Hi everyone, here are the updates from this week:

Release 2.1.2 supports the activation of Heartwood on testnet, with an activation height of 903800, slated to occur on May 6, 2020. Once the feature selection is finalized for NU4, we will begin the process of picking a codename.

As part of the Heartwood network upgrade, Zcash miners and mining pools will have the option to mine directly to a shielded coinbase.

ECC has new resources and documentation for light clients. ECC is also planning on open-sourcing the zECC wallet by the end of the quarter.

ECC now has a dedicated Documentation PO. Congrats @lindanaeunlee! The goal is to improve documentation across the company and establish a regular doc cadence. This work is critical in order to engage and grow our open-source dev community.

Check out this thread for other Zcash interop projects including Ren, Thesis, Cosmos and Polkadot.

Mark your calendars,

Tues, 4/28, April Zeal Call: @nathan will be doing a deepdive on all things Heartwood and @mhluongo will join us to talk more about his company Thesis and his perspectives on Zcash.

Tues, 5/5, Zcash Gardening club: @nathan is hosting this open monthly meeting for open source contributors to share about their projects and connect.

Mon, 5/11, ECC at Consensus: Distributed: Join us at 2pm EST. The first panel will cover developer resources to help you build on top of Zcash, the second panel will cover interoperability. Register: https://bit.ly/34SgkKe.

Tues, 5/19, ECC Livestream: Highlights include our R&D, Engineering, and Growth flight plan, overview of flyclient, viewing keys for 2.1.2, a preview of our upcoming Gitcoin hackathon & an update on community efforts.

Zcash Foundation posted their quarterly update. @hdevalence was featured on Zero Knowledge podcast discussing Zebra, ZF and privacy-preserving contact tracing.

Community Shout Outs - This section celebrates the contributions to Zcash made by folks outside of ECC and Foundation. Shout out to the community developers who contributed to Release v 2.1.2: avnish, @rex4539, glasgow, @zancas, ca333, Dagur, @oxarbitrage, NikVolf and avnish89.



Dev Infra Team

Tested, Signed, and Deployed v2.1.2

Expanding Q1 Docker container efforts to generate Gitian Signatures; ultimately aid a portion of automated releases in CD

Completed Automation of Smoke Tests

Completed testing of alternative fetch-param script; provides cross platform support for nodes to retrieve param files

Core Team

Dev fund ZIPs are published (207, 214, 251)

Switched to Rust for Equihash validation starting with Heartwood

Making progress on TZEs and Halo research

Security Team

Automated some defense of company assets

Devised a plan for integrating for Zcashd dependency checks

Opened new internal vuln classification system for comment in #engineering

Wallet Team

Finalization of taddr design and transaction details

iOS full wallet restore

Android and iOS: Basic reorg integration testing, memo tests, test plan for reliability testing

CI/CD process improvements for Android and iOS

Security: starting review of Android and iOS code, darksidewalletd documentation underway

Ecosystem

Shielded Ledger support is on the way!

Binance Savings enabled flexible deposits for users to earn 1% yield for holding Zcash on the platform.

OkEx listed Zcash perpetual swaps up to 20x leverage.

Huobi listed Zcash Perpetual Swaps up to 75x leverage.

This week in privacy, WIRED explains Safari’s pretty glaring vulnerabilities, they’ve since been patched but it’s an interesting read nonetheless. What else has been hacked this week? Nintendo.

The US Supreme Court announced they will hear a case this fall on CFAA, the country’s broad “hacking” law. This law has been used to prosecute activists such as Julian Assange and Aaron Schwartz.

In crypto news, Coindesk covers Bitcoin upgrades that could improve privacy and scalability. Binance opened up P2P crypto trading in Venezuela. BraveNewCoin published a new analysis on Zcash. That’s it for now. Have a nice weekend y’all.