Status Update

Weekly Development Report

DAEDALUS

Wallet

This week the team continued integrating the V2 API, which is required for compatibility with the new backend code for Cardano 2.x releases.

Work for the upcoming Cardano 1.6 release was also completed this week, including new UI themes and some smaller fixes for issues found during the testing and quality assurance phase of the release process.

The team also updated all outstanding pull requests which contain changes which will not be shipped with Cardano 1.6 so that they can be merged as soon as possible after the 1.6 release.

App Platform

This week the team worked on multiple features, including platform configuration, TLS certificate provisioning, and writing to a local directory. Work has also begun on implementing the smart contract backend as a platform service, which led to developing a single process mode of operation to better suit a full-stack application.

In other news, the platform UI has been rebooted with a TypeScript implementation of functional React components using the new hooks API for state management. Improvements have also been made to the continuous integration process to improve the granularity of builds and embed the job configuration in source code. Support for the Daedalus backend upgrade project is also ongoing.

BACKEND OPTIMIZATION

This week a new version of the wallet backend was released, with support for two different backend targets: cardano-http-bridge and Jörmungandr. Meanwhile, the team is continuing to work on making the V2 API more complete, as well as extending the engine to support the random address derivation scheme currently used by Daedalus in the Byron era. This will allow current wallets to be loaded and manipulated in the new wallet backend, facilitating migration from the old to the new format.

NETWORKING

This week the team has been working on syncing from mainnet, focusing on the Byron proxy and cardano-node. The team also created an application that can decide whether a given set of nodes reaches consensus, which will allow a small Shelley network to be run as part of continuous integration and have any problems detected early.

The team has also been working on extending debugging information for Shelley nodes, as well as a small refactoring effort for the code base.

DEVOPS

There is no update this week.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

Most of the team has been focusing on testing this week. While there are already tests that simulate a network of core nodes that sync chains, download blocks, and exchange transactions, this has been mostly a 'perfect setup'. The tests are now being extended to simulate a more realistic network: nodes joining later, network partitions, introducing network delays, simulating a disk failure, adversary behavior, etc.

The team has also been hard at work preparing for syncing with mainnet: the new on-disk chain state (ChainDB) is now able to store the mainnet blocks.

GOGUEN

The main focus of the Plutus team this week has been modifying the evaluation rules to include type instantiation and changing the vesting example to use a wallet instead of a public key in the Playground. They also added a user space sealing mechanism, as well as ways to encode the ownership of contracts, and fixed some minor bugs.

The Marlowe team spent time ensuring that the Marlowe Playground name change has been consistently applied across the board, while the education team added some new chapters to the Plutus ebook to cover non-fungible tokens and Marlowe.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

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