Zano Development Update (12–11–2020) — Auditable Wallets, Bug Fixes & Foundation Fund Transparency

We’re very excited to announce the latest Zano release and to give you all a little information on what’s new.

Auditable Wallets and Foundation Fund Transparency

In response to requests from our community, we’ve dedicated ourselves to the task of making the Zano Foundation Fund completely transparent. Obviously achieving this in a coin designed to be private by default isn’t an easy thing, and we spent several months working to find a solution.

Work began with sowle’s extensive investigation into the possible implementations, which he compared at length in his research paper. From these options, we chose what we believed to be the most elegant and fitting solution for our use-case and set to work integrating it. The low-level functions were included in the last release and our new release builds upon them to allow the importing of auditible wallets via the GUI in both the desktop and mobile wallets.

Every single movement, any transaction to or from the Foundation Fund wallet — even the stakes for securing chains through PoS — will be visible in real-time to anyone who wishes to track it. We don’t know of any other privacy project that has provided this level of transparency regarding their expenses and funding and we hope it reinforces the trust we’ve built with the community and serves as a testament to our long-term commitment to Zano’s success.

To import the Foundation Fund auditable wallet:

  1. Open your wallet (desktop or mobile)
  2. Choose Restore Wallet
  3. Enter the tracking seed:

aZxat4HAWriVQ3enkGcVsrZRdMseAJswG3CSEwTqZS246VsFQ53w26eZstYsu1jWE74Atz9ajLxFnBsVTafncWNH5SMv4zHFaTS:1780c4d5dd7e97cc4a75ea8baa7977d12ef948b9a6dddc2a9a37e5e22ac7180e:1599495055

Easy as 123!

UI Enhancements and Bug Fixes

Beyond extending the auditable wallet functionality, with this release we were focused heavily on fixing UI issues and bugs that were encountered over the past few months. We had a number of problems where users received uninformative error messages, such as “Failed” or “Core busy”, for no reason. We believe that we have solved these sporadic problems once and for all. And we would like to thank everyone in the community that reported these issues and helped us by providing helpful data to fix them! It’s with your help that we are able to continue quickly refining the software to give users the best experience possible, so please let us know if you encounter any problems. Bug reports can be made via Github or in the #support channel on discord.

In addition, there was a problem where opening wallets with a large number of unsynchronized transactions would cause even very powerful systems to slow down or freeze. We performed some optimizations, and now opening such wallets works smoothly without overloading the system.

We’ve also added a master password for added security with sending transactions. Now when sending Zano, you will be asked to enter the master password to confirm the operation.

Another cool enhancement (thanks to a proposal from one of our community members) is the display of the application status when entering the password and also on the locked screen:

And one final improvement: for those who mine with Proof-of-stake, the display of staking transactions could make it difficult to see past send/receive transactions — the actual money transfers. We’ve added a filter that lets you hide mining transactions with the switch on the bottom right:

Swelling the Ranks

In other news, Jed recently decided to step down as our Community Manager. We’d like to thank him for all his time and dedication as CM and we’re happy to report that he will stay on as a mod/admin and continue to help Zano grow.

After careful consideration, we decided to offer the position of CM to Gigabyted, and we’re happy to report that he has accepted. He has been involved with the project for several years and over that time we’ve developed a good working relationship and a mutual trust. OrsonJ will also be helping with various tasks. I believe that they complement each other well with their different skill sets and will try to honour the position as much as they can and help to build the community this project deserves!

That’s it for now. Thank you all for your continued support and enjoy the new wallets!

Wallet Links:

Windows/Mac/Linux: https://zano.org/downloads.html

iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/zano-wallet/id1506829937

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com .zano_mobile

Join the Zano community:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/zano_project
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zano/
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/wE3rmYY
Telegram: https://t.me/zanocoin
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5090272.0