Here are your weekly Zcash updates:

• ECC welcomes Christina Garman as a new board member. Garman is one of the seven founding scientists who invented Zerocash, the protocol that would eventually become Zcash.
• Signal now accepts crypto donations – including Zcash.
• CoinHako now supports Zcash.
• I recently caught up on this Pool Deprecation proposal Nathan posted. This topic was also covered in a recent Arborist call. Arborist calls are now every two weeks.

Mark your calendars –

• 3/23 – Zooko is speaking at Orchid’s Priv8 Summit along with speakers like Edward Snowden, Audrey Tang and Cindy Cohn.
• 3/25 – Arborist calls are now biweekly. These regular community calls center around network upgrades and protocol development. Register here.
• 3/30 – This month’s Zeal call features Yan Zhu from Brave and Jay Graber from Happening.net. Register here.

In the news, Georgia HS students may be learning about crypto as part of a new financial literacy initiative. Journalist Maria Bustillos talks about the myth of money and Bitcoin. An NFT art heist reminds us of the importance of self-custody and carefully reading the TOS.

Here are your weekly Zcash updates:

• ECC is hiring. Check out our career page to learn more about these openings: Developer Relations Lead, Senior DevOps Engineer, Head of Regulatory Relations, and Digital Marketing.
• Have you heard about Unified Addresses? ECC is collecting feedback on a proposed upgrade to improve the UX for Zcash transactions moving forward. Check out this Github issue for more details.
• Travala now supports Zcash. Book your summer travel with ZEC today.
• ICYMI – here’s a recording from Zooko’s presentation at Priv8 Summit this week.

Mark your calendars –

• 3/30 – This month’s Zeal call features Yan Zhu from Brave and Jay Graber from Happening.net. We’re trying something new this month – Zeal calls will be livestreamed. Subscribe to ECC’s youtube channel to get the latest alerts.
• 4/27 and 5/25 – We have great speakers lined up for the next two Zeal calls: Ashkan Soltani, Robin Berjon will discuss Global Privacy Control in April and Julia Angwin will discuss journalism holding big tech accountable in May. Read more here.

DevInfra

• Completed CentOS 7 build for Bithumb
• M1 Mac setup and troubleshooting builds for iOS LightClientKit
• 50% through github data export for some Tekton vs BuildBot comparison data
• Testnet Faucet rewrite initial requirements written, to be pared down for practical delivery time
• Transaction metric delivered for wallet team

Core Team

• Published 0.5 release of the Rust crates which includes Data Access API, ZIP 302 memos, and significant improvements to trial decryption
• Merged a large part of the initial Orchard implementation
• Transaction builder is nearly complete aside from proof creation
• Draft ZIP 302, Standardized Memo Field Format merged
• Fixed two bugs related to creating transactions with no change outputs
• Unified Address requirements and scoping work
• NCC specification audit interim readout on the 22nd with a follow on this afternoon

Security

• Level of Effort estimation for security input for Unified Addresses

Wallet

• Max Amount/Full Note spend bug identified, squashed (huge thanks to core for the support), now working on an easy recovery strategy for affected users.
• More in depth iOS logging deployed on team release
• Team testnet build for Android to flatten in flight feature development and bug fixes
• UA contributions and effort estimations

In the news, EFF and internet advocates call on ISPs to commit to protect basic user privacy. A Visa study shows that 25% of credit card users in LATAM want to experiment with cryptocurrencies. That’s all for now folks!

Here are your weekly Zcash updates:

• The Sapling privacy set is about 3x larger than it was a year ago. Check out more Zcash stats on the ECC metrics page.
• NU5 activation timeline updated. Mainnet activation is now scheduled for October 1.
• NU5 is a big deal because it will mark the activation of Halo Orchard on the Zcash mainnet. This will do away with the ‘trusted setup’ and allow for the addition of new capabilities without complicated and risky ceremonies. Halo Orchard also paves the way for more scalable, programmable Zcash!

Mark your calendars –

• 4/27 and 5/25 – We have great speakers lined up for the next two Zeal calls: Ashkan Soltani, Robin Berjon will discuss Global Privacy Control in April and Julia Angwin will discuss journalism holding big tech accountable in May. Read more here.

Community Shoutouts – Shout out to plutoforever for submitting a good community PR. Shout out to Mandeep (Nighthawk) and Elio (independent) for PRs primarily to handle UI around memos between sending to t or sending to z in wallets, Mandeep fixed a security finding related to removal of logging while typing characters.

DevInfra

• Fixed bug for windows cross compile failure
• Massive build time reduction from rust docs bug fix
• Full test suite for Ubuntu working in Tekton
• Ubuntu 20.0.4 builder image updated
• Debian 10 builder image updated (with a few issues due to Debian 10 defaulting to an older version of minGW)
• Security collaboration for geographic redundancy of VM snapshots

Core

• Produced release 4.4.0-rc1
• Continued to refine Unified Addresses definition and UX
• Began drafting ZIP 316
• Halo scientific review in progress, spearheaded by Mary Maller member of the SAG 

Security

• Reviewing Orchard spec, security proofs and unified addresses.
• Sinsemilla python implementation is done (thanks Daira for catching bugs)
• Redwood – analysis of cargo tools, adding json to rust-secure-code/cargo-supply-chain

Wallet

• Rescan api for error recovery implemented in both SDKs,
• Lightwalletd “getAddressUtxo” implemented and merged,
• Publishing of Android SDK moved to Maven Central
• Android moved to one SDK library (instead of two for testnet/mainnet)

What to watch, CodedBias is a documentary on biases and AI algorithms. The film features researchers and technologists including Joy Buolamwini, Cathy O’Neil, Meredith Broussard, Silkie Carlo, Virginia Eubanks, Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble and others. Worth watching this weekend if you have nothing else in your Netflix queue.

In other news, are you FLoCed? If you’re using Google Chrome, you might be part of an experimental new tracking feature called federated learning cohorts.

Here are your weekly Zcash updates:

• Zcash is now supported by a US publicly traded company. That’s pretty amazing.
• “Privacy will become a more popular investment theme.” Barry Silbert namedrops Zcash in his first interview in eight months.
• Former CIA director Michael Morell published a paper on Bitcoin’s use in illicit finance. The paper was commissioned by Crypto Council for Innovation (whose members include Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Square). While this may seem good for Bitcoin, the paper makes some concerning conclusions about mass surveillance and crime. Check out Josh’s thread for more context.
• New Release 4.4.0 allows zcashd to be configured to optionally expose an HTTP server that acts as a Prometheus scrape endpoint.
• This week, ECC announced Halo Arc and Unified Addresses. Both of these announcements signal a new era for Zcash – one that is shielded by default, without the trusted setup and without the challenges of multiple address formats.

Mark your calendars –

In the news (besides Coinbase), Oklahoma is launching a state-wide ALPR (automatic license plate readers) program using mass surveillance as a way to collect more revenue.“Policing is not about crime control or public safety but about the regulation of people’s lives — their movements and modes of being in the world.” AI researchers boycott Google after the firing of Timnit Gebru.

The Winklevoss twins will be on the May cover of Forbes .Nigierian artists dabble with NFTs. MEV (miner extratable value) is a growing concern (and fascinating topic!) for Ethereum. Don’t miss the March Roundup from ZKMesh.

That’s all for this week folks!

This week, many in the internet security/ researcher/ hacker community remember Daniel Kaminsky who passed away last Friday. He was an outspoken advocate for privacy and a friend of freedom. Rest in peace.

Here are your weekly Zcash updates:

Mark your calendars –

That’s it for this week folks. Enjoy the weekend.

Here are your weekly Zcash updates:

Mark your calendars –

• May 25 – Zeal Call with special guest Julia Angwin. Subscribe to ECC’s Youtube 1 channel for the latest updates and new content.

Community shoutouts: Shoutout to narodnik for your merged PR. Shout out to Finstreet, ZOMG grant recipient producing a weekly Zcash update in Hindi. And finally, shout out to Harry Halpin for presenting on the usability of privacy and cryptocurrency (featuring ZecWallet and Tor) at the Usable Security 2021 Workshop.

Dev Infra

• Testers complete and in production for: Debian 11, Debian 10, Debian 9, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04 cross for Windows, Arm, and Darwin, CentOS8, and Arch.
• Updated CI Builder deployments to simplify and cleanup, PR

Core

• Progress on the Orchard circuit, major refactor of the Core / Chip / Layouter Abstractions
• Working with Mary Maller on security review documentation
• Test vectors coming along nicely for NU5: PRs #18, #21
• Property testing framework for Sapling and Orchard components included as part of an update for ZIP 225 support
• Progress on incremental merkle tree design, more efficient, less space intensive, makes updating witnesses significantly faster

Wallet

• Added getAddressUTXO call to darksidewalletd
• SDK, ECC Wallet, and ECC Testnet Wallet Releases
• iOS Testnet Wallet created
• Balance details screen and t-address display promoted to main feature
• Wallet rescan fix deployed on both platforms to ECC Wallet
• Community Wallet collaboration is accelerating and productive.

Here are your weekly Zcash updates:

• ICYMI – the recording from the last Arborist call is up on Youtube. You can see all of the past community calls from Zeal Calls, Gardening Club and Arborist calls on ECC’s youtube channel.
• Check out this thread where Zooko dispels a few common Zcash myths in simple terms and with clear charts.

Mark your calendars –

Thats it! Short and sweet this week.

Hello Zcash community folks! Here’s your mid-July update.

Miscellaneous: a bug was discovered (and fixed) in the iOS versions of Nighthawk and ECC Reference Wallet code, you can check out the ZOMG whitepaper published last month, autoshielding is live on Android with NightHawk, and Flexa is partnering with InComm Payments to widen the scope of retailers accepting Zcash payments via Flexa.

Work full-time in the Zcash ecosystem

We’re hiring here at ECC. Check out our open roles and apply on our careers page. The Zcash Foundation is also hiring!

DevInf

• Working on interviewing candidates for open positions
• Updated infrastructure components

Core

Wallet

• Shipped autoshielding for testnet and mainnet on iOS
• Continuing to collaborate with Unstoppable to enable z->t
• Facilitated Nighthawk shipping significant Android and iOS updates
• Executed the “Responsible Disclosure” process in support of iOS bug

In the news: the US Presidential Advisory Group is chatting stablecoins, tensions are high in Cuba and some residents are turning to cryptocurrencies, and is crypto chatter quieting down at everyone’s family dinner tables?