Zcash Sapling Activation date, new v2.0.1 software release and more

Zcash team has released its first Sapling RPC supported version of the Zcash node software. The Zcash Sapling activation will happen around 28^th of October 2018, which is the day when Zcash becomes two year old.

Sapling has already been activated on the testnet at block 280000 and if you are already running the v2.0.1 software right now, you can play around with it by specifying -experimentalfeatures and –developersapling on the testnet.

However, if you’re running older nodes, you need to understand that there will be a chain spilt on block 299188 and that is why, you must upgrade to new version before 299188 block. The new software introduces a consensus rule change.

Here is the complete changelog:

Allow minimum-difficulty blocks on testnet
Enable Sapling features on mainnet
Use ZIP 32 for all Sapling spending keys
Fix signing raw transaction with unsynced offline node
Sapling support for persisting wallet to disk
Add Sapling RPC support to z_shieldcoinbase
Add Sapling RPC support to z_listunspent
Add Sapling RPC support to z_listreceivedbyaddress
Add Sapling RPC support to z_importwallet and z_exportwallet
Add Sapling RPC support to z_sendmany
Add Sapling RPC support to z_getbalance and z_gettotalbalance
Track Sapling notes and nullifiers in the wallet (in-memory only, no persistence to disk)
Make NU peer management logic upgrade-agnostic
Generate an ovk to encrypt outCiphertext for Sapling t-addr senders
Windows cross-compile support