Happy Bitcoin Pizza day! Here are the updates from this week:
- The World Economic Forum announced the Presidio Principles, dubbed the “blockchain bill of rights.” ECC, along with the Government of Colombia, Deloitte Consulting LLP, ConsenSys and the United Nations’ World Food Program are among the first signatories.
- If you missed the ECC Quarterly livestream, you can check out the recording here. One of the main topics covered was viewing keys. If you want to learn a bit more on viewing keys, check out ECC’s latest blog post. If you want to see all the highlights, check out this thread from @decentralistdan. The Q&A is saved here.
- The Zcash Documentation page got a refresh this week. It looks sleek.
- NU4 needs a name. Cast your vote here. So far, it looks like Canopy is in the lead.
- Congrats to @daira for being recognized by ZKStandard as an MVP during the ZKProof workshops earlier this month. Video link here.
- Zcash Foundation posted an update on the Walking Onions grant. Chelsea Kolomo explains Walking Onions in general and how this project can improve scaling anonymity networks and user privacy in general. Good read!
- In the broader ecosystem, NowPayments partnered with Zcash Foundation for a ZEC giveaway campaign, Swapzone is requesting feedback on their new interface (they help you compare exchange rates for BTC<>ZEC across several exchanges)
Mark your calendars,
- Tues, 5/26, May Zeal call: That’s next week! We’ll be joined by Kevin Owocki to discuss quadratic funding and other exciting projects on Gitcoin. More details here.
- Mon, 6/1 – Wed 6/3, @zooko and @joshs will be speaking at Messari Mainnet. More details here.
- Tues, 6/2, June Gardening Club: Sign up to connect with other zcash developers and/or give an update on your project. Registration link is here.
- Fri, 6/5, Tu Privacidad: Protegela: ¿Hablas español? Tú privacidad es muy importante, aprende a protegerla con este webinar. Dulce Villareal de Techqueria, Andres Arrieta de Electronic Frontier Foundation y yo vamos hablar sobre la importancia de la privacidad y como protegerla usando herramientas prácticas. Únete a la conversación!
Community Shout Out – to Holmes from Zbay, thank you for actively reaching out to orgs to request shielded support and for reaching out to us with your questions and ideas!
Dev Infra Team
- Supporting testing for v2.1.2-3 and v3.0.0-rc1
- Working through future details of testnet-n-a-box at scale
- Completed initial audit of detectors
- Continuing to work on metrics toolbox (e.g. “real time” vs snapshot analysis)
- Completed initial Tekton testnet snapshot tool
Core Team
- Produced the 2.1.2-3 Hotfix
- Several history-tree related bugs found and squished
- Produced the 3.0.0 Release Candidate
- Sets the mainnet activation height for Heartwood (mid-July)
- Submitted Halo Paper to ASIACRYPT
- Made significant progress on Halo 2
- Made progress on Rust refactorings
- ff crate refactoring is done (Finite Field), group crate refactoring in progress
- Pulled in several good Community PRs from oxarbitrage (2)
Security Team
- MVP of lib_fuzzer integration with zcash at scale complete
- Mobile security assessment continues prior to open sourcing
- NU3 external implementation assessment complete (not published),
- NU4 external design assessment is booked
Wallet Team
- Lightwalletd: improved testing!
- Created the APIs to allow the wallets to control the test chain state and generated some canned data sets to trigger several specific scenarios
- Android/iOS: integration with darksidewalletd
- Security review performed on wallet codebase
This week in privacy, EFF has been hard at work with privacy legislation and advocacy work. Check out their latest guide to digital rights and their write-up on Facebook’s Oversight Board. EFF’s Jillian York also wrote about Content Moderation in the age of CO-VID for Brookings Institute. USAToday fact-checked a viral post last week regarding the Patriot Act and FBI accessing search history without a warrant. Worth reading! Lastly, a court rules that a grandmother in the Netherlands violated GDPR by posting pictures of her grandkids without their parent’s consent.
In the crypto world, JPMorgan is taking on two big crypto-customers, Coinbase and Gemini. Chainalysis fact-checked several false claims around cryptocurrency financing terrorism.
