Release
This past week we continued merging dev infrastructure related improvements for the upcoming 1.0.13 release. It’s worth putting out a forewarning now that the scheduled 1.0.13 release date is likely to be pushed back due to several engineers attending the Devcon3 zk-SNARK workshop that we’re hosting the week prior. It is currently set for Monday Nov 6th but don’t be surprised if that changes to the following week on the 13th.
One big achievement for this release is merging the libsnark library into Zcash instead of having it as a dependency (PR 2652). Some other goals for the release include the aforementioned experimental features (payment disclosure + payment offloading) and low memory proving.
You can see the rest of the tasks we’re aiming to include in the upcoming release on Github here.
Sapling and HF0
We’re progressing on many fronts with regards to Sapling improvements including work on extracting primatives of the jubjub-prototype into a reusable Rust crate and updating pairing, a Rust library for zk-SNARK pairing cryptography.
We’re also looking to continue plans for hardfork zero (HF0) in the next week.
Misc
Some outside contributions to the ZBXCAT implementation were reviewed and merged this week.
We announced our completion of the JPMorgan Quorum collaboration. All of this work is open source, you can check out the documentation here.
We’ve been growing the team the last couple of months and are continuing this process for the coming month or two. We’ll be announcing our recent new hires soon!