Releases & upgrades
We continued our work reviewing and testing code for the upcoming release and has resulted in several closed issues and merged pull requests. The next release is planned for April 9th.
We added a new zcashd schedule page to our website which we hope can help the community track the time frames of releases and upgrades a little easier. It is hooked into the milestones on Github so any updates we make to those will reflect on the visual roadmap.
A note on the next release: we anticipate the next release to be 1.1.0 but have this Monday set as our go/no-go date for our final decision on that. Essentially, if the audit analyses of Overwinter code do not report any major issues, then we will keep on track with 1.1.0 as the release that will set the activation block height for Overwinter on the main network. If there is a problem discovered that requires more time before 1.1.0 can be released, we will instead insert an additional Sprout release, 1.0.16. The most up-to-date information on the Overwinter network upgrade can be found on our Overwinter information portal.
If we commit to the next release being 1.1.0, then next week will be focused on creating and testing a release candidate.
Sapling MPC
As mentioned in a previous update, the Powers of Tau portion of the Sapling parameter generation was concluded (though, others are continuing the MPC for other zk-SNARK applications interested in making use of it) and we’re moving onto the second stage of the ceremony. Next week we plan to release the coordinator report of Powers of Tau, the generated public parameters that will be used in the second phase, the PoT verification utility and the Sapling MPC code (phase 2).
Audits
We put out an official announcement of the 2018 audits in addition to a more in-depth post outlining the scope, auditors, risks, etc. Our plan is to use these audits to gauge any changes needed to the roadmap mentioned above and release the reports when they’re available.
Community & Events
This past week we participated in the Zero Knowledge Summit in Berlin where our engineer @str4d gave a presentation.
Zooko is continuing his tour of India where he is participating in a series of developer meetups and next week is off to Singapore to attend De/centralize and meet with the Zcash community there.
Don’t forget to apply for Zcon0 if you haven’t already! Scholarships are available and the Foundation will be reviewing applicants very soon so folks can start planning their travels.
Also, student scholarships are still available for Consensus 2018. Zcash partnered with Coindesk to sponsor 75 students to attend the event this year. Time is running out for these applications so get in yours if you haven’t already!