Releases

This week we completed generating a bunch of test data that will aid us with some benchmarks we plan to use to help diagnose wallet performance issues. We’ve tested these benchmarks in our dev-ci infrastructure with plans to get them into the production CI server next week.

The overall theme for 1.0.12 is to focus on benchmarking issues users have been experiencing so that we can implement fixes as soon as we understand how to best address them. If there’s enough time, these fixes could be part of 1.0.12 but are more likely to be addressed in 1.0.13.

We also re-signed the 1.0.11 package because some users on Debian stretch were seeing warnings or errors regarding an unsupported signature type. If you have been experiencing issues upgrading to 1.0.11, try updating again.

We also had a retrospective meeting about the 1.0.11 release so that we could diagnose the process issues we had which resulted in delays. After taking the time for analyzing the planning, coordinating and development slippage, we feel much more prepared for staying on track for future releases and communicating in advance for times we feel the need to postpone.

Future priorities

Our Show & Tell last week to demo XCAT was a big step for our engineers who have been developing a cross-chain atomic trade protocol between Zcash and Bitcoin blockchains. We also open sourced the experimental software (ZBXCAT) used in the demo and will continue to work on improvements and testing over time.

We’re also making progress on research for Sapling and in particular the new MPC protocol we plan to use for generating the new zk-SNARK parameters. An announcement with more details about the improvements and a research paper will be forthcoming.

Miscellaneous

Our subsequent UX research project is just getting started. It will compliment the initial research we published a couple weeks ago and we’ll publish the new results as soon as they’re ready! We’re very excited to be continuing this research, not only to support the Zcash ecosystem but also for general cryptocurrency adoption by addressing fundamental UX challenges.

We’re making headway on migrating our website and blog to more scalable solutions given our current support for 8 languages and interest in expanding even further. This migration will also introduce a reorganization of content on the site to help us communicate more effectively. Stay tuned!