Status Updates

Weekly Development Report

CSL CORE

Last week, the core team successfully completed the following tasks: In regard to Mainnet 1.0 maintenance (Core), the team spent time working on non-mainnet clusters. As far as finishing code restructuring, the team worked on and successfully extracted the proof-of-stake Client out of lib. The monad stack has been revised. Furthermore, the team worked on ETC installer integration. They spent time considering extracting the launcher out of cardano-sl

DAEDALUS

The team has presented Daedalus integration with Mantis on Grothendieck’s team weekly public call, streamed live on YouTube. Final preparations for the Daedalus integration with Mantis were completed for the upcoming RC1 release, like minor issues with translations and cleanup of Ethereum Classic API integration. The team also completed a lot of chore tasks, refactoring and upgrades in preparation for upcoming sprints which will be focused on feature implementation for the upcoming Shelly release of Cardano. Acceptance test setup was improved to simplify test setup steps, and test configuration was improved by updating to the latest cucumber-js dependency. Flow type definitions for Cardano were refactored to type folder and WebPack configuration was improved.

MIDDLEWARE

• New members joined the team this week. Here is what the team has been working on:
• Paper wallets - Requirements overhauled to take into account more sophisticated use cases (hot/cold storage flipping, more generality), centered around the idea of “single-address wallets”.
• Linux Wallet work in progress with key members of DevOps;
• Exchange integrations slowly but steadily progressing;
• A key member is going to work solely on documentation issues.
• Other team members plan to work mostly on V1 endpoints.
• Wallet redesign `Phase 1' ongoing - planned for end of december: Propose a new V1 API; Hook the old (versioned) API; V1 endpoints stubbed/mocked.

EXPLORER

Explorer will be officially paused after a team member completes one last task.

NETWORKING

Last week the team finished detailed network designs which are now ready for review/ sign-off. Requirement gathering was also successfully completed.

Extra IOHK manpower to be added to the team.

DEVOPS

There are no updates this week

IOHK CODE AUDIT

There are no updates this week.

Tech Support

Last week saw a fairly unchanging influx of tickets as compared to the week before. There were a total of 343 tickets logged. The top reported issues were:

• Cannot connect
• Cannot redeem coins
• Cannot see transactions
• Issue using wallet
• Antivirus
• Cannot launch

Weekly Development Report

CSL CORE

The team mostly concentrated on Core and Mainnet 1.0 restructuring and updates last week. Currently, the tasks in progress for Core are:

• Finish code restructuring
• Extract delegation, block out of lib
• Extract utility modules out of core
• Extract Pos.Client out of lib In terms of Mainnet 1.0 maintenance (Core), currently, progress is being made on:
• Update system troubles
• Read and send blocks without deserialization
• Mainnet 1.0 maintenance: inbox & misc. (Core #52)
• Auxx: convenient toolkit for CSL
• Auxx interactive CLI: prepare for usage on Mainnet Following tasks are being reviewed and verified:
• Core: Revise monad stack
• • Revise monad stack: describe
• Mainnet 1.0 maintenance (Core)
• • Non-mainnet clusters

DAEDALUS

Work on designing a plugin system has started. The end goal of this effort is building an application store and transforming Daedalus to an application platform. As a first step towards that goal, Daedalus will be decomposed into a bundle of plugins. In process of doing that the team will develop a plugin architecture that will address as many needs of the application platform as possible and learn from the experience. The work on the implementation of HTTPS/TLS communication between Daedalus and the Mantis client is finalized and tested. The Daedalus team is currently working with the Mantis team on finding a proper solution for handling ETC transaction history which is now the very last thing missing for the MVP release.

Two of major new changes are now fully tested and ready to be released:

• Non-blocking Daedalus interface during wallet restore and import processes,
• Flow type checked Javascript solution as a replacement for PureScript middleware (Daedalus Bridge).

A feature for showing screen-blocking notification with instructions for setting up NTP in case user’s local time is out of sync is nearly done. The code base has been updated to latest flow-bin and Daedalus code has been modified to be fully compliant with new flow type check rules.

MIDDLEWARE

Last week the team was tackling the following:

• Linux Wallet work in progress with key members of the DevOps and Middleware teams
• Wallet backend endpoints for exporting a wallet to paper
• Started implementing parts of the V1 API
• Support for exchange integration in the past week
• Technical proposal for backend
• Documentation of current API -Athens Intern to work on this
• HD wallet review process with the auditors
• Draft the error handling mechanism for V1
• Wallet redesign `Phase 1' ongoing - planned for end of december
• • Propose a new V1 API;
• • Hook the old (versioned) API;
• • V1 endpoints stubbed/mocked.
• Explorer testing and benchmarking;
• Improve explorer tests

EXPLORER

No updates this week

NETWORKING

Here is the latest from the Networking team. Last week the guys focused on planning and discussion for other Shelley features. Detailed network designs finished, with a few outstanding questions to be clarified with Neil / Peter. In terms of Shelley networking design, requirements gathering is to be closed out by Friday 24th. Furthermore, extra IOHK manpower to be added to the team. 4 first round interviews this week

DEVOPS

Here is what the team was up to last week:

• Release Process Blog initial draft complete and to be shared for review on the 22nd
• Exchange integration complete. New integration hire to be dedicated to integrating exchanges
• (Figure out requirement for exchange deployments). Discussion with an exchange to migrate to new - script
• Hosting migration
• Planned for CI migration
• Infrastructure deployment fixes
• Migration to fresh NixOS release
• Developer documentation review
• Deployment fixes & improvements
• Enabling developers to deploy clusters on their own. Implementation done and merged. Needs documentation

IOHK CODE AUDIT

No updates this week

Tech Support

Last week did not see any significant changes in tech support traffic, same as the week before. There are currently 195 tickets in the system.

The top issues reported were:

• Cannot connect
• Cannot redeem coins
• Cannot see transactions
• Cannot launch/install
• Issue with wallet

Weekly Development Report

GENERAL

The effort to refine and fine-tune the various workstreams attributed to Shelly, continued. Many maps have been created and the first sessions have been completed successfully. Furthermore, the unification of issue tracking has been completed. Design and research is ongoing for Incentives, Delegation and Networking.

CSL CORE

Last week the team concentrated on Mainnet 1.0 maintenance. In regard to Documentation, the following tasks were completed:

• Delegation document was reviewed by auditors
• Transaction processing doc was written from scratch and reviewed In terms of Block retrieval slowness investigation:
• Main points to improve for short- and mid- terms understood Last, but not least, in terms of code restructuring, the following was addressed:
• Refactoring: Extract block processing, txp out of lib
• Refactoring: Various items from the previous sprints

DAEDALUS

The work on basic ETC version of Daedalus is nearing it’s end as the team is finalizing integration of ETC transaction history handling and implementation of HTTPS/TLS communication between Daedalus and Mantis client. A solution for non-blocking Daedalus interface during wallet restore and import processes has been finished and is just waiting for the final approval of the whole team. The team is working on a feature for showing a screen-blocking notification with instructions for setting up NTP in case user’s local time is out of sync. The work on refactoring the purescript middleware (Daedalus Bridge) to a Flow type checked Javascript solution is done and testing phase is underway. The code base has been updated to latest Electron and Electron-related dependencies.

MIDDLEWARE

Last week the team tackled the following tasks:

• HD wallet derivation scheme review with the auditors;
• Made a start on wallet backend endpoints for exporting a wallet to paper;
• Start implementing parts of the V1 API
• Ongoing support for exchange integration
• Continue exploration of the solution space for bundling Daedalus on Linux.
• A team member is currently investigating AppImage
• Proposed a new API for handling updates on the wallet backend
• Developed an initial possible API for external wallets (as a Swagger spec)

This Week the team plans to:

• Continue HD wallet review process with the auditors;
• Keep investigating AppImage for bundling Daedalus on Linux;
• Paper wallet - the business analyst is going to schedule meeting
• Draft the error handling mechanism for V1;
• Aim to complete Wallet redesign `Phase 1'
• Propose a new V1 API;
• Hook the old (versioned) API;
• V1 endpoints stubbed/mocked.
• Review proposed Update mechanism for V1 with the team.
• Finish reviewing our Ledger Swagger spec and forward it to a blockchain consulting vendor
• Start working on the test vectors for data visualization solution (transaction signing and wallet Id derivation)
• Un-/subscribe to latest page of epochs;
• Explorer testing and benchmarking;
• Improve explorer tests

EXPLORER

Update coming soon.

NETWORKING

Last week:

• The team continued with planning. Some meetings with key members about delta-Q estimation and details on how to actually construct the core DIF routing trees.
• Came closer to an agreement with the core team on Serialization performance tasks. Discussion is still ongoing. Not a blocker for any other work on Shelley networking but it is a requirement.

This week: The team plans to get started on the patch originally planned for last week but bumped in favour of more planning and discussion for other features. There is a concrete plan (actual Haskell text) for doing it in parallel with the core team. Plan to start implementing later this week.

DEVOPS

Last week the team tackled several important tasks. The following tasks are now in progress:

• Cloud hosting migration
• CI migration
• Infrastructure deployment fixes
• Migration to fresh NixOS release
• Developer documentation review
• Deployment fixes & improvements

IOHK CODE AUDIT

Update coming soon.

Tech Support

Last week did not see any significant changes in tech support traffic. There are currently 195 tickets in the system.

• The top issues reported were:
• Cannot connect
• Cannot redeem coins
• Cannot see transactions
• Cannot launch/install
• Issue with wallet

Weekly Development Report

GENERAL

The teams are currently moving to two week sprints and have agreed on a rolling release schedule to allow regular testnet release. The team is currently discussing doing mainnet releases on a regular rolling release schedule as well, but the time intervals between releases remains under review.

CSL CORE

Last week the Core team made progress in the following areas:

Multisigs

• Papers provided by the research department reviewed, some preliminary ideas discussed within team.
• Work to estimate complexity to be kicked off.

Core tech backlog:

• Delegation doc ready for external review, auditors already provided one
• Transaction doc: internal review on final phase
• Refactoring: restructuring refactoring on progress
• • Pos.Txp, Pos.Update` modules moved to separate packages
• • Moving Block definitions in finalizing stage

Cardano-sl 1.0 maintenance:

• Some issues in update system/launcher are either fixed or actively WIP
• Block retrieval: unchecked serialization implemented
• Prepared instructions for doing tx size limit update

DAEDALUS

Great effort has been put into the collaboration with the Mantis team to finalize a first basic version of Daedalus ETC integration. Several new endpoints have been negotiated specially for Daedalus integration which enabled important features like deletion of wallets, showing recent transactions and sending money. The Mantis team has provided the Daedalus team with a local setup, so the frontend and backend can be run individually on each developer’s machine, which is crucial for acceptance testing and rapid feature development. The ETC version of Daedalus has special handling of large numbers now, a necessity due to the unbound amounts and 18 decimal places in ETC. ETC error messages are now handled correctly in the UI. Daedalus does not enforce any max window size anymore, which was reported as a problem on large screens. Some minor issues with the react-polymorph options component have been fixed. The integration of the new autocomplete control has been finished and is just waiting for final approval of the whole team. Missing UI components in react-polymorph have been identified and task cards for each will be added to our backlog soon. The work on refactoring the purescript middleware (daedalus bridge) to a Flow type checked Javascript solution is nearly done. The code base has been updated to latest mobx-react-form dependency.

MIDDLEWARE

Here is what the team was up to last week:

• Updated technical documentation
• Workshop with a block chain consultancy company to finalize user stories
• Provided a tentative API specification (as a Swagger document) for the new endpoints needed for the Ledger integration.
• Started gathering requirements for paper wallets integration;
• Investigation of Linux app bundling solutions for providing Linux installers for Daedalus;
• Produced an initial version of the `wallet-new' prototype with a versioned HTTP API
• Rewrote some Daedalus-bridge functions from PureScript to JS to help the frontend team in their integration work.
• Improved logging on the wallet-backen

Here are some of the tasks planned to be tackled this week:

• HD wallet derivation scheme review with the auditors;
• Second round of requirements gathering for paper wallets;
• Start implementing parts of the V1 API using building blocks of the existing API;
• Initial exploration around wallet-backend integration with ATMs & other exchanges;
• Continue exploration of the solutions for bundling Daedalus on Linux- -

EXPLORER

Last week the team spent time preparing few middleware PRs from middleware and explorer to 1.0. With the addition of a new BA they are starting to prepare Explorer requirements documents and other related materials. Also, the team is currently discussing a few Explorer tasks. However, they have been postponed and waiting for the Daedalus PM to continue the discussion.

NETWORKING

Last week’s highlights:

Technical planning of features for Shelley networking.

• Interface between diffusion and application layers
• Peer discovery (kademlia)
• QoS/delta-Q measurements
• Serialization performance
• Pub/sub (work in progress) Team members reviewed a cardano-sl pull request which improves performance by avoiding expensive deserialisation. The team also discussed validations, but a final decision is still required to proceed.

Planned this week:

A key member will be working on peer discovery. Another key member plans to begin work on cardano-sl to implement the interface between diffusion and application layers. This is a wise first step because it should reduce the frequency of conflicts between networking work and that of unrelated cardano-sl changes.

DEVOPS

2 members of DevOps were at the nix conference all week. The remaining team were working on deployments. "Enabling developers to deploy dev-env clusters on their own" in progress with a goal to be finished this week.

IOHK CODE AUDIT

Here is the latest from the Code Auditing team:

Spec Audit

• The team have not been assigned any new tasks on Spec Audit. Code Audit

Found minor issues (DEVOPs) on daedaluswallet.io audit,

• Issue regarding hosting windows binary on build server

Tech Support

Last week has seen a significant decrease in new tickets. There are currently 193 tickets in the system.

The top issues reported were:

• Cannot redeem
• Cannot connect
• Anti virus blocking
• Cannot see transaction