July 21, 2017 - Dev update

Since I missed last week’s dev update, this week will overview work from previous 2 weeks.

1.0.11 Release
Various issues for the upcoming 1.0.11 release have progressed including adding a field to listunspent output to show whether the UTXO is a coinbase transaction (#2446), a restriction to spending from shielded addresses when minconf=0 (#2519), removing UPnP support (#2500), etc.

We also sent out an alert to remaining 1.0.10 nodes enabling safe mode as part of this milestone.

We have an updated release process we’re trying which involves deploying and testing a release candidate 1 week prior to main release. Next week should see the RC for 1.0.11 and testing with the following week deploying the regular 1.0.11 release. This updated process comes as a result of our mistake in the 1.0.10 release which required a 1.0.10-1 hotfix (the current version). The goal is to drastically reduce any need for hotfix releases in the future by catching issues in the RC.

Beswick
Progress was made on design for a new RPC z_shieldcoinbase for shielding all coinbase UTXOs in wallet (#2448).

Other tickets in the Beswick project can be tracked here.

Sapling
We’ve been researching and working on the BLS12-381 elliptic curve upgrade which can be tracked in the following tickets: #2502 & #2517.

Sapling working group meetings continue to run regularly and overall we are making good progress.

Other tickets in the Sapling project can be tracked here.

Dev outreach
Our team has been doing a lot of outreach the past two weeks as well: Zooko and Paige were in China meeting businesses and developers; Str4d and Sean attended PETS (which ZcashCo was a sponsor for) & Ariel and Jay participated in the IC3 Ethereum bootcamp and as a result made a lot of great progress on the implementation of ZEXCAT (Zcash-Ethereum).

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