This is our fortnightly engineering update which happens after the conclusion of each 2-week engineering sprint. You can check out last week’s update for recent news on community and communications.
Zcashd Team
This team focuses on development of the zcashd client and Zcash protocol. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #zcashd-team channel .
“We are still working on the code implementation of the Sprout to Sapling migration tool and finished a first draft of the code for an automatic counterfeiting action plan. We created the pdfs of the Blossom spec to submit to security auditors next week. We plan to cut the 2.0.4 RC next week for testing and follow up with the full release the following week.”
Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures developers have the tools and infrastructure they need. Join this team in the #dev-infrastructure chat channel.
“We finished documentation on the zcashd regular release process and are starting on automation of some of these steps soon. We are also working on documentation for some of our internal systems. We are continuing to work on getting the Windows build integrated with our CI system (buildbot).”
Ecosystem Team
This team is intended to work on projects that interface with external parties not including the zcashd core client and handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.
“Insight explorer code is continuing to be reviewed and merged into Zcash, which will, in the near future, allow block explorers and the insight api to operate more reliably.
We have begun looking into the Zcash testnet faucet issues along with our dev-infra team, they are working to fix deployment and SSL certificate issues and we are working on making the faucet Sapling compatible.”
Documentation Team
This team drives the curation and assists in the creation of documentation. Follow along in the #documentation chat channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.
“We’re working on putting together an internal presentation about documentation best practices in addition to some changes in RTDs which introduce/clarify value pools and how they’re used via the Sapling migration tool vs manual migration.
Finally, we’re hoping to find out where translations of documentation should be prioritized and are investigating reformatting RTDs styling so it matches more to z.cash”
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.
“We’ve open-sourced all of the wallet code except for the Android frontend code; the open-sourced code includes the librustzcash branch for the reference wallet (note this branch may become outdated as improvements are done), the lightwalletd code and the Android SDK code. We are working on documentation and code cleanup to improve the user experience with this code. Please be patient while we complete this work, we may not have the bandwidth to respond to comments and questions as we do this cleanup/doc work. A full announcement will be made once we’re past this final stretch.”
Miscellaneous
In keeping with the network upgrade pipeline (aka NUP – diagram here), Draft ZIPs are due by the end of this month (March 31st) in order to be considered for NU3. Draft ZIPs need not be fully specified but have enough detail for proper consideration for NU3. For more background on this, please read Call for NU3 ZIPs and Network Upgrade Pipeline Process Changes
Zcon1 applications are open! Zcon1: June 22 – 24 in Split, Croatia
