Dear Cloak Community,

Things have been a little quiet in terms of Development contact with the Cloak Community, so we wanted to take a little time and share some thoughts and information. Many of you, like many of us, have been with Cloak for the long haul. The current Core Team, having been working on the project since it changed hands in October of 2014. As you're aware, it's been quite a journey so far, and shows no sign of stopping. Over the last two years, we've expanded the team, learnt some lessons and continued to press on with delivering on the promise we all saw in Cloak at the beginning. We're still a relatively small team, in spite of taking on some new development talent to address some of the side projects that will play an important part in Cloak's future. With cryptocurrency still in its infancy, the technology moves at an exponential pace and the crypto-space affords no man (or woman) the luxury of resting on their laurels. To this end, the team has been working hard on developing our own internal mobile wallets as well as a Cloak Electrum Server, which will provide many new possibilities and facilitate some hopefully rather neat technical advances in the not too distant future. No one (least of all us) wants to have to worry about keeping up-to-date with the Cloak blockchain while on the move, we just want to be able to send Cloak privately and securely, with the minimum of fuss. Our focus going forward will be one based on simplicity and ease of use. If cryptocurrency is going to sail into the mainstream and form an important part of our day-to-day lives, it must be easy for both Little Jake and Granny Norma to use. We're not quite there yet, but we honestly believe it's only a matter of time...

In terms of the new wallet (and daemon) release, we really are very close. The developers and the rest of the team are doing our very best to get the core client ready for prime-time and we're down to the last bug on what was quite a list As many of you are aware, PoSA has now been rebranded as Enigma. This is more than a simple protocol renaming and we have refactored and improved the majority of the core code for both Enigma and the secure CloakShield communication layer. Here's a brief rundown of the main changes in this release:

*** Rewrite the core onion-routing system for Enigma ***
This has greatly improved communication success rate (to 100% in tests) and reduced network load considerably. We also have some further improvements planned for CloakShield, but they will wait until a future release.

*** Fix Enigma bugs ***
A number of issues were identified with the PoSA system, and these have been addressed during the transition to Enigma. Although the cloaking process was always secure and funds were always safe, PoSA sends sometimes failed to complete. Users should find the success rate of Enigma sends is now pretty much 100%. The final issue on the bug-list (alluded to previously) is related to the distribution of funds to change addresses during an Enigma send. The allocation code sometimes results in an Enigma output that doesn't meet the minimum required, causing the transaction to be unsuccessful. We have only noticed this issue a few times during our extensive tests of the new wallet, but we are insisting that it is resolved before we let this new release out into the wild.

*** Remove 'NumSplits' from the Enigma system ***
After a year or more of PoSA (now Enigma) running on the 'live' Cloak network, we have determined that allowing the sends to be split comes with too many restrictions, which quite frankly outweigh the benefits. Using a high number of splits for a cloaked PoSA send required that participating cloakers had enough balance to cover the sent amount multiple times. For very large transactions, this was deemed to be too much of a limiting factor and greater privacy/security is much better achieved by using a higher number of cloakers and removing splits completely. We also have a feature pencilled in that will allow users to cloak just a portion of an Enigma send, which will further improve fungibility and allow users with a minimal cloak balance to contribute to cloaking large transactions.

*** Implement sendCloakedToAddress RPC command ***
PoSA was previously only available via the QT Wallet, so even though users running the daemon could assist in cloaking a transaction, they were not able to perform a cloaked send from with the daemon. sendToCloakedAddress resolves this issue and brings the Enigma functionality within the daemon in line with that of the QT Wallet.

*** Provide a feature complete QT Wallet for OSX ***
I'm sure you'll all agree that this is long overdue

*** Switch blockchain database format and implement a blockchain downloader ***
When starting the new wallet, you will be offered the choice of downloading a compressed blockchain from Cloak's trusted servers or syncing directly with peers. The addition of the automatic blockchain downloader allows new users to get up and running with the minimum of fuss and allow existing users to easily download the blockchain in the new format. It should be noted that this change just alters how the blocks are stored on the local disk. The content of the blockchain remains unchanged and there are no forks or anything of that nature. We've also sped up the blockchain loading, so you'll notice the client starts a lot quicker now, especially if you're lucky enough to have a solid state drive to store the blockchain on.

*** Various misc. fixes and improvements ***
In addition to the above mentioned changes, we have also fixed some issues with block validation to improve syncing and made a few changes to the wallet itself to allow copying of transaction IDs with a right click.

Team Cloak have currently been testing RC1 of the 2.0.1.0 release. There will be another internal test to ensure the min-tx-amount issue mentioned above has been resolved once and for all, prior to public release. We will post an update as soon as that is taken care of.

We're still very much all 'peace and love' aboard the good ship Cloak, but we need to concentrate as we navigate the choppy waters on our way to release. This wallet has taken longer than we'd have liked, but it almost ashore!

Peace and Love,

Team Cloak