Status Update

Weekly Development Report

DAEDALUS

Wallet

This week the team continued with the integration of the V2 API, which is progressing well.

Since this new version of the API lacks support for ada redemption, the team has removed this feature from the application.

Additionally, all system dialogs have been updated so that they get rendered within the main Daedalus window, eliminating the possibility of window overlap.

In the scope of regular maintenance tasks, the team worked on theme management optimization as well as improving the positioning of external link and copy icons.

App Platform

This week the team made progress on the Daedalus app platform by packaging the single-process version of the smart contract backend for desktop targets using a continuous deployment process suitable for on-demand installation. Work has also commenced on the service dependency management features in the base application stack, using the available service as the first target.

The other area of focus this week has been on the new Cardano Explorer, with the team assigned to defining boundaries within the domain and developing an API service for the frontend application. A solution using GraphQL to provide a holistic queryable model of Cardano has been proofed and will be presented as part of the solution proposal early next week. Not only will this serve the immediate use case for the explorer, but will provide far greater utility for DApps, including the app platform.

BACKEND OPTIMIZATION

Half of the team was on holiday this week, so work progressed slower than usual. There was also some unexpected trouble involving a double upgrade, which included upgrading the integration layer for Jörmungandr to work with its latest version and adjusting the cardano-http-bridge to work with the most recent testnet deployment.

Meanwhile, the team has made significant progress in reimplementing the necessary primitives for managing legacy wallets using a random derivation address scheme. With these primitives, it will now be possible to implement higher-level functionality and eventually make random derivation wallets available in the new wallet backend.

NETWORKING

The networking team made good progress on the Byron proxy this week, and it can now sync from mainnet and serve blocks to the new Shelley nodes. The team has also started working on improving error handling for the networking layer, as well as enhancing tests in the network-mux library. Improvements to the documentation are also underway.

DEVOPS

There is no update this week.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

This week the team worked on extending the framework to capture and route structured log items to backends. A collection of generic tracer transformers is also being implemented that will bridge observables from tracers to the switchboard, where they can be routed to backends as structured items.

In other work, more command-line options have been added as required by the node, and the newest version of cardano-shell has been integrated into cardano-ledger and cardano-node.

The team gave a demo this week as well, which demonstrated that the ChainDB can successfully store and validate blocks from mainnet. Hammering the ChainDB with tons of real blocks helped detect some simple bugs and uncovered some quick performance wins, even before entering QA. Catching and fixing those bugs early will make development much smoother later on.

GOGUEN

This week the Plutus team worked on type checking of input-output pairs and updated the build and type-check docs. They also improved code formatting in the Plutus Playground backend and added a new failure event to provide more flexibility for dealing with exceptions. A style tweak was made to make it easier to read Playground actions. Updates were also made to the data scripts to include the hash so that users can cross-reference the PendingTx and determine the associated output.

The Marlowe team continued their testing efforts within the Marlowe Playground.

The education team continued making minor improvement updates to the Plutus ebook and met to discuss a tracking mechanism for incorporating any feedback that is received from the community. They also discussed ways to further publicize the ebook.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

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