Zcash Developers Update 8-3-18

By Paige Peterson This week concludes a slightly longer sprint as most of the teams had opted into a one-time 3 week sprint in order to reorient after a couple of distracting weeks with Zcon0 and folks taking time off around the 4th of July. So a lot was accomplished this sprint! Zcashd Team This team focuses on development of the zcashd client. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #zcashd-team channel. The team continues to focus on working towards a Sapling MVP for v2.0.0.

Integrating wallet support for Sapling
Some RPCs have been updated
Completed a transaction builder for testnet
There has been continuous improvement to Sapling crypto with both fixes and optimizations
Discussed the impact of ZIP32 on RPC design and wallet key management
Discussed that we may have to release v2.0.0 as Sapling consensus ready, if the activation height for mainnet goes into the release, but place all Sapling related RPC calls behind an experimental flag while work continues to finish the RPCs and ZIP32 for v2.0.1
A future goal is to create and test Sapling transactions on testnet

Development Infrastructure Team The Development Infrastructure team ensures application developers have the tools and infrastructure they need to efficiently collaborate, design, implement, review, test, and ship high quality projects. These responsibilities include: CI/CD, release automation & execution, coverage reporting, simulations and testnets and “spin-up-a-box-for-arbitrary-work-tasks” service for engineers. Accomplished:

Deployed fix for macOS worker to production CI
Windows test suite is becoming more stable
Investing and implementing new node auto-provisioning schemes in CI
Found fixes for existing workers in CI

Goals Next Sprint

Deploy CentOS 7, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch, and Valgrind fixes to production CI
Build zcashd natively in Windows
Upgrade testnet faucet

Ecosystem Team For the time being this team handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support. Accomplishments

Launched ecosystem@z.cash support channel for external development teams to request support.
Created and provided training documentation for how Zcash Co. employees should use the support desk
Begin planning with Documentation team on Sapling support needs

Documentation Team This team works on improving the accessibility of zcashd and Zcash overall by creating and moderating documentation. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #documentation channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation. Accomplishments:

Reconfigure emergency banner + tested on staging
Replaced remaining auto-senescence references with EOS halt
added: top-level Zcash contributor guide & elaborated on Overwinter specific issues
moved: UX and network upgrade guidelines to RTD
documenting which wallets support certain zcash features in new website wallet page
Readme update (will be released with 2.0.0)
Moved readthedocs to Gitlab
More investigations towards RTD translation support

Goals:

finish up backend work needed for translation support
test emergency banner on production website
add a glossary to RTD
include testing instructions into Zcash contributor guide
Collaborate with ecosystem team on Sapling readiness guides for third-parties & developers

Reference Wallet Team This teams current charter is to build a Zcash reference wallet. Deliverables will be a series of MVPs where Android is the first target platform. Accomplishments:

Hashed out the difference between proof of concept, reference wallet, and a zcash wallet product and documented it in detail
Chose our stack: sketch for design with anima, craft (another craft, not craft.io), and material design plugins , abstract for version control, craft.io for project management, slack call for pairing once a week.
Narrowed down the feature list for the proof of concept
Rough sketches for most screens required for the proof of concept
Finished first round of wireframes for the proof of concept

In progress/goals: