Yesterday the Zcash team updated the main net to version 1.0.3. This update fixes a number of bugs and all miners need to upgrade ASAP if you have not done so already. Meanwhile the Zcash network is working towards Block 20,000 (which should be hit on November 28th). This Block (technically block 19,999) will be the first block to have the full reward of 12.5 ZEC issued every 2.5mins. This will be then end of the “Slow Start” period and will also hopefully mark a period of price stabilization in the marketplace. The decision to have a Slow Start was unusual in the crypto-currency space has lead to wild price fluctuations on the markets. Though somewhat controversial the Slow Start has been effective in its goal of preventing “instamining” and giving miners around the world a chance to set up thier hardware before the full block reward was in place. The end of the Slow Start will be an opportunity for true Zcash price discovery. Also the Zcash network is stronger than ever with thousands of nodes around the world. You can see a list of nodes and locations here: https://mainnet.z.cash Zcash Blog:

1.0.3

Sean Bowe | Nov 17, 2016

Today we’re announcing the release of Zcash 1.0.3 which fixes several crashes and security bugs, improves performance, and adjusts relay policies. We strongly recommend users and miners update to this version, as it fixes a cache invalidation bug that could be used by an attacker to disrupt the network. (See #1874.) Other changes in this release include:

1. We fixed a bug that caused the wallet to crash during startup in some situations, such as when the wallet is not synchronized properly with the blockchain. (#1858)
2. We re-enabled note randomization that was temporarily disabled in 1.0.2. (#1814)
3. We adjusted fee policies to reflect changes made in Bitcoin Core and encourage relaying of transactions containing JoinSplits. (#1855)
4. We improved diagnostics and strengthened testing for the merkle tree’s interaction with the constraint system. (#1797)
5. We disabled RPC keepalive features temporarily to avoid deadlocks. (#1847)
6. We adjusted our use of the libsnark verification API to improve zk-SNARK verification performance by 10%. (#1760, stats)
7. We changed the error message format for z_sendmany so that amounts are displayed in units of ZEC. (#1838)

We’re encouraging all users and miners to update to this new version. See our download page and the 1.0 User Guidefor more information. For a more complete list of changes, see our 1.0.3 github milestone. To follow our progress, watch the GitHub project and join the forum.