ECC:

Technical

News and notes about Electric Coin Company and its work on Zcash

Electric Coin Co. (ECC) has been working since June to resolve Zcash wallet performance issues that are affecting users of third-party apps Edge, Nighthawk, and Unstoppable.* All three of these mobile wallets utilize the ECC SDK.Our engineers have made progress, however, work remains — including further updates to zcashd, lightwalletd, the ECC wallet SDKs, and the ECC prototype wallet — to fully restore good user experience in the impacted apps.

In August, ECC shared its rationale for moving Zcash from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake.

We had many successes in 2021 across all of our engineering-related teams including Core, Mobile, and DevSecOps, a team comprising what was previously the separate DevInfra and Security teams. These successes included the regular cadence of releases as well as breakthrough cryptographic research, developments to move the shielded wallet ecosystem forward, operational enhancements and advancements, and a continued demonstration of our commitment to security best practices, ensuring safe and secure releases and network upgrades. 

TL;DR: The 4.5.0, 4.5.1, and 4.5.1-1 zcashd nodes will reach End of Service on or about January 10th, 2022. Prior to that time, miners must upgrade to 4.6.0-1 and all other testnet and mainnet nodes should upgrade to either 4.6.0 or 4.6.0-1.

TL;DR: The 4.5.0, 4.5.1, and 4.5.1-1 zcashd nodes will reach End of Service on or about January 10, 2022. Prior […]

It has become clear that the best way for ECC to contribute to the Zcash community over the next three years is to release an official ECC wallet on top of a highly interoperable Zcash protocol that leverages proof-of-stake consensus.

This is a required update for all testnet nodes, and is highly recommended for mainnet nodes if you were using the deprecated getaddressesbyaccount RPC method.

The code preparations for the Network Upgrade 5 consensus rules are finished and included in this release. The following ZIPs […]

Electric Coin Co. (ECC) has entered into an agreement with Protocol Labs, the Filecoin Foundation, and the Ethereum Foundation to explore Halo R&D, including how the technology might be used in their respective ecosystems.

A successful transition to Proof of Stake would necessarily require support from Zcash users, a legitimate governance process, and a well designed technical migration process. This post outlines what the technical migration process might look like at the top level.