Sapling

This week we had another meeting about Sapling progress. We discussed the work being done to benchmark the Sapling cryptography improvements and are very excited to announce them. In a previous update, I alluded to such an announcement and while this is still in the works we’re very close to being ready to share with you all so expect something very soon!

In the meeting we also discussed progress on the new MPC Ceremony design that will come along with the Sapling upgrade. A formal write-up is in the works for this as well and should be ready to publish by the end of the month.

We also reviewed some next steps which include auditing of libraries and building a skeleton implementation/proof of concept.

Release

More engineering work was put towards the 1.0.12 release this week including performance benchmarks, improvements to testing environments and the overall release process. We’re also planning to include some uncategorized fixes and design improvements that are more or less ready to go.

Payment disclosure & XCAT

Both of these projects are seeing additional work being done to them. Payment disclosure needed a rebase since it had been put off since the last release and we intend to focus more engineering time on it next week. XCAT needed a bug fix that was discovered but once that is addressed, the project will be set aside so the engineers can, for now, turn focus to the upcoming release.

UX

We’re currently evaluating a 3rd wallet’s UX, this time one with bitcoin only support. This testing will continue next week and conclude with a public report that we’ll add to our UX research survey collection. We also discussed the next UX evaluation project which we’re thinking will revisit the flow of making purchases with Zcash with other platforms. If you haven’t seen our first UX survey, you can check it out here.