By Paige Peterson

1.0.15/Overwinter

We decided to delay the 1.0.15 release to Monday (Feb 19) to allow the engineers time for sufficient review and final touching up of the outstanding Overwinter PRs. As a formality, we’ll still be putting out a release candidate but much of the testing for Overwinter PRs will happen via testnet over the next few weeks. We’re focusing on making the testnet more reliable in terms of blocktime for this period (and beyond) by dedicating more mining nodes to it.

Audits of the Overwinter code changes and Overwinter ZIPs are starting shortly as well.

A new countdown page for Overwinter was made live and we’ll be pushing updates to it as needed in addition to a new section of the FAQ about network upgrades. The countdown page should be the central resource for everyone interested in learning more about Overwinter. Resources for third-party developers and users are both linked there so please share this with anyone curious and let us know if you have any feedback.

Sapling

We’re coordinating an audit on the pairing library for Sapling and have updated the API for Bellmanwhich is now in good shape and subsequently updated the Sapling crypto library to work with those changes.

Some final review of the specification for the consensus changes in Sapling are still occuring but we’re getting much closer at making it ready for publishing.

Hiring

Four new engineers are starting on Monday! We’re very excited but will need some time to sufficiently onboard them and get them into the flow which might disrupt other progress temporarily but will sufficiently improve progress in the long-run.