Dear all,
This project is indeed still being actively developed.
Due to nature of BitTorrent sharing, we have been experimenting with the possibility of migrating ZEC's zero-knowledge to VTR core to improve users anonymity and try to do without needing of reseting the current chain.
vTorrent 0.9.1z will be the first version to incorporate the zero-knowledge protocol and if resetting the chain is needed, there could possibly be a fork of vTorrent-Classic running by community keeping the 0.8.x chain.
There are some other plan along with this new chain, which is still being in discussion in our team.
Regards,
vTorrent
If you are going to create a ZEC fork, you should just launch it on it's own straightaway without any features to establish the network and allocate the distribution of coins. You then have time to fork in the BitTorrent features.
ZEC is building some private messaging channels into the protocol, so you don't need too many other chat features.
The ZEC fork sounds like it will likely be a PoW fork, unless you are thinking of creating a PoS version? Not sure you need to make this too complex, if anything creating a ZEC fork makes development much easier in terms of additional anon features needed.