Release
This week we focused on a lot of the final reviews for next week’s 1.0.12 release. The plan according to our release cycle was to have a release candidate out at the beginning of the week but we slipped on finishing up reviewing in time which pushed back the RC going out to today. This will push us back to testing the RC Monday and Tuesday next week with the regular release slated for Wednesday. We apologies for this minor delay and if there is any more slippage, we’ll certainly update the community.
One new RPC z_shieldcoinbase will be introduced in the release. This will allow miner wallets to sweep hundreds of coinbase UTXOs in one transaction - a big performance booster for pools and large miners who accumulate ZEC from block rewards.
We also released a blog post outlining the updated time frame of our release cycle and also serves as a reminder about the upcoming 1.0.9 deprecation per the auto-senescence policy. If your node is outdated, be sure to check for updates to avoid using a version that becomes deprecated.
Security
In collaboration with NCC Group, we released the official audit of the MPC ceremony that happened last October before the launch of the network. Please read our blog post and the full report which is linked for complete details but in short, there were no serious issues detected.
We are maintaining a regular audit schedule for the Zcash codebase, especially with the upcoming cryptography improvements in Sapling. Out of respect for Zcash users and the network’s security, will continue to be transparent about this ongoing process and report outcomes of future audits. We thank NCC Group for their attentive analysis and clear reporting.
Miscellaneous: website, UX, meetups
We’re making progress onboarding a contractor to maintain the website and translations and help us transition our blog into a more scalable solution that supports Transifex better. We’re thinking about splitting the blog into a more general/PR announcement stream and another that captures the technical/research focused topics since we tend to have a lot of blogs falling under both categories and some folks might be more interested in one over the other. If you have any feedback on this strategy, let us know. Do you prefer the technical/educational blogs or the blogs announcing new growth in the ecosystem? Or do you like reading both kinds?
So I hinted last week that we were studying the UX of a beta software and my hint was probably obvious enough that it’s OpenBazaar v2. 
We’re really liking it so far and will have a report ready in time for next week’s Crypto Is Currency Day on Friday Sept. 29 to help the Zcash community use ZEC as currency by making a purchase on Open Bazaar! You can also just plan to spend your Zcash for Crypto is Currency Day by purchasing from Purse.io who just made a recent UX update of their own!
Our community team is starting to brainstorm how we can promote Zcash meetups around the world. We’re interested in talking to anyone who would like to start one in their hometown or nearby city and how we can help you!