Reminder that Overwinter activation is set for this Monday, June 25th. If you run a Zcash node, make sure you’re on 1.1.0 or later. Download the latest version of zcashd and check out the new user guide while your at it.
This week, the engineering teams completed their 2nd sprint of this release cycle. We’re tracking each team’s progress in Github projects so you can see a more detailed view of what they’re tackling each two-week sprint and what they have in their longer-term backlogs.
Each team’s update includes big picture accomplishments for the last sprint and forward looking goals for the next sprint.
Zcashd Team
This team focus on development of the zcashd client but stands distinct from consensus protocol (which is a separate team).
Accomplishments:
- Completing work/sprint cycle for v1.1.2 release candidate, a new release due to schedule change
- Sapling activated on testnet
- Made continued progress on implementing Sapling keys, addresses and notes
- Added more test vectors to help with Sapling implementation work
- Team members spent a fair amount of time working closely with other teams to prepare for Overwinter activation
Upcoming goals:
- Send Sapling transactions on testnet
- v2.0.0 release with Sapling support (from prior report, due to insertion of new v1.1.2 release):
- Sapling activation height for mainnet
- Implement Sapling keys, notes, addresses
- Add support in the wallet to actively track Sapling keys, notes, addresses
- Implement partial support for Sapling related RPC functionality e.g. value transfer via
z_sendmany.
Consensus Protocol Team
This team focuses on the Zcash consensus protocol current and future upgrades which include R&D, specification and interfacing with the ZIP process.
No updates this sprint.
Development Infrastructure team
This team works on making sure developers have the tools and infrastructure they need to efficiently collaborate, design, implement, review, test, and ship high quality projects.
Ongoing accomplishments and goals:
- Resolved reported issues with block explorer
- CI implementations for Mac & Windows is actively being tested to ensure validity/stability in existing system
- Preliminary IAC(Infrastructure-As-Code) refactor phase is underway
- Phase 1 of Network Observer refactor is nearing completion. Several key components are implemented in a live environment and undergoing internal review. Phase 2 will stress the robustness of the components at scale, per manual deployment process. Phase 3 is intended to minimize process overhead and system erosion, by transitioning each manual deployment process into an automated pipeline
- Work to profile and improve existing test frameworks is underway. Knowledge obtained from this will be used to improve some existing resource profilers throughout the system
Ecosystem team
This team is the interface to everything not directly related to zcashd or the protocol and include support for third-party tools and services. Ecosystem projects developed by Zcash Co. also get handled in this team. Tracking for this team is kept private to prevent information leakage about third-parties.
Accomplishments:
- Performed wallet testing on Windows, WinZEC, and other network wallets (ZenCash, Monero)
- Completed Overwinter awareness outreach.
- Created documentation for Insight Explorer modifications
- Roughly designed an ecosystem outreach system to improve how we share information with external development teams
Goals:
- Support ecosystem partners with the Overwinter upgrade.
- Perform workshops and talks at Zcon0
- Gather preferred communication channels for ecosystem partners
- One teammate is TAing for a blockchain class and they are preparing for that
Documentation team
This team works on improving the accessibility of zcashd and Zcash overall.
Accomplishments:
- Transifex is integrated with ReadTheDocs now, on the admin side of things and translation of docs into Spanish has started. That translator is working hard to get the User Guide (at least) translated this week.
- Added preliminary Sapling info portal and a Network Upgrade index page.
- Added a Overwinter banner notice to https://z.cash
- Reviewing some of the other straggling documentation to formalize it for RTD migration.
- Reviewed the Github comment regarding first release of RTD. Working on a couple of these documents to stage them if we decide they are needed.
Goals:
- Planning a user-focused table to highlight which services support various Zcash features.
- Continue work on translations of documentation and Transifex intregration into RTD
Community & Communication
You can check out last week’s community and communication update on June 15th for the latest info.
Hope to see you all in Montreal next week for the first Zcash conference. Check out the schedule!