New Beta Release: Audit Mitigations and Bug Fixes

Today, we deployed the second beta release of the Zcash reference implementation, 1.0.0-beta2, to the testnet. This is the second release of the Zcash Beta Series. The new release includes the following changes [1]:

1. We have changed the address prefixes. (#1477)
2. Encrypting your wallet with a passphrase now also encrypts the spending key for zaddrs. (#1372)
3. Founders’ Reward addresses will now rotate monthly. (#1398)
4. We have re-enabled disabled compiler warnings and updated all dependencies, including Boost and OpenSSL. (#1429)
5. We have merged in upstream patches to mitigate the risk of DoS attacks. (#1411, #1407)
6. We have deployed a dnsseed to improve launching and connecting to the network. (#1443)
7. The RPC call getbalance now returns a correct balance for UTXOs. (#1427)
8. High-priority alerts now put the RPC into safe mode. (#1374)
9. We have updated the public parameters. (#1476)

This release also makes reliability improvements in the wallet, however some work remains to be done around importing keys and rescanning after restarts. If you are encountering problems with the wallet, stop your node and restart it with the -reindex flag (Example: ./src/zcashd -reindex).

This release will reset our testnet, invalidating all previous coins and breaking backwards compatibility. To get connected to the new testnet, follow the instructions on the Beta Guide.

Additionally, you can now reach our main test network node through a Tor hidden service at zctestseie6wxgio.onion.

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.