Cross-posted from ZF’s newsletter.
Hello Again
The Foundation discovered that these emails weren’t reliably reaching many of our subscribers! We reconfigured the email setup, so future ZF updates should land in your inbox rather than your spam folder. Apologies for the delay.
If you missed the last two updates, click through to catch up:
Especially if you’re interested in the debate about Zcash development funding! Speaking of which…
Governance
If you only read one link, make it the joint ZF and ECC statement about control of the Zcash trademark. Zcash Foundation executive director Josh Cincinnati and Electric Coin Company CEO Zooko Wilcox are still negotiating a new agreement.
The most recent Zcash Protocol Hangout, hosted by the Foundation, was dedicated to draft ZIPs that address development funding. Our thanks to everyone who participated or observed!
Community members have published three new articles explaining their perspectives:
- “Zcash: A most private revolution” by Blocktown Capital
- “Zcash’s Block Reward Debate Will Be a Difficult But Necessary Challenge” by Justin Ehrenhofer
- “Reframing the Conversation, Zcash Dev Fund” by Antoinette Marie
(The authors of all three participated in the Zcash Protocol Hangout.)
ZF News
Zcon2 will take place in Lima, Peru, from June 22 – 24, 2020! Attendee applications will open in December, 2019. Email antonie@zfnd.org to discuss sponsoring travel scholarships 
The Foundation now has eight employees, since we hired Lena Wang as our operations associate! She will help keep the organization running smoothly behind the scenes.
Core engineer Deirdre Connolly and former technical intern Anna Kaplan appeared on the podcast Relay Chain. They discussed Zebra, the Foundation’s independent Zcash node, as well as “integrating cryptography into our day-to-day lives, quantum-resistant cryptography, and what baby zebras are called.”
As you may recall, ZF engaged FPGA engineer Ben Devlin to research Zcash network acceleration. At the Taipei Ethereum Meetup on Monday, September 30, Ben will present a talk titled “Blockchain Acceleration Using FPGAs — Elliptic curves, zk-SNARKs, and VDFs.”
Ecosystem Highlights
ECC posted a security alert:
Version 2.0.7-3 of Zcashd includes an important security fix in response to an issue that was reported to us on Friday September 13th 2019 by Florian Tramèr, Dan Boneh, and Kenneth G. Paterson.
Users should upgrade their nodes to this version immediately and discontinue use of older versions.
Please note that the issue does not put funds at risk of theft or counterfeiting. More details of the issue will be released in coordination with the reporters of the issue at a future date.
Also from ECC, Halo is an exciting breakthrough in the field of zero-knowledge cryptography:
Sean Bowe, an engineer and cryptographer at Electric Coin Company (ECC), has discovered a technique for creating practical, scalable and trustless cryptographic proving systems, ending an almost decade-long pursuit by the cryptography community.
It’s called Halo. A paper authored by ECC employees Sean Bowe, Daira Hopwood and Jack Grigg is available here. An implementation that recursively demonstrates the proof-of-work of a Bitcoin block hash is also under development.
Halo achieves practical zero-knowledge recursive proof composition without the need for a trusted setup.
The ZecWallet light client is in private beta!
Gemini’s new custody service supports Zcash, which gives institutions more options for holding and handling the cryptocurrency.
“Not exactly low effort, but here is some go code that will make a time-ordered list of transactions from a particular zcash address (given an onion node with rpc access credentials)” — Sarah Jamie Lewis
ZEC Economy
New newsletter feature! The point of a private payments system is that you can pay for things privately. Such as…
Pure wildflower honey from Bull Creek Honey:
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Honey our hives produce comes from the native Texas flora of the Edwards Plateau. It’s just pure honey with a deep amber color, very rich and sweet.
Mouthwatering, isn’t it?
See PayWithZ.cash for more retailers that accept Zcash.
That’s all for now. Thank you, as always, for your time and attention! Don’t hesitate to reply with feedback or questions.