Status Update

Weekly Development Report

DAEDALUS

Wallet

This week the team finished implementing a new screen which displays the status of the block storage consolidation process. This new screen will be accessible from the application menu and will help users to identify and fix potential block consolidation issues.

Additionally, implementation of the virtual-list rendering method on the "Transactions" screen has been completed. This new approach eliminates performance issues caused by the display of a large number of transactions, and Daedalus can now display any number of transactions without impacting performance. The same approach is being applied to the "Receive" screen as well, to fix similar problems with the rendering of large numbers of wallet addresses.

In order to improve the UX, the team has disabled the misleading right-click context menu on all of the screen elements except the ones which support copy/paste options, such as the input and other form elements. The team has also moved the initial setup steps (language selection and acceptance of "Terms of Use") to the very beginning of the Daedalus startup sequence. This means that Daedalus will no longer wait to establish a connection with the Cardano network before showing the setup steps.

Finally, as part of preparations for the upcoming Daedalus release, the team has updated the list of contributors shown on the "About Daedalus" screen.

App Platform

This week the team investigated the use of progressive web app technologies to solve some challenges with the current model, namely adding fundamental support for mobile and light clients part of the initial design.

BACKEND OPTIMIZATION

The team has been integrating the final elements required for node decoupling, as well as cleaning up old artifacts from the implementation. Decoupling won’t be enabled by default, however, since it has no user-facing impact: it is just a necessary intermediate step in the transition to using the new Haskell or Rust node.

Meanwhile, work continues on BIP-44, which approaches full support for externally owned wallets, and the team is also wrapping up and polishing development on cardano-sl for the upcoming 1.5 release.

NETWORKING

Work on the chain following protocol has been completed and undergone initial testing, and the team is planning to write some more tests soon. The ΔQ implementation continues, and the team has begun creating supporting documentation as well.

DEVOPS

Continuous Integration

The team continued work on integrating nix-tools with the new repositories including ouroboros-network, cardano-shell, and cardano-chain, and the work for cardano-wallet was completed.

Testing Automation

The team continued work on the new testing automation tool. This work should be completed this week and ready for QA to start testing.

1.4.1 Release

The team spent a lot of time deploying the new 1.4.1 release to testnet and mainnet this week.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

Research and Design Work has been underway to address some of the issues that were raised at the workshop in Berlin, about half of which have been resolved. This has involved lots of general clean up, and some simplification of the UTxO transition rules, as well as grouping together address definitions, transaction definitions, and protocol parameters.

GOGUEN

This week the team had a productive discussion with a financial contracts standard body about building a library of financial smart contracts. The business analysis team are currently working on a plan for this engagement.

Good progress is being made in planning Plutus and Marlowe development efforts, as well as creating documentation and educational resources.

Work is continuing on research paper submissions for multi-assets and chimeric ledgers.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

IOHK is currently looking for talented people to work with us. Please see the IOHK Careers page for more details.