Status Update

Weekly Development Report

CSL CORE

Here are the latest updates from the Core team:

• Cardano Launcher now takes JSON config as a parameter. Thus, no system-specific launch scripts are needed (previously, the Launcher required a lot of parameters to be passed).
• The recent fixes from master were merged to develop.
• Exception handling refactoring is in progress. This will improve the safety and predictability of the code by removing error-prone patterns.
• The team is working on the reliable shutdown of a node. A lot of the code was recently refactored, a few occurrences of bad concurrency patterns were removed.
• A few optimizations have been applied to block syncing (this is work in progress).
• An experimental prototype for HTTP-based block syncing is almost ready. Once completed, this should allow expedited block syncing.
• A few optimizations were performed for “high traffic” wallet users (e.g. exchanges), in particular, address generation is now >100x faster (the result of wiping out several data access anti-patterns).

DAEDALUS

The Daedalus team focused on Byron-related tasks. In the scope of this effort, numerous improvements were built for the upcoming release of the Daedalus Cardano wallet. This includes a feature that detects cases of a Cardano node being out of sync due to internet connectivity issues and reports this to the user by displaying the “Connecting” screen with the appropriate message, moving the user away from the main user interface. A New “About” screen has been implemented. Now it shows bot Daedalus and Cardano client versions for Cardano, and the Mantis client version for Ethereum Classic. Furthermore, a bug regarding the incorrect detection of time on the user's machine being not in sync with the global time was detected and fixed. This removed the false-positive report which prevented some users from using the wallet when their time was only slightly off. The Electron platform running Daedalus has been updated to resolve a security flaw in Electron.

MIDDLEWARE

Here are the latest updates from the team:

• A team member is to resume working on the new wallet V1 API, tackling the endpoint to calculate the fees for a transaction.
• The team is focused on performance improvements and stability of the wallet backend.
• Two key members are to continue working on the benchmarks and will move to stress tests soon afterwards.
• Another team member will extend "dbgen" (a tool to generate synthetic wallet-db data) to generate fake history entries. This synthetic data will be used in the benchmarks to simulate realistic workloads.
• The updates on consistent DB updates for the old wallet are to be reviewed and merged.
• A team lead is to continue fleshing out the formal specification for the new wallet with an eye on asymptotic complexity.
• Two team members have converged on the same specification for UTXO accounting, so that it can drive the implementation of the data layer.
• A team member is to implement a solution for a much faster procedure to restore an HD-wallet from a seed.

NETWORKING

A small but important change that increases the network connection timeout from 2 to 15 seconds has been merged to the development branch. The team expects that this will eliminate certain connection problems (2 was too low to begin with). They continued design work on a better block download system that will make Daedalus faster to start up. Work on supporting features for a better UX for Daedalus initial sync hasn't progressed yet because its developer is away teaching Haskell in Barbados). Those two pull requests have been moving along: devs working on the issues are tying up loose ends and nearing approval from the core developers. They are optimistic about having them merged by the end of the week.

DEVOPS

This week's update will be available shortly.

Tech Support

Last week saw a bit of an uptick of new tickets. The Tech support team received a total of 1214 tickets, out of which 828 were successfully resolved and the remaining 386 are currently being followed up and resolved by the tech support team. The top reported issues were:

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