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Zebra Beta Release Series
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In November the Zcash Foundation's Engineering Team released the first two beta releases of Zebra. These releases marked the completion of mempool work - making it fully compatible with ZIP-401, as well as the implementation of a number of consensus rules necessary for Zebra to fully validate all of the Zcash network consensus rules. The Engineering Team also tackled several security issues, increased the test coverage, updated Zebra's user documentation and lastly, upgraded to the latest version of tokio (1.14.0).
The goals of the beta release series are for Zebra to act as a fully validating Zcash node for all applicable consensus rules as of NU5 activation on mainnet.
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The Zcash Foundation released its third quarter 2021 report in mid November. Our goal with these reports is to provide transparency on our financial status and engineering developments, in a simple and reader-friendly way. Download ZF's quarterly results for Q3 here.
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NCC and QEDIT NU5 Security Assessment
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The Electric Coin Company recently engaged NCC and QEDIT to review the NU5 upgrade at both the specification and implementation levels. The report indicated that no serious or critical issues were found in either audit. This is good news for both the Zcash Foundation and the ECC, since we depend on the successful execution of the NU5 upgrade for a successful Zebra deployment. The NCC and QEDIT audits can be found below:
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ZOMG Grant Recipients for the Month of November
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In November, the Zcash Open Major Grants committee approved four grants, totaling $631,560 USD. Awards included a Thorchain grant, which will enable the support of native Zcash on a major decentralized exchange, opening up tremendous opportunity for new and existing users to acquire it. Furthermore, the Cake Wallet grant equips the Cake Technologies team with funds to build a privacy-conscious Zcash wallet, which will enable Zcash to take advantage of Cake's integrations and 200,000+ user base. Additional grants approved by the ZOMG in November were BTCPay and a community related promotion of Zcash through Zcash-branded skydives.
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Trezor Announces Completion of Milestone 2, Bringing Shielded Support One Step Closer
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New features from this completed milestone include derivation of spending keys, Orchard shielded addresses and Unified Addresses. Users will also be able to get an address and viewing keys via trezorctl command and they will also be able to review an address on display (text or QR code).
This moves the Trezor team to the third and the most complex stage of the firmware development - transaction signing. Trezor Connect integration will be added as part of M.3.
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Revised Schedule for ZOMG Elections
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The Zcash Foundation paused the Zcash Open Major Grants election process to address questions regarding potential conflict of interest issues. We have since received clarity regarding the COI policy, and are now in a position to resume the election process. Find the revised schedule here.
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The Zcash Foundation will also be re-opening the window for the ZCAP expansion. Moreover, following consultation with the Zcash community, we are adding some new routes for Zcash community members who make a meaningful contribution to the Zcash eco-system to join the ZCAP. More information on the ZCAP expansion here.
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Second ZOMG-ZIP 1014 Independent Review Committee Community Call
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During this community call, Jason McGee (aquietinvestor) led the discussion with the panelists to explore how ZOMG can operate with a bit more autonomy. More specifically, what are the pros and cons to amending ZIP 1014 to allow ZOMG a discretionary budget, subject to 501(c)(3) restrictions, that allows committee members to allocate financial resources in limited circumstances to make itself more effective.
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The Zcash Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity that builds financial privacy infrastructure for the public good, primarily serving the users of the Zcash protocol and blockchain.
We serve the users of the Zcash protocol and blockchain. The Foundation also supports other applications of zero-knowledge cryptography, as well as other approaches to private cryptocurrency.
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