By
Paige Peterson
This week began with the successful and timely release of
1.0.6 which features low level interface improvements along with upgrades to security components. If you haven’t updated your nodes yet, go ahead and do that now then come back to read the rest of this update.
For the big picture planning theme of the week, we started fleshing out a
list of priorities which is helping to shape a development roadmap. You’ll see the details of this roadmap explained further in an upcoming blog post. From a priorities standpoint, security incidents will always come first and foremost with 100% engineering time dedicated to any related tasks. We will also keep continuous improvement high on priorities but with a fraction of engineering time dedicated so other tasks can happen simultaneously. New features on this priorities list include
payment disclosure,
delegated proving and
XCAT – which might not be a surprise if you’ve been keeping up with dev updates so far. We consider these features low/medium hanging fruit which will enhance the Zcash ecosystem to a significant extent. Research and development on core circuit improvements in addition to
user-defined assets (UDAs) are further down the list of priorities at this point but still in the scope of our roadmap.
We also discussed a security incident response process which we will make public via a blog post in the near future in addition to our continued open development process. While our engineering meetings are currently kept to an internal scope, we plan on extending invitations to outside developers with related work and interest. We are additionally exploring other methods for more open video meetings. Our AMA’s are also set to occur on a bi-monthly basis with the
next one set for a week from today on Friday, February 24th. We’re also keen on keeping up public text-based engineering discussions which are hosted on the
community chat, mostly in the
#zcash-dev channel. Engineers, advisors and scientists working with ZECC are marked with
Zcash Team Member.
To keep the ball rolling with Payment disclosure, we had another topical meeting which focused on nailing down a solution to the privacy leaks with change addresses which resulted in a new approach (
issue 2102,
PR 2103) and specification into a ZIP which will be pushed as a draft for review in the near future.
We continued work on pulling in
changes from upstream Bitcoin v0.12.0 (
PR 20991,
PR 2100,
PR 2101) and
unifying the RPC documentation.
In addition to the above changes from upstream for
1.0.7, we worked on a new RPC command
z_decryptsinceblock which mimics
listsinceblock functionality but includes transactions sent to shielded addresses in the wallet. We also continued work on a
test for prioritising transactions.
On the infrastructure side of things, more was done to finalize a
chain fork detector and we also stabilized our
network dashboard which shows a visual of recent peers on the network and highly available nodes.
Next week, we’ll redirect more focus onto 1.0.7 issues and continuing development and specification of payment disclosure.
