DevCon3 & Zcash family gathering
Before diving into the recap of engineering work, I’d like to share that after our successful participation in DevCon3 last week, we had an internal Zcash family gathering at a nearby location. For operational security reasons, we did not disclose that this gathering was taking place and because a good amount of the Zcash team would be in Cancún for DevCon3 anyways, we figured it would be a good opportunity to gather for in-person collaboration and a Zcash Birthday celebration. This meeting included internal sessions in which we reviewed a preliminary engineering roadmap, marketing & community goals, balancing governance between the company and foundation, etc.
Expect to see much of what we discussed come to light over the coming months, particularly the roadmap to network upgrade 0 (formerly known as hard fork 0) and Sapling.
We’ve also hired several new people over the last months (still trying to wrangle headshots and bios out of them for the website and an introductory blog post so stay tuned for official announcement) so this was a good opportunity to formally welcome them to the team.
Release
In a previous update, we announced our plans to push back the 1.0.13 release by 1 week due to low engineering resources from traveling to Cancún and now we’re announcing it will be pushed back another week to Nov. 20 due to similar reasons. If there was any chance of us getting the release out for the 13th, we would have needed a release candidate done early this week for testing throughout the remainder of the week. The RC hasn’t happened yet (but it’s almost ready) and our new, more realistic plan is to instead have it for early next week.
We’ve successfully merged low memory proving into the client so barring any major issues that may turn up during RC testing next week, you can expect to have shielded address memory consumption reduced down to about 1.7 GB from 3.1 GB. If you’ve been paying attention, you’d know that the upcoming Sapling improvements will further reduce memory consumption down to just 40 MB but while we’re still in Sprout, this is a great interim milestone!
If all goes well and we are able to get payment disclosure and payment offloading experimental features properly reviewed in time, 1.0.13 is looking like it’ll be an exciting release! We look forward to hearing your feedback!
[minor edits by @daira]
