Two important birthdays happened today!
- January 15th, 2021 would have been the 91st birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, a celebrated American civil rights activist. Dr. King fought for voting rights, desegregation, labor rights and other civil liberties through community organizing and nonviolent resistance.
- January 15th, 2021 is also the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia, a crazy idea to make the sum of human knowledge available to everyone in the world, for free. Wikipedia has over 280,000 monthly editors from all over the world. While far from perfect, this website is a beautiful testament to the power of collaboration and curiosity.
Here are your weekly Zcash updates:
- Check out ECC’s latest blog: Engineering 2020 – Year in Review .
- Visa-backed crypto company and Zcash custodian Anchorage got crypto’s first ever national banking charter. This is big news as it “provides a legal green light for big banks and other traditional financial companies to use Anchorage as a means to offer Bitcoin [and Zcash!] to their customers.”
- Zcash Foundation hosted a conversation regarding Halo. Here is the summary of the call.
Mark your calendars –
- Sat, Jan 16: Boston Zcash Meetup
- Tues, Jan 26: Zeal Call, special guest Danny O’Brien, EFF
- Tues, Feb 9: Gardening Club, Halo + Wallets discussion plus Grants Q&A from ZOMG
- Thurs, Feb 11: Arborist Call, NU5 feature discussion
- Tues, Feb 23: Zeal Call, special guests from Blockchain Association
Community Shout Outs – ZcashZeal for live-tweeting the protocol hangout this week, ZECpages for incorporating tons of new features and @BostonZcash for hosting a Zcash meetup this Saturday. Other shout outs go out to @rex4539 and @oxarbitrage for submitting some great PRs this week.
Dev Infra
- Assisted and tested zcashd issue #4936.
- Grafana Cloud research.
- Debian 9 CI Issue resolved within 3 hours of the report.
Core
- Produced Release 4.2.0
- Improve getblocktemplate rpc performance when using shielded coinbase
- Implemented ZIP 313 in Zcashd
- Merged Data Access Api V1
- Reduced IBD data by more than 90% by eliminating redundant block header requests / replies
- Made great progress on the SHA-256 gadget which has helped tremendously with the Gadget API
Security
- Facilitating connection with kestrel institute on r1cs analysis of Sprout and Sapling
- Organizing responsible disclosure agreements with mobile projects
Wallet
- New Android Demo App Screen “Get Balance” (Community contribution!)
- DoS Research in LWD which led to a bunch of tickets to be closed this coming sprint
- Data Access API implementation research spike
