New Alpha Release: Terminology and Security

Today, we deployed a new alpha release of the Zcash reference implementation, v0.11.2.z7, to the testnet. The new release includes the following changes [1]:

  1. The terminology of the RPC and internal code has been modified to reflect our
    protocol specification. (#1090)
  2. We have forked libsnark and made a number of changes to improve security and performance. The public parameters have shrunk by about 35% and memory usage during JoinSplit creation has improved by several hundred megabytes. (#1104)
  3. We have published guidelines about side-channel attacks and other security warnings.
  4. The alert key has been changed. (#1105)
  5. A bug in the difficulty adjustment algorithm has been fixed. (#1124)

We have changed protocol version numbers, which requires all old nodes to upgrade to continue to use the testnet network. However, we are not resetting the testnet blockchain for this release.

To follow our progress, watch the github project and join the forum. To get an email announcement when Zcash Sprout is ready, put your email address in here.

[1] For more specific detail, view our z7 release github milestone.

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