Status Update

Weekly Development Report

CORE

Last week, one of the key points of the team's effort was the upgrade to Glasgow Haskell Compiler 8.2.2. The team concentrated on performance regression on the build with GHC-8.2.2, to make sure that the build time for Appveyor CI was increased to 90 minutes. Additionally, current conflicts with the develop branch are being solved and retried on the CI. Benchmarking for HTTP-based block sync proof-of-concept was also completed in the past week. In regard to format specification in machine-readable logging: The last two issues, outlined in the Logging Proposal document have been solved, making the document clearer. A senior engineer is due to give the document one last review.

• Exchange Onboarding & Support

In regard to documenting the new Wallet V1 API: Work has resumed and is progressing as quickly as possible. A test strategy has been defined for porting all the required exchanges’ endpoints to V1 all the endpoints. Servant-client will be used to run tests against V1 API. This has lead to the creation of more tasks related to error handling and test writing.

DAEDALUS

Implementation of paper wallet certificate generator for Cardano wallet continued and was the main focus of the week.

WALLET BACKEND

• Work on current wallet backend

The team put in a lot of effort into adding a server side TLS check. The first variant of the server side TLS check has been implemented, however it doesn't yet work as expected. A pull request, regarding DB schema change and migration to use more appropriate representations, is ready for review. Furthermore, the team addressed the task of asynchronous restoration of a wallet from seed. The asynchronous restore is implemented. The wallet shows the balance in a matter of seconds (~20 on staging). However, due to the legacy of the old wallet, there are edge cases which are still not working correctly. These will be addressed during this week. The endpoint to report to Daedalus the transaction syncing status is yet to be implemented.

NETWORKING

In regard to speeding up verification and application of blocks, the various development efforts have been merged into the develop branch. Discussion with reviewers is now ongoing.

DEVOPS

Last week we resolved an incident on staging which resulted into 16 action items to improve our process and tooling. We deployed a couple of staging updates to move us closer to a stable mainnet release. We are continuing to improve/unite our CI and are adding more automation for quicker release cycles.

MISCELLANEOUS WORKSTREAMS

• IELE and K-EVM

Good progress was made on the Mantis portion of K-EVM with the team addressing issues raised by RV, refactoring and consolidating code, adding to the test suite, fine tuning the API and assisting QA to familiarise them with the system. Progress on RV side has been mixed with little improvement on the Solidity-to-IELE compiler and unsubstantiated IELE VM progress. It seems impractical to give a countdown timer for testnets at this point. The team is currently working with the RV PM to put the QA process in place (internally) and getting the IOHK QA team in position to validate their work. The team is currently collaborating on the subject of what is the highest priority, with DevOps and others on testnets (IELE VM and K-EVM).

• Smart Contract Language

The SCL is still in an early stage. However, the team is very motivated and starting to document work they are performing as well as a plan for development.

• Other work

Marlowe is also showing good progress with the paper and a demo is expected by the end of March 2018. Sidechains has not been progressing well in the last week and more work is needed to meet May 2018 target. Reagan work is progressing with additional testing and healthy discussions between key stakeholders. Asset Locality and Accounting research is proceeding with extended work on accounting to finish this week and asset locality work to move forward. An internal document is expected by mid-March.

Tech Support

Last week saw a reduction in the number of tickets received. The tech support team received a total of 592 tickets, out of which 351 were successfully resolved and the remaining 242 are being followed up. The top reported issues were:

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