This week concludes a 2-week engineering sprint. You can check out last week’s update for recent updates on community and communications.
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 released 2.0.1-rc1 (release candidate) and have been testing and preparing for the full release of 2.0.1 which enables wallet and RPC support for Sapling transactions.
Look out for the 2.0.1 release announcement in the blog for full details.
Consensus Protocol Team
The focus of the team over the next couple months will be protocol code cleanup/refactoring and eventually doing some research groups to study potential improvements in the next network upgrades. Follow along in the #zcash-refactor channel in the community chat.
We are continuing to focus on cleaning up technical debt that arose from pushing Sapling out the door on time.
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 and right now the focus is on integrating it with a CI system so we can ensure easy and automated testing.
Ecosystem Team
For the time being this team handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.
The Ecosystem team continued to do outreach and education directed to commercial products such as wallets and exchanges about the Sapling upgrade. For teams that are having trouble with integration we are supporting them with documentation and basic engineering support. For teams requiring more in depth support we are offering our recently unveiled premium support contracts, teams interested in support can email us at ecosystem@z.cash.
We are updating our testnet insight explorer to be fully Sapling compatible
The privacy metrics that we track have been updated.
Documentation Team
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 .
We decided to push documentation tasks to be owned by respective teams now that the core infrastructure has been set up. There still remains a need for documentation outside of engineering teams, particularly with user education, guides, dev tutorials, doc review and curating.
For example, the Zcashd team will own client/RPC/API documentation and the Dev infrastructure team will own the backend work for RTD.
This upcoming sprint will solidify the new plan for the documentation team and how documentation tasks will be handled going forward in respective engineering teams.
Reference Wallet Team
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.
We are excited to have our android developer on board so that we can start building our proof of concept! In addition, the protocol engineers have been testing the feasibility of building libraries with rust that run with android applications, and it seems like it’s feasible. The design team is continuing to finalize the details with the prototype while validating some of their decisions via user testing.
Miscellaneous
We’re working on wrapping up some todos regarding the security audits that we contracted earlier this year. The goal is to get them published asap but we may be required to postpone publication until after Sapling activation. Stay tuned.
Finally, we’re hiring an IT Operations Engineer!
That’s all for this week!