By Paige Peterson
1.0.11 RC and release & 1.0.12 planning
We decided to shift our schedule for 1.0.11 as documented in this forum comment and ended up waiting until this past Monday to create the 1.0.11 release candidate. The official release is scheduled for this upcoming Monday (August 7th) so be sure to keep an eye out for that and be ready to upgrade.
We also started some initial steps for planning the 1.0.12 release which is (as mentioned in last week’s update) going to come 6 weeks after 1.0.11 which sets it up for a release on September 18.
XCAT
We had an internal demo of the ZBXCAT implementation (a protocol for exchanging Zcash & Bitcoin without a central party) this week and are planning for a public demo via livestream in the coming weeks. We don’t have any specific release dates for the first version yet, but progress is moving along nicely and we’re now at a point where we can focus on refactoring the code and writing tests.
Payment offloading
A version of payment offloading for transparent addresses was also completed (PR 2120) and should be ready as an experimental feature very soon. This version of payment offloading will allow clients without the minimum resource requirements to generate a zero-knowledge proof to send from a transparent address to a shielded address by delegating the high-demand processes to a server-like proving service. It will be a big step towards improving mobile and hardware wallet support in the Zcash ecosystem.
Hiring
As you may (or may not) have noticed, the past couple months at Zcash have been slower moving than the months following launch. This is due to many circumstances but in the end, it comes down to a lack of sufficient engineers to keep up the pace. So we’re hiring! While we’ve been asking around for recommendations on a semi-private basis, we also wanted to reach out to the public as to not miss out on any candidates we wouldn’t notice otherwise. Before going public, however, we wanted to set up an efficient process for hiring and are now at a point where we feel comfortable announcing the first role we’re hoping to fill soon: an engineering project manager.
So if you know of anyone who might fit the description in that listing, please forward the above link to them and tell them to reach out to us ASAP. We also plan to include additional job listings very soon so keep an eye out on the jobs page of our website.
Show & Tell
Finally, we’re excited to announce that next week we’re hosting @jasondavies to demo his alternative Zcash zk-SNARK verifier, zcash-sprout-verifier. The livestream will take place Friday August 11 at 18:00 UTC and can be accessed here.