Zcash Alpha Testnet z9 Release

Zcash Alpha Testnet z9 Release
Today the Zcash team released an update to the Testnet: Zcash Version z9 “Solidifying the Consensus Protocol” This update has a number of improvements including more space-efficient encodings for Equihash and merging upstream Bitcoin patches related to Denial-of-Service protection. And best of all this update contains the fix for the  MAX_HEADERS_RESULTS  Bug that caused many users to not to be able to connect to the Testnet. You will need to download the latest version and re-compile to reconnect to the Testnet. All of your previously mined test coins are no longer usable on the new Blockchain. Full blog post below:

Daira Hopwood and Jay Graber | Aug 25, 2016

Today, we deployed a new alpha release of the Zcash reference implementation,v0.11.2.z9, to the testnet. The new release includes the following changes [1]:
  1. Decreased block header size to address a bug interfering with the testnet (#1289).
  2. Ensured that Zcash secrets are saved along with Bitcoin secrets in wallets (#1198).
  3. Implemented more space-efficient encodings for Equihash solutions (#1175).
  4. Implemented more space-efficient encodings for zk-SNARK proofs following an IEEE standard (#1262).
  5. Increased the size of the memo field sent with notes, to 512 bytes (#1187).
  6. Merged in upstream Bitcoin patches related to Denial-of-Service protection (#1251).
  7. Implemented the first stages of adding a new higher-level RPC interface so that clients don’t have to deal with details of the underlying cryptographic protocol (#701,#756, #1197).
  8. Began addressing issues found by NCC Group as part of our security audits(#1214, #1215).
We do not expect to make any other changes to the consensus protocol, except for possible security fixes, until after 1.0. Zcash Blog
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