Here are the updates from this week:
- Heartwood activated successfully with broad 3rd party support. Coindesk covered the story.
- ECC concluded a successful hackathon. Winners and details will be announced in a forthcoming blog post.
- ECC is hiring a Growth/ HR Coordinator.
- Zcash Foundation published their Q2 2020 report. Henry De Valence shared some details on Zebra progress. Chelsea Komlo announced a new version of FROST. Kudos!
- Ecosystem Updates
- Zcash is now available on the Brave Browser through an integration with Gemini exchange (currently on Nightly version with full support coming soon)
- Exchange ETH for shielded ZEC by following this user guide.
- ICYMI – here are recordings from past events
- 7/2, Gardening Club recording
- ZK Study Club recordings from Daira (pt 1, pt 2) and Sean, explaining Halo, accumulation schemes, Halo optimizations and elliptic curves.
Mark your calendars,
- Tues, 7/28 – Zeal call, details TBD
- Wed, 7/29 – Moneytalks, hosted by Blockchain Association and Coinbase, Financial Inclusion: It’s Not All About the Benjamins, Andre is speaking, register here.
Documentation updates
- Prioritized list of high-impact, low-lift video ideas.
- Plan of reducing clutter/decision fatigue on readthedocs.
- Started work on optimizing the readthedocs landing page for impact.
DevInfra updates
- Testing for RC1 and RC2.
- Testnet-in-a-box is now in hackworks. Undergoing development iterations.
- Tracking coinbase statistics.
- Heartwood activation visibility in Grafana.
Core updates
- Heartwood successfully activated!!! An incredible team effort – kudos to everyone!
- Removed C++ Equihash verifier, now using Rust unconditionally.
- Completed implementation of all the NU4 ZIPs (Canopy) in 3.1.0.
- Fixed a long-standing assertion failure in Zcashd. zcashd assertion failure CopyPreviousWitnesses() Assertion
- Published ZIPs 301 (Stratum Protocol) and 307 (Light Client Protocol)
Security updates
- Downloads security – Extended falco ruleset & tuning caching (now starting to reach saturation) & firewalling
- Canopy implementation assessment booked (starts week of 27th July)
Wallet updates
- Concluded the Protect Privacy Hackathon
- Paid bounties to 5 main projects and 8 contributions to our repos
- Entries ranged from one line bug fixes to complete working demos of projects
- iOS: Added MixPanel integration, crash logging, send feedback, UI bug fixes post Heartwood activation
- Android: SDK published to bintray, merge bug fixes from hackathon, engaged with nighthawk team
- General Research: t-address implementation, localization, and minimum requirements.
Community Shout Outs – Shout out to 20Birds for posting “How to go from ETH to shielded ZEC”.
This week in crypto news, Zcash was named among the Coindesk 20. Zcash got a shoutout from Tyler Winklevoss. EFF now accepts donations in shielded Zcash. Elliptic shares insights from the twitter hack earlier this week. Airdrop Venezuela, a campaign from AirTM, shares insights on how crypto is really used in Venezuela. ZDA member, BoltLabs, launches zkChannels, a private payment solution, on Tezos. If you don’t read ZKMesh, YOU SHOULD. That’s it for this week.
