Status Updates

Weekly Development Report

CSL CORE

The team is currently on leave for the holidays. Development will resume in the beginning of next month.

DAEDALUS

Grothendieck and Daedalus teams finalized the first release of Daedalus/Mantis integration and released a candidate of Daedalus wallet with Ethereum Classic support shipped to the community. Daedalus team started building support for wallet accounts for the Cardano wallets. Wallet accounts will enable partitioning wallets into multiple HD (hierarchical deterministic) lines. This will enable users to organize their funds in wallets into multiple independent sub-wallet structures. This feature will be backward compatible with current wallets, and the funds that currently are in users wallets will be visible in the first wallet account when the feature rolls out.

MIDDLEWARE

The team is currently on leave for the holidays. Development will resume in the beginning of next month.

EXPLORER

Explorer has been officially paused for now.

NETWORKING

The team is currently on leave for the holidays. Development will resume in the beginning of next month.

DEVOPS

Although development is haulted until the beginning of next month, network monitoring continues around the clock.

Tech Support

Last week saw a slight decrease in traffic. A total of 1171 tickets were logged. The top reported issues were:

• Unable to connect
• Unable to see transactions
• Issues with using the wallet
• Antivirus related issues
• Problem redeeming coins
• Cannot launch

Weekly Development Report

CSL CORE

Here are the major updates from the team:

• More work on Monad stack proposal has been done. The team is going to have more discussions with the engineering and networking leads in the coming week.
• The team tackled finishing work on the initial version of the block processing technical documentation.
• Furthermore, the team prepared Exception Handling Refactoring proposal. The document is currently waiting to be reviewed.
• The Update system document’s internal review has been successfully finished.
• The team has finalized spec/proposal on checked/unchecked deserialization approach.
• Significant effort has been focused on preparing installers for master deployed on dev cluster.

DAEDALUS

Preparing the first release of Daedalus wallet with Ethereum Classic support, both Daedalus and Grothendieck teams committed most of the week to testing and fixing bugs. Smaller issues, such as the issue with transaction sorting, have been found and fixed. Team has started working on a new feature for sending bug reports from Daedalus with the possibility to attach logs.

MIDDLEWARE

Here are the latest updates from the team:

• Work has been done on refactoring the database layer to read the database exactly once in all GET/list queries.
• Performance improvements for the newPayment endpoint have been made.
• Team members have written a technical proposal on how to change underlying crypto derivation schemes without breaking Address' compatibility.
• The team has made an attempt to complete as many V1 endpoints as possible.

EXPLORER

Explorer has been officially paused for now.

NETWORKING

A rather large refactoring to separate blockchain logic from network diffusion has been merged to master, and a second phase has been completed and is ready for review. The team submitted a patch for cardano-sl-1.0 that is going to drastically reduce the load on relay nodes when serving the blocks to end users.

DEVOPS

While preparing for the first soft fork taking effect at the start of the 16th epoch, the team was paying very close attention to both the cluster and exchange health. Everything went smoothly. As Ada's popularity grew throughout the week, exchanges informed the team of new bottlenecks, such as slow withdrawal rates. DevOps coordinated with the developers and QA to isolate problems, test, and deliver improvements. More improvements are in progress to ensure long term scalability. To accommodate increased load on the mainnet cluster, the team provisioned 60 new nodes. Additional work continued on CI migration, packaging a Mantis wallet, and general development support.

Tech Support

Last week saw an uptick in tickets due to various issues and an increase in traffic due to the increase in Ada’s popularity. A total of 1310 tickets were logged. The top reported issues were:

• Unable to connect
• Unable to see transactions
• Issues with using the wallet
• Antivirus related issues
• Problem redeeming coins
• Cannot launch

Weekly Development Report

CSL CORE

Here are the major updates from last week:

• Further work has been done on the Monad stack proposal. Various approaches have been discussed with the various teams involved, and a new approach has been proposed.
• Finishing work has been done on the initial version of the block processing technical documentation.
• The exception handling refactoring proposal has been prepared and is now in review.
• Reporting mechanism review has been finished.
• Work on the code diagram for CSL has been started.
• A release of master on the dev cluster has been made. Local bench tests have been run, and the Installers for dev cluster are now pending preparation.
• A mainnet update (v1.0.3) has been performed.

DAEDALUS

Work on the plugin system design continued with the Chrome extension API investigation, from which we drew a lot of inspiration for Daedalus plugin system API design. A draft of the plugin system design is taking shape, and the whole architecture has been considered and discussed, from securely running binaries to plugin file structure to messaging and the permission system. In order to ensure better performance and higher stability, the team has replaced the electron-json-storage with the electron-store plugin which takes care of storing user’s data, such as preferred theme and locale along with the ETC wallet data within the Daedalus itself. Software hygiene improvement work continued this week with updates to WebPack and React. The Daedalus team has coordinated and aligned with the Cardano team on the design of the next version of Cardano wallet API.

MIDDLEWARE

30 issues have been closed during the last sprint. However, the CI is still slowing down progress a little bit. Paper wallets — requirements were signed-off by management, and work can now start. The first effort will be aimed towards the API and technical docs. Daedalus installers for Linux — the team will try to deliver a "beta" soon, for user engagement purposes. Proper releases are scheduled to start on Monday. Team members will push to iterate on the feedback from last week, to produce a simplified model and a new revision of the technical spec. Some key members are expected to work on benchmarking, sorting & filtering on the new API,as well as on the V1 endpoints.

EXPLORER

Explorer is officially paused for now.

NETWORKING

The team reports that logic/diffusion split task has been approved, but it was a struggle to get CI to pass. It takes a very long time to fail, and when it fails, it’s typically a false negative (not related to the actual patch). Furthermore, the team continued refining details of peer-to-peer communication patterns such as pub/sub, request/response, and more detailed descriptions (types, Haskell text). They also have invested a lot of time into the CSL monadic effects.

DEVOPS

DevOps supported developers with CI and staging deployments, analyzed cluster behavior as load varied and timed jobs executed, diagnosed a false positive alert, and shipped a Daedalus update followed by a mainnet update. Additionally, they continued to work on their own development projects,including integrating a new CI system, Mantis wallet integration, and build tooling.

Tech Support

Last week saw a bit more of an increase of tickets as compared to the week before, although not as much as the week before the last one. There were a total of 915 tickets logged. The top reported issues were:

• Unable to connect
• Unable to see transactions
• Unable to redeem coins
• Issues with the wallet
• Antivirus-related issues
• Unable to launch

Weekly Development Report

CSL CORE

Here are the major updates from last week:

• Finalized document on Monad stack proposal
• Shared the YT standardization proposal
• Started work to prepare master for release on cluster
• Close to having solutions on checked/unchecked deserialization
• Clean-up work done on reporting server
• Prepared the document on Update system downloader redesign proposal.
• Started work on technical documentation for block processing

DAEDALUS

In the scope of the plugin system workstream, a small but important milestone was achieved. A working proof of concept of a minimal plugin which hooks up to the Daedalus user interface and executes in complete isolation from other code was built using Electron webviews. In the scope of the Mantis integration, a process launcher was implemented to start and stop the Mantis node on Daedalus startup and shutdown. This feature will serve as the basis for a general-purpose process launcher in the future when support for integration with external binaries for Daedalus plugins will be built. Software hygiene improvement work continued this week with updates to all small dependencies in the Daedalus codebase.

MIDDLEWARE

Last week the team engaged in the following tasks:

• 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".
• Daedalus installers for Linux in progress; the idea is to release an initial immutable version using Nix and then refine it. The immutable version won't support “in-app” updates. A new installer would need to be downloaded each time.
• Exchange integrations completed -- both are live.
• A key member is working on redesigning the current wallet backend data layer. He will try to come up with a technical specification which will model the Blockchain syncing in a purely-functional way.
• Another member worked on redesigning the way updates are proposed on the blockchain and how Daedalus is updated within the app. The proposal is going through the last stage of reviews and will eventually support voting centre capabilities.

Wallet backend redesign `Phase 1' ongoing - planned for end of December. The team plans to:

• Propose a new versioned API (called `V1');
• Support the old (unversioned) API, slowly deprecating it;
• Have V1 endpoints mostly implemented using old logic.

EXPLORER

Explorer officially paused for now.

NETWORKING

The team separated what they call the "diffusion layer" from the blockchain logic as a first step towards a better architecture for the software. Furthermore they also began working out the details of peer-to-peer communication patterns that are needed for Shelley.

DEVOPS

Last week DevOps operational concerns included assessing an increased load on the mainnet, adding more relay nodes, and supporting exchanges. Significant progress has been made in evaluating a continuous integration system, wallet integration for Mantis, and the Haskell build tooling.

Tech Support

Last week saw an increased influx of tickets compared to the week before. There were a total of 759 tickets logged. The top reported issues were:

• cannot connect
• cannot see transactions
• antivirus
• cannot redeem coins
• issue using wallet
• cannot launch