Status Update

Weekly Development Report

DAEDALUS

Wallet

The team continued the work on the integration of V1 Cardano wallet API in order for Daedalus to be ready for depreciation of the V0 Cardano API. Most of the work has been done and the code changes are in review and testing stage.

In the scope of maintenance tasks the team fixed a bug within Storybook setup and improved Gulp build setup.

This week the team is focused on the preparation of the Daedalus 0.11.1 and Cardano 1.3.1 release which includes a lot of improvements and fixes such as an improvement of the paper wallet certificate QR code compatibility, a feature to restart Daedalus in safe mode and most importantly Daedalus build, which runs on the testnet network.

App Platform

The team continued the work on proof of concept 1, focused on permissions UI and sandboxing app state based on permissions provided by the user. This work required changes of the test suite to better describe the features and cover the changes with integration tests. In the scope of permissions UI implementation, the team added a dialog to request access from the user upon initialization.

The team is also working on app platform theme switcher implementation which will allow easy theme change across the apps.

WALLET BACKEND

The team spent the week wrapping up work on wallet-related endpoints and now have the whole family of wallet-related endpoints ported to the new data layer.

More work was done on extending the new data layer to support updates and wallet restoration as well as Ada redemption. While conducting this work, the team identified the need for extending the wallet with the notion of "foreign transactions" to implement redemption effectively.

A team member spent their time on writing proper safe-copy instances for the new data layer. This is very important as it will allow the use of a proper, persisted database rather than a transient in-memory one.

The team also completed part 2 of the extensions required for BlockMeta testing - allowing for multiple poor actor addresses for test poor actors and made use of this in BlockMeta scenario testing. Next up, a rebase of note and then to bring BlockMeta Testing to a close.

Other team members added tests that focus on Sqlite and other tests that use combinations of different Layer endpoints.

Also, the team worked on the task of wallet restoration.

NETWORKING

The team continued their work on the TCP Performance tests for Delta Q Measurements Design.

The developers have started work on implementations for both proposals of the Communication Protocol Design. A team specialist has made good progress with state machine description of his protocol and added free monad machinery in the second approach which was discussed in the previous weeks.

A team member extended the peer discovery test framework to deal with more realistic situations. The new tests revealed that the previous efforts did not properly assess the process of bringing up the relays "cold". The team has started thorough analysis of the newly acquired data.

DEVOPS

The IELE testnets received a number of deployments, in support of post-release improvements. The deployment process was improved, as part of preparation for future integration between Cardano and Mantis deployment infrastructures.

The Byron testnet had seen further pre-launch preparations, including automation improvements, faucet and Zendesk integrations. The team are well on track to support the coming release.

On August 8, 11:15 UTC, a Cardano mainnet update was confirmed, and accepted 12 hours later, carrying the Daedalus 0.11.0 release and Cardano 1.3.0. Further work has been performed to facilitate graduation of the Linux installers to Tier 1 level of support. Installer GPG signatures have been added to the website. Additionally, the installer distribution process is finally being transitioned to the use of CDN. End users should see significantly improved download times due to regional caching.

Preparatory Devops support work was started for the 1.3.1 release.

The exchange interaction process was undergoing refinement, to facilitate efficient onboarding and integration of the growing set of exchanges.

Continuous integration facilities received further work on cross-compilation, which would allow to speed up Windows builds, and significantly improve their reliability. Inter-project consolidation of resources received attention, in terms of Hydra deployment and servicing. Better coverage of the Cardano upgrade process is being worked on, through automation of hetero-versioned cluster deployments.

Implementation and further planning of DevOps organisational security and robustness improvements were major topics this week.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

Research and Design

The delegation paper was submitted to a conference last week. The team will find out later in the year if the paper is accepted. Delegation eprint is expected to be released end of next week.

A number of revisions have been made to the delegation design document which now includes the rewards mechanism. This now needs to be reviewed internally this week.

Development

The developers spent time working on the changes to the block storage and an important issue that came up with the way the addresses were handled.

GOGUEN

Testnets

The team has completed their second week of supporting the IELE testnet in 'production' with no issues reported.

Further effort is being put into working on tasks for IELE testnet and maintainability changes (logging).

DevOps started work to help accelerate development of Plutus/Marlowe.

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.