Status Updates

Please note that this is the last technical report before the holiday period. We wish you joyful holidays ahead and will be releasing more updates on January 7th, 2022.

DAEDALUS　

This week, the team made several UX improvements to the wallet's interface. In particular, they improved the selection of tokens before starting a transaction, and updated the ada input field so that it automatically reflects the minimum amount of ada to cover the transaction fee. The team also improved address validation, making it impossible to use the stake address in the receiver field.

Finally, the team added a new filter for wallets.

ADRESTIA

This week, the Adrestia team released an update to enable compatibility of cardano-wallet with node v.1.32.1, and also released updates to make cardano-rosetta and cardano-graphql compatible with db-sync 12.

The team is currently working on the technical debt of cardano-wallet, focusing specifically on performance improvements for the DB layer.

Finally, they continue developing the cardano-js-sdk.

NETWORKING

This week, the team continued assessing the P2P semi-public testnet and worked on timeouts testing and diffusion simulation. They also fixed some issues related to peer ranking by the blockfetch client and improved the connection manager functionality.

DEVOPS　

This week, the team tested and deployed a new candidate for node v.1.33, and also modularized the Bitte deployment tool so that it is less AWS specific.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

This week, the team continued assessing ledger performance and merged the new data structure that will be used for memory savings. They also made progress working on the UTXO HD properties, improved chain database operations, and implemented tracers for chunk validation. Additionally, the team updated Nix setup tooling.

The Hydra team released a second pre-release version of the Hydra node. This means that developers who want to try it out can now run a Hydra Head interacting with a Cardano node on a local devnet. A number of limitations remain, but it is an exciting step forward, and we look forward to having some users trying this out.

GOGUEN

This week, the Plutus team simplified some data types at the type-level and spent more time on benchmarking experiments. They also published a security policy for their repositories.

The Marlowe team investigated the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) common domain model (CDM) and optimized the build time of webpack in the marlowe-cardano repository. They also fixed an infinite recursion issue with the WebSocket module and added new features to the Marlowe CLI. Additionally, they implemented the chain-index PAB API for the follower contract.

DAEDALUS　

This week, the team improved the start and shutdown features of Daedalus by reflecting more information about the Cardano node background activities. Previously, when closing Daedalus, there was only a 'Stopping the Cardano node' notification, and the process took some time. Since it's important not to close the app while the node is running, there are now more details about its activity. The team also added the Catalyst fund snapshot, enabled the phase of vote tallying, and implemented the logic to change fund details based on the phase.

The team upgraded Webpack to v.5, which allows the integration of the light-wallet SDK with Daedalus. They also tested the feature that enables delegators to see the reward history. Finally, they worked on upgrades to Trezor libraries for Daedalus to communicate with the new firmware.

ADRESTIA

This week, the team continued working on the technical debt of cardano-wallet. Specifically, they're designing an update to enable compatibility of this component with the latest version of the node.

Also, they began the release procedure to update cardano-rosetta and cardano-graphql to db-sync 12, and development work continues for cardano-js-sdk.

NETWORKING

This week, the team released the semi-public P2P testnet. They worked on P2P improvements, enhanced and refactored some parts of the connection manager, and worked on coverage tests for the connection manager trace points. They also started verifying some timeouts and worked on a presentation of the networking state.

Finally, the team lowered the recommended value of MaxConcurrencyDeadline.

DEVOPS　

This week, the team tested and deployed node v.1.32.1.

ERC20 CONVERTER

This week, the team released the first AGIX ERC20 converter. Users can now test the migration of their SingularityNET AGIX tokens from Ethereum to Cardano and back.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

This week, the team worked on the Babbage specification. Babbage’s main objective is making small adjustments in different places to simplify the ledger or to include features that weren’t included in previous development eras.

The team also inspected the new Babbage txbody and txout properties and worked on some script integrity hashes. They wrote property tests for a more compact UTXO data structure and found and resolved resulting issues. Additionally, the team started writing microbenchmarks for transaction processing to eliminate possible performance issues.

Work continues on Hydra development; the team made progress running end-to-end tests and conducted benchmarking using real UTXOs against a local devnet.

Finally, they updated the Hydra project plan.

GOGUEN

This week, the Plutus team released the new version of the Plutus Application Backend (PAB), which includes some enhancements and bug fixes. The team continues working on the implementation of new functionality within independent libraries. They also worked on benchmark experiments and performance testing.

The Marlowe team added and tested Merkleization to Marlowe's Plutus semantics and assessed a private Marlowe testnet. They added more examples for ACTUS contract types (stock and futures) and fixed some tests updating the plutus-apps version used by marlowe-cardano.

The team also worked on CLI options for marlowe-cli transaction management.

DAEDALUS　

This week, the team implemented the Discreet mode and tested RTS flags. They also worked on various UI enhancements and codebase improvements.

Finally, they started implementing some security upgrades to wallet packages.

ADRESTIA

This week, the team worked on technical debt for cardano-wallet. The next update of this component will include support for the latest version of the node and some bug-fixes.

They also prepared updates for cardano-rosetta and cardano-graphql to enable compatibility with db-sync 12.0.0, and are also working on the development of cardano-js-sdk.

NETWORKING

This week, the team continued working on diffusion (data exchange between nodes) simulations. They increased the recommended value of maximum block fetch concurrency for SPO’s relays, implemented block adoption delay EKG metric, and investigated the block compressibility feature.

The team also refactored startup logging of the Cardano node and enhanced network tracers. They evaluated the effectiveness of counting both headers and blocks in the upstream metric, which governs demotions from hot to warm peers.

Finally, the team created instructions for SPOs in preparation for the semi-public P2P testnet release, and worked with technical writers on the new blog post announcing this.

DEVOPS　

This week, the team finalized implementing Nix flakes support for the wallet and deployed release candidates for node v.1.32.0. They configured Discord and Telegram channels for public testnet SPO discussions, and also increased block size and transaction memory units in the mainnet update proposal. The team integrated Consul Connect with the Cardano stack on the Bitter cluster, worked on the new benchmarking infrastructure for Cardano node testing, and ran final deployment testing for the ERC20 public testnet.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

This week, the team worked on the chain database and explored its structure to integrate the hard disk (HD) interface within the initialization phase. They worked on improving database initialization tracers and UTXO HD properties. The team also worked on GHC plugins and the GHCJS test suite.

Work continues on Hydra development; the team committed UTXO entries into a Hydra Head from the local devnet and also implemented support for Alonzo transaction format.

Finally, they replaced cardano-ledger types with cardano-api types in most parts of the codebase.

GOGUEN

This week, the Plutus team made important updates to increase the Plutus script memory units to support future growth in traffic. They also submitted three CIPs: reference inputs, inline datums, and reference scripts. Additionally, they made some various profiling improvements.

The Marlowe team implemented (de)serialization features in the marlowe-cardano repo and worked on the proof of concept of sharing wallets between the wallet backend, Daedalus, and Nami. The team added transaction building and submitting capabilities to the Marlowe CLI and reduced validators’ size. Finally, they continued working on the purescript model for ACTUS Lab and libraries for data collection and form validation.