bugs uncovered and resolved

This week in privacy, the Atlantic publishes an in-depth article on the Chinese panopticon. This article reminded me of A Tale of Two Surveillance States, a Crazy/Genius podcast episode that aired last year. The episode compares surveillance systems in XinJiang and East New York. Rite Aid deployed facial recognition in hundreds of stores according to a Reuters special investigation.

In crypto news, US national banks can hold crypto. Zcash gets a shoutout in this Coindesk report. Diario Bitcoin did a great comparison of various privacy-preserving projects.That’s all for now folks. Have a great weekend!

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