Cross-posted from our newsletter, as usual.
Hello friends! Here’s the last newsletter, in case you missed it. Without any further ado…
ZF has started formal polling regarding 13 Zcash Improvement Proposals that address future development funding.
Anyone in the following groups is eligible to participate:
- Members of the Zcash Community Forum with accounts created before March, 2019
- Zcash miners or mining pools
- Members of the Community Advisory Panel (invitation only, as described in August)
If you qualify, please read the instructions! Polling ends on November 30.
The Foundation’s director of engineering, George Tankersley, published our tech team’s roadmap for 2020!
Since this summer, our team has been focused on 1) organizing the projects that were already in flight when ZF hired all of us, and 2) figuring out the development and release strategy for Zebra, our Rust implementation of a Zcash node. After deeply studying the Zcash protocol, its ecosystem, and existing work by ECC and others, we have a roadmap for 2020 that we’re excited to share.
Here’s what to expect from ZF in the coming year:
- A newly redesigned Zebra, with complete chain state tracking/validation by April 2020 (NU3 activation) and full wallet support coming soon after
- Foundation-run infrastructure and development support for light wallets
- Cross-chain integrations for Zcash
- Hardware wallet support for shielded addresses
- A simplified threshold scheme for multisignature spends of shielded funds
- Research and development toward greater network-level privacy for Zcash
- General ecosystem improvements
We are going to be working on all of these initiatives in parallel, through a combination of our in-house team, contractors, grant support for volunteer contributors, and external research collaborations.
Read the rest on the Foundation’s blog. There’s lots to get excited about!
As you may know, ZF is an American public charity. Every year, 501(c)(3) organizations like the Foundation file a transparency report called Form 990 with the IRS. We published our Form 990 for 2018, along with some context on what it means.
Lastly, a few highlights from the Zcash ecosystem:
- The Electric Coin Company’s Q4 livestream, “an update about product development, regulation, community projects and financial updates followed by a Q&A session.”
- Metrics specific to Zcash, visualized
- ZecWallet FullNode’s latest release includes Blossom activation!
- The tradeoffs of using ZecWallet Lite, summarized in a Twitter thread.
- ZecWallet Lite now supports community servers! If you’re interested in running one, get in touch.
Until next time 