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.
Final call: Draft ZIPs are due by Monday (March 31st) in order to be considered for NU3. Draft ZIPs need not be fully specified but have enough detail for feedback and discussion. For more background on this, please read Call for NU3 ZIPs and Network Upgrade Pipeline Process Changes.
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 released v2.0.4 of Zcashd. The release addressed a Sprout wallet bug reported to us by an external third party. The release also implements a consensus rule on testnet, to add turnstile detection to shielded value pools as described in ZIP 209 which was also completed in this sprint. We continue to work on the Sprout to Sapling migration tool and ZIP. We have also begun work to integrate the changes necessary to add Insight Explorer support directly into Zcashd.
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 cleaned up some of the reproducible build infrastructure, gitian, when a bug was found during the release of v2.0.4 (some non-reproducible inputs had crept in, which needed to be removed). v2.0.4 was released. We spent time cleaning up some zcash container infrastructure. We have completed the automated provisioning of Windows Buildbot workers and are working on a build factory to run the zcash test suite on windows workers.
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 code merging was frozen due to the 2.0.4 release. We are now targeting code changes being complete for zcashd to run the insight block explorer for the 2.0.5 release.
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 added updates to better define “value pool” and “turnstile” in the documentation. We’re continuing work on at a restyling of the documentation.
Finally, we tagged the documentation to match the zcashd release at v2.0.4. The release notes now include links to changes since the last tag.
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 started exploring long-term improvements to the reference wallet, specifically drafting a ZIP to ideate on detection keys for the server. Detection keys would allow the server to detect that a block contained a particular transaction for a client, but would not give them privileges to view the transaction details like viewing keys would. We spent most of the sprint cleaning up code, setting up a preview branch for the repositories, and made diagrams for explaining how to interact with the Android SDK.
Miscellaneous
Updates to ZIP 0 were merged. This means that there is now a representative from the Foundation and the Company acting as ZIP editors. More details in the ZIP 0 specification.
Check out the ECC livestream and AMA from last night and the remaining questions answered in this forum: Electric Coin Company 2019 Q1 Livestream
Zcon1 applications are open! Zcon1: June 22 – 24 in Split, Croatia
