These updates are now categorized by working groups.
Meta:
As a reminder, the goal of the working groups is to eventually have regular, specialized meetings so that each area of development can move forward more efficiently and provide meeting notes or reports of their recent progress to include in these updates.
If you have interest in participating in the existing working groups or jumpstarting one of the proposed working groups, let us know!
Protocol:
While discussion about HFO and Sapling were minimal this week due to focusing on the 1.0.9 release, we did manage to merge support for automatic shutdown of deprecated client versions (PR 2297) which is relevant to future hard forks for protocol upgrades. Note that this automatic shutdown is default but can be bypassed via flags in your configuration file.
A couple of devs spent time this week looking at proving optimizations for generating zk-proofs.
Release:
We released version 1.0.9 on Wednesday this week. Tickets included in 1.0.9 can be seen in the milestone.
Our next release date is for the pre-1.0.10 CI deploy on June 6th. As a reminder, these CI releases are scheduled in between client releases so upgrades to development infrastructure and the Zcash client have distict due dates.
The 1.0.10 release is set for June 20th and you can keep track of what will be included in the milestone.
You can keep track of our highest priorities for future releases via the projects page with Priority 0. Security and stability being the highest.
Development infrastructure:
A few minor changes to the dev infrastructure were included in 1.0.9, however, as mentioned above, future changes to the dev infrastructure and continuous integration will happen via separate milestone dates from now on.
You can keep track of progress related to this working group in the Development infrastructure project.
Network infrastructure:
In the 1.0.9 release, many benchmarks were included and enhanced to better test network behavior. AMQP was also finally merged which extends messaging capabilities for third-party devs.
Berkeley DB replacement:
No further discussions this week. See the Wallet DB to SQLite project for current status.
It’s worth noting that the current proof of concept for Payment disclosure uses Berkeley DB and we’re considering swapping out with SQLite before the feature is released.
Miscellaneous:
This week was quite busy for a few of us in the company, attending Consensus 2017 and Token Summit in NYC. Both were great opportunities to do some business development and outreach!
We had an internal demo of XCAT and progress is certainly moving forward! With the XCAT, Payment offloading and Payment disclosure proof of concepts coming along nicely, it shouldn’t be too long now until we start seeing some of these as experimental features in the Zcash client.
We’re a little late on the final installment of the SNARK explainers but expect to see that next week!