The solar actually by no means units on ECC Engineering! We’re a small, world group centered on constructing and supporting expertise to supply folks with entry to a good and open foreign money — no matter location or demographic. In brief, our mission is to empower everybody with financial freedom. We’re lucky to have among the most gifted engineers and cryptographers on the planet on our staff, and whereas 2020 was a difficult yr on many fronts, we continued to make great progress in each R&D and engineering, which we really feel will profit Zcash for years to come back.
ECC actively develops and maintains the Zcashd consensus shopper, the official reference implementation of the Zcash Protocol Specification. The Zcashd shopper permits you to ship and obtain ZEC, mine ZEC, and confirm transactions. It’s in use by mining swimming pools and exchanges all around the world.
Since 2016, ECC has been on the forefront of groundbreaking analysis and growth with implications past the cryptocurrency world. Zcash was the primary venture to efficiently implement zero-knowledge proofs, and ECC has established a popularity for transport high quality, production-ready code at common intervals. We launch new variations of Zcashd on roughly six-week launch cycles and are at the moment performing a median of two community upgrades (or “laborious forks”) per yr.
Historic and future launch and community improve data could be discovered on our Schedule page.
Highlights
We had many successes in 2020 throughout all of our engineering-related groups together with Core, Pockets, Dev Infra, and Safety. These successes included the common cadence of releases and community upgrades, in addition to breakthrough cryptographic analysis, developments to maneuver the shielded pockets ecosystem ahead, operational enhancements and developments, and a continued demonstration of our dedication to safety finest practices guaranteeing secure and safe releases and community upgrades.
2020 highlights embody:
- Launched nine versions of Zcashd and efficiently executed our fourth and fifth community upgrades, codenamed Heartwood and Canopy.
- Launched quite a lot of resources to assist in mobile wallet development, together with an up to date Android SDK, a brand new iOS SDK, and a suitable lightwalletd with elevated pace and effectivity.
- Developed and open sourced the ECC Pockets for iOS and Android, which, together with our iOS and Android pockets SDKs, has already fostered the doorway of two extra Zcash shielded wallets into the ecosystem, Unstoppable and NightHawk.
- Launched Sapling viewing key RPC assist, particularly, the prolonged viewing keys described in ZIP 32.
- Carried out a number of safety audits of Heartwood and Canopy, in step with the safety commonplace at ECC requiring an audit for each ZIP included in a community improve.
- Launched the preliminary model of Testnet-in-a-Box, which permits growth groups to spin up their very own personal testnet with any variety of nodes.
- Labored with Gemini engineering as the corporate grew to become the primary regulated establishment to announce shielded assist, having acquired earlier approval from the New York State Division of Monetary Companies (NYDFS).
- Started productizing Halo, the subsequent technology of zero-knowledge proof expertise, which could radically improve Zcash in addition to different blockchains, and which could also have applications beyond blockchain.
- Established an internal security process to implement coverage-guided fuzz testing to enhance our exterior safety audits.
- Suggested Zondax within the growth of their Ledger integration which represents the primary shielded assist for {hardware} wallets.
- Designed a brand new cycle of elliptic curves for the Halo 2 venture, Pallas and Vesta, which we collectively seek advice from because the Pasta curves.
For a full recap of 2020, together with all our engineering exercise, please see our Electric Coin Co. blog.
Wishing you one of the best for a wholesome, pleased, and profitable 2021!
