NU5, the first major upgrade since November 2020, includes the launch of the Orchard shielded payment protocol, utilizing the Halo proving system to remove reliance on complex setup ceremonies.
In August, ECC shared its rationale for moving Zcash from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake.
When ECC announced the release of zcashd 5.0.0, we indicated our intent to add two general exceptions to the BOSL license so that our partners and friendly forks could use the Orchard technology deploying in NU5 in a manner consistent with their current licensing choice.
Over the last 10 months, ECC published a series of blog posts on our work exploring Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs), including our plans to perform an economic analysis of various fee mechanisms that could be employed alongside ZSAs.
The 5.0.0 release supports NU5 activation on mainnet, which will occur at a block height of 1687104 (May 31st), following the targeted EOS halt of our 4.6.0-2 and 4.7.0 releases on May 16th. Release binaries will be available later today and instructions on how to install can be found on our download site.
