Status Update

Weekly Development Report

DAEDALUS

Wallet

React Polymorph user interface library was expanded with a progress bar component and components for managing layouts.

For the rest of the time, the team mostly worked on integrating Cardano wallet API v1 with Daedalus, since that is one of the main features for the upcoming Cardano 1.4 release.

App Platform

The team has decided to build a series of proof of concept releases to address upcoming key features for the application platform.

The first proof of concept will be focused on application persistence. The team will build a storage service with GraphQL interface and demo application running on the platform which will use this service to store, retrieve and update its state. Work on building this proof of concept is underway.

The following proof of concept will be focused on external communication, which will allow applications to communicate with external servers through REST API-s, web-socket connections, and communications with smart contracts running on blockchains.

WALLET BACKEND

The work on rewriting the Cardano wallet to use the new data layer continued. The team began working on implementation of the set of endpoints for managing wallet accounts. Wallet restoration code has been refactored to use the new data layer. Also, the team concentrated on writing tests for block metadata. Implementation of the state needed to build queries for history wallet tracking continued. Furthermore, the developers completed work on static transaction size estimation needed for calculation of transaction fees. Additionally, the team had reviewed the delegation specification and made some modification to the wallet specification accordingly.

NETWORKING

The team has continued progressing on the task of Communication Protocol Design and have now transitioned from pure design into prototyping. Additionally, a team member spent time on reviewing the Peer Discovery Implementation code in order to get a better scope of the code base. After their analysis, the team member plans to create a standalone manual test where nodes will talk to each other locally.

DEVOPS

DevOps continued preparing for upcoming testnet launches. Build, deployment, and maintenance infrastructure for both IELE and Cardano are incrementally improving with each deployment and focus is shifting more towards testing. An IELE redeployment included a fix for an internal compiler error. Cardano's faucet now includes a return address.

A new release candidate for Daedalus 0.11.0 and Cardano 1.3.0 was prepared and announced internally for QA. A DevOps engineer has also been considering ways to improve the packaging and user experience for Daedalus Linux builds. A temporary misconfiguration was discovered and resolved in systems that handle Daedalus bug submissions.

Alerts indicated some Cardano mainnet and staging nodes in IOHK-controlled machines were no longer receiving blocks. Two mainnet nodes and three internal staging nodes were unreachable, and the incident was eventually correlated with a temporary networking connectivity issue that affected one of the cloud provider's regions. Both clusters restored to good health after the incident.

The team made progress on continuous integration optimizations. A proof of concept cross-compiled Cardano build for Windows was made on Linux, and an engineer verified it can sync blocks. Engineers improved build reproducible by implementing a nix derivation for NSIS tooling for Windows installers and working on a BuildKite job to validate the release.nix Hydra jobset definition. There's focus on reducing the gap between the cross compilation feature branch and develop, including discussing with developers how dependencies for all platforms can be updated while maintaining compatibility. More generally, DevOps are working on improving visibility on CI bottlenecks and coordinating with developers streamline builds.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

Research and Design

The research team has completed the Delegation paper. They are now looking to submit the work to respective conferences for peer review. The design document is also nearing completion. The researchers have been specifically focused on how rewards would be collected. After the document goes through an internal review, the team plans to begin prototyping. Additionally, the specification with new delegation are nearing completion as well. The team is planning to have the first draft completed by the end of the month. Detailed Technical Implementation Plan - Several senior researchers have began documenting the implementation plan last week and continue to do so this week.

Development

The team continued refactoring the existing code base and flashing out the dependency graph. A team member concentrated on reuniting orphan instances with their types. Another developer spent time working on removing partial field constructors (and adding some JSON tests on the way). Finally, a database specialist has been rearranging the dependency graph from a db point of view.

GOGUEN

Languages and Virtual Machines

The team is now in preparations and planning for Marlowe and Plutus development.

End Users and External Developers

The Goguen team is now filling the roles of community managers, technical support engineers as well as other key roles, with the aim to provide multi-faceted support for the release.

Testnets

The week was spent preparing for IELE launch with Devops, QA, Technical Support, Marketing, Comms & Development team as well as Runtime Verification. The team reports that the IELE technology is ready for the launch and production environment.

MISCELLANEOUS WORKSTREAMS

Hardware Wallets

The team concentrated on running integration tests and reports that all of the major hardware wallet operations have now successfully passed all of those tests.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

IOHK is currently looking for talented people to work with us as a Front End developer, Exchange Experience Engineer/Coordinator, Software Test Engineer, Senior Events Manager, Testnet Community Manager, Development Experience Manager as well as several others. Please see the IOHK Careers page for more details.