With less than a week until Launch the Zcash team released a new update to the Testnet: Release Candidate 2 (rc2) This new release incorporates a number of improvements including security and DDoS protections but the feature I am most excited to try out is the new Tromp Solver! As many of you who have been mining on the Testnet know the included miner in Zcash (zcashd) was not optimized for maximum CPU performance but thanks to John Tromp and @sarath-hotspot you will notice a HUGE improvement to your mining by using the new Equihash Solver. To use the new solver add equihashsolver=tromp to your zcash.conf folder. This new release also includes Jack Griggs new Node Metrics screen which has cool ASCII art and displays your mining node information in a much easier to read format. Src- Zcash Blog:

New Release Candidate: Less than One Week to Launch

Daira Hopwood | Oct 22, 2016

The Zcash team has been hard at work preparing for the launch, which is on track for the 28th October. Despite some hiccups due to the widespread DNS disruptions on Friday, today we deployed the fourth beta release of the Zcash reference implementation, 1.0.0-rc2, to the testnet. The new release includes the following user-visible changes:

Wallet encryption has been disabled. The reasons for disabling this feature for the time being are explained in our security warnings document. We recommend using full disk encryption for now instead. You can find a guide on disk encryption here (#1552)

We have included mitigations for security issues found by the NCC Group and Coinspect audits. (#1459, #1464, #1504)

We have merged some changes from Bitcoin to help address potential denial-of-service vulnerabilities. (#1588, #1589, #1591)

A bug that could cause assertion failures when restarting after a crash has been fixed. (#1378)

A more efficient CPU Equihash solver written by John Tromp has been integrated into the built-in miner. This is not used by default, but can be enabled by adding equihashsolver=tromp to zcash.conf. Thanks go to John Tromp, and to @sarath-hotspot for providing the impetus for this improvement. (#1570, #1578)

Running the node now displays a screen showing node metrics (and some pretty ASCII art ☺). (#1375)

The consensus rules have been tightened to reject block and transaction versions that were previously used by Bitcoin but are not valid for Zcash. (#1556, #1600)

The testnet now enforces the same rules on standard transactions as will be enforced on mainnet. (#1582, #1557)

We have made changes to the getblocktemplate RPC call to support mining pools. (#1424, #1602)

Improved support for deterministic builds. (#1549)

Build fixes for the musl C library used by Alpine Linux. (#1558)

Documentation improvements. (#1500, #1575)

For a more complete list of changes, see our 1.0.0-rc2 release github milestone. This release resets the beta testnet. It continues to use the beta 2 proving and verify keys.