This is our fortnightly community and communications update; we didn’t post an engineering update last week, due to the holiday, so we’re adding those summaries into this week’s update. Next week we’ll have our regularly scheduled Engineering update.
Zcashd Team
This team focuses on development of the zcashd client. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #zcashd-team channel.
The team completed and tested the 2.0.2-rc. They’re finishing up the full 2.0.2 release now so keep an eye out for that tonight. This release includes Sapling support for the z_mergetoaddress RPC, a fix for the signature expiration issue and some security improvements.
Consensus Protocol Team
The focus of the team over the next couple months will be protocol code cleanup/refactoring and research to study potential improvements in the next network upgrades. Follow along in the #zcash-refactor channel in the community chat.
Overview of Sapling implementation refactor: Sapling Implementation Refactor · Issue #41 · zcash/librustzcash · GitHub
Note that this team is planning to merge back with the zcashd team at the beginning of the next sprint.
Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures developers have the tools and infrastructure they need. Join this team in the #dev-infrastructure chat channel.
We are continuing to work towards our port of Zcashd for Windows - we’ve finished a proof of concept of integrating it with a CI system and now we’re working through the automated tests to make sure they’re all passing. We have about 10 failing tests remaining to fix out of about 400.
For the time being this team handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.
The ecosystem team is working with specific companies support needs for the remainder of the year so there will be little to report publicly. That said, the team created a public ecosystem backlog which you can keep track of in the Ecosystem team Github project.
This team drives the curation and assists in the creation of documentation. Follow along in the #documentation chat channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.
Worked with Zcashd and Infrastructure teams on the various changes to accommodate for the 2.0.2 release. We’re also working on a new resource about addresses in Zcash and migrating/updating some documentation that still lives on the website into RTD.
This teams current charter is to build a Zcash reference wallet. Deliverables will be a series of MVPs where Android is the first target platform.
The reference wallet is becoming fleshed out and functional, since the designs are done. This sprint, we started to work on writing android and server side code so that the light client can receive preprocessed compact blocks to detect an incoming transaction (specified ZIP 307).
Miscellaneous
We’re hosting our next Technical AMA December 14th at noon PST!
We announced a proposed set of goals for the Blossom upgrade: Announcing Zcash Blossom and proposed feature goals
Due to the holidays we’re setting the next target release (2.0.3) date for Feb 11 with a release candidate target of Feb 4. EOL for 2.0.2 is ~March 11
From the blog
This week the reference wallet team published a second post about their steady progress. This post digs deeper into UX considerations and provides an overview of our design decisions and rationale Zcash Reference Wallet Design.
We also shared our perspective of the Zcash Coinbase Pro listing.
Events
Josh Swihart, VP Marketing and Business Development, and CFO Andy Murray presented "Long Cryptocurrencies. Short The Bankers" at FEI - Denver this past Tuesday.
The Zcash Foundation is sponsoring an event in SF this week called Blockchain Against Evil.
Spotlight
If you haven’t heard… Zcash has been introduced on Coinbase Pro!