Status Update

Weekly Development Report

CORE

• Exchange Onboarding

In the past week almost all ported V1 endpoints have been been coded, manually tested and merged into the develop branch. The proposal for testing exchange endpoints (v1) is also almost finished. It is still in need of a written example as to how to test a V1 endpoint.

• Core Backlog

Several key team members discussed the subject of refactor exception handling in CSL. It was voiced that a change to the guidelines could have big implications on how the process is handled. One of the team members voiced concerns about the proposed process, however, a solution encompassing that team member’s concern was proposed and is now being flushed out further. The HTTP-based block sync proof-of-concept feature consists of several components: Block downloading, which is ready and is currently being tested, the Blockchain dump creation tool, which is also now ready and is now awaiting review. Taking agreed upon deadlines into consideration, the team feels that they can launch without it, as blockchain dumps can be created manually and they only need to be created once a week. Furthermore, Daedalus integration is in progress. The team reports that it will not take much time, however, smoke testing will be required. Hosting of the blockchain dump can be done in a rather short amount of time, but such an operation would require the assistance of DevOps.

• API Rewrite

Transaction end points (V1) have been successfully implemented and tested with the same logic as V0.

DAEDALUS

During the week the Daedalus team performed manual testing and quality assurance tasks for the upcoming Daedalus 0.9 and Cardano 1.1 release. During this process, some smaller, mostly cosmetic and user experience issues were detected and fixed.

• Log Submission

A significant effort was applied to implement functionality which would allow users to send bug reports directly from Daedalus. Two more flags (--store, --send-logs) have been added to the code base. Currently, the report server only accepts a maximum of one file. In the past week, the maximum file size upload increased to 25MB. This functionality is now being tested.

WALLET BACKEND

• Wallet backend data layer rewrite

A team member has completed his initial assignment in generating synthetic blockchains via QuickCheck. A different team member has began to write the actual wallet logic code starting by block application. Unfortunately, the progress has been slowed due to ramp up time. Yet another team member is tackling the specification for block rollbacks, which are then going to be reviewed by a senior engineer and implemented by the team.

• Work on current wallet backend

Performance measurements are scheduled to resume immediately after the team member, previously assigned to the task, is finished with 1.1 release testing. A new benchmark was added for the New Wallet endpoint. Mempool consistency has been completed and merged, the DB schema change and migration has also been completed and is now awaiting to be merged. The migrations are being tackled as part of the benchmarking effort. A team member was focused on trying to benchmark his changes to "prove" the remedial work was effective. The team plans to keep working on the benchmarks and to backport previous work done by a team member, working on this task, to the develop branch.

NETWORKING

Multiple pull requests have been completed and are now ready and/or are being reviewed. The Implement (block) verification proposal is currently blocked by a different pull request. However, two of the team’s members are working on and expect to be done by Wednesday. After that task has been successfully completed, a team member will then be able to complete the concurrent block streaming/verification.

DEVOPS

In the past week, the team has made significant progress on the Linux installer. Currently they are still waiting on the best solution to package NPM with Nix. Additionally, the team made several improvements to our CI as well as supporting development for the upcoming release.

MISCELLANEOUS WORKSTREAMS

• Hardware Wallets

The UAT part of Phase 1 has been planned, with a view to the Phase 1 release candidate being completed and delivery sign off being issued to a blockchain consultancy firm at the beginning of March. The planning for Phase 2 (the integration of Ledger Nano S functionality with the Cardano wallet) is also scheduled for the beginning of March. The production of the specification for the Daedalus implementation has been delayed due to testing work for the February release of Daedalus. It has been agreed that the initial release will not support delegation. A team member continues to work with the blockchain consultancy firm, on resolving questions around the ED25519 derivation implementations used by Ledger and IOHK.

• Incentives

Two of the researchers were expected to deliver the solution proposal by 16 February, 2018. However, they have requested a further extension until the end of February to refine the paper. The meeting planned for the middle of February 2018 to review the proposal (and move to the technical specification and simulation phase) has been rescheduled for the beginning of March. This is the latest it can be pushed before it starts to block planned progress on Decentralisation. Once this occurs, the incentives scheme will be evaluated before the process of planning its implementation and integration into the Cardano platform. Two of the senior engineers will execute the simulations needed to establish the required level of confidence in the model.

• Smart Contract Language

Recruitment for roles has been promoted and is in progress. Two candidates referred internally are going through selection. A new member has joined the team and is taking part in design discussions with two senior engineers. Work started on building the test suite to validate language functionality. The discussions are currently ongoing.

• Sidechains

Fundamental research has been completed and a detailed academic paper developed by the international research team reporting to the chief scientist. The team are looking at potential conference submissions, which could require some empirical analysis. Paper to be shortly distributed to engineering for internal review.

Tech Support

Last week did not see a significant variation in the number of received tickets. The tech support team received a total of 475 tickets, out of which 198 were successfully resolved and the remaining 277 are being followed up. The top reported issues were:

• Unable to connect to network
• Antivirus-related issues
• Cannot launch
• Transaction-related questions