By
Elise Hamdon
This is our fortnightly community and communications update, for the latest update on the engineering front, check out
last week’s update.
Exciting news this week! The Zcash Sapling network upgrade activated at block height 419200. Sapling introduces new shielded addresses with significantly improved performance: a time reduction of 90% for constructing transactions, and a memory reduction of over 97%. More details are
available here.
Sapling received lots of great press; here are just a few among the many:
Happy Birthday Zcash! Sapling activation coincided with the two-year birthday of Zcash. This brings us one step closer to widespread adoption of an open, permissionless and private payment system.
On October 30,
the Zcash Foundation and Parity Technologies announced a technical partnership to build a consensus-compatible Zcash node. Parity plans to devote significant development resources to the project, using Parity Bitcoin as a starting point and writing in the Rust programming language. The Zcash Foundation will contribute its own engineers as the organization’s hiring and community funding processes allow.
From the blog
We released a blog post last week about the implementation of shielded HD wallets:
Sapling in HD. The HD wallet technology for Sapling addresses is complementary to the faster SNARKs improvements, particularly regarding usability and private key security.
The Perspectives series included
a special birthday edition last week, featuring Eran Tromer speaking about Zcash origins and cryptography.
This week the blog featured an exciting introduction to progress on the Zcash Reference Wallet:
Introducing the Zcash Reference Wallet.
Events
On October 31st, Brad Miller and Marshall Gaucher spoke at the
San Francisco Devs Meetup; a video link will be available next week.
On November 1st, Zooko Wilcox presented at DevCon4:
“Privacy for Everyone.”
Spotlight
The Zcash Foundation hosted an informative livestream in the hours surrounding Sapling activation, attended by many Zcash Company team members. The
recording is available here. There is a bit of fun included in the footage as well, with Zooko creating his Halloween costume on-camera over the course of the discussion.
Check out this activation ecosystem retrospective from our ecosystem team:
Sapling Launch Ecosystem Recap
Zooko was interviewed by Breaker magazine and the article made a strong case for privacy coins:
Zooko Wilcox Says Regulators Like the Privacy of Zcash
