Edit 2018-05-31: Auto-senescence terminology changed to “end-of-support halt”.

Today we’re announcing the release of Zcash 1.0.13, introducing new features, performance improvements and bug fixes. Our new low-memory prover reduces memory usage by 43% when generating a shielded transaction, from 3 GB to 1.7 GB. An experimental feature, payment disclosure, can help services better manage their shielded payments. We also now fully support the z_shieldcoinbase RPC call to help miners sweep up and shield their coinbase rewards.

Summary of the changes included in this release:

End-of-support halt (previously called “auto-senescence”) cycle has been reduced from 18 to 16 weeks. (#2733) Low-memory prover reduces JoinSplit creation memory usage from 3 GB to 1.7GB. (#2670, stats) Payment disclosure has been added as an experimental feature with new RPC calls z_getpaymentdisclosure and z_validatepaymentdisclosure (#2159). This feature enables a sender to prove that a payment was made to a recipient, which can help services better manage their shielded payments. See the documentation for a full explanation of this new feature. z_shieldcoinbase is now a fully supported RPC call (#2692). See an explanation of this command here . Libsnark has been brought into the source repository tree. (#2652) Potential shutdown errors have been fixed. (#2555) User interface messages have been cleaned up. (#2548, #2150, #2649) The extended QA tests have been migrated to Zcash. (#2533) A workaround has been implemented in the test wallet_protectcoinbase , which was previously failing on some platforms. (#2698) Benchmarking has been updated with new performance measurements and fixes. (#2645, #2659, #2377, #2687, #2665)

We’re encouraging all users and miners to update to this new version. See our download page and the 1.0 User Guide for more information.

For a more complete list of changes, see our 1.0.13 GitHub milestone. To follow our progress, watch the GitHub project and join the forum.