Hello Zcashers,
I hope all of you are doing well in your corners of the world. As usual, here is the latest roundup of updates fresh off the griddle.
Zcash updates:
- ECC has entered into an agreement with Protocol Labs, Filecoin Foundation, and Ethereum Foundation in an effort to unlock recursion in Halo 2 and explore the future of proofs
- Release 4.5.0 is out in preparation for NU5
- Shielded Zcash hit an all-time high.
DevSecOps
- Interviews
- Test/Release of v4.5.0-rc1 and v4.5.0
- Updated backend components for upcoming NU
- Full zcash stack environment deployment onboarding complete (e.g. full node, lightwalletd, ios client)
- Fixed Gitian build environment bugs
- Standup and On-call rotation cohesion (e.g. optimize meetings and response awareness)
Core
- We released 4.5.0-rc1 and 4.5.0!!
- Testnet activation height targeted at September 30th
- Started the work to make our Orchard dependency stack reusable by hardware wallet vendors
- Fixed a regression in wallet load testing (kudos to Marshall for catching it)
- Merged part of the Halo 2 security proof into the public documentation
- Finished reviewing the consensus rules for NU5 on testnet
- Finished implementing ZIP 239
- Modified Unified Addresses to support longer addresses and experimental typecodes
Wallet
- The Team Evolves! (continuously)
- ECC Wallet Auto-shielding is now complete on Android (Kudos Carter!)
- Android SDK:
- Demo app compiles and works again
- Improvements on initial Setup for new developers
- Cleanup of old dependencies
- Bugfixes on checkpoint loading code.
- Gradle plugin updates and improvements
In the news, China’s central bank has declared all crypto transactions illegal. Bitcoin has subsequently dropped $2k in value. President Biden plans to nominate a crypto critic to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Twitter is playing with Bitcoin tipping and NFT verification.
Enjoy the weekend!