Status Update

November 22, 2019

Status Updates (November, 2019) > November 22, 2019

WEEKLY DEVELOPMENT REPORT

Daedalus

Wallet

This week the team successfully delivered a new balance check version of the Daedalus wallet and continued preparing the next Daedalus release for the Incentivized Testnet, which will include delegation features.

App Platform

There is no update this week, as the team was focused on delivery of the new balance check Daedalus wallet.

Cardano Explorer

This week the team closed 34 issues, making progress in user experience, performance, test coverage, and implementation of new capabilities from Cardano GraphQL. The app now has near real-time data feeds without impacting the scalability of the Cardano GraphQL API service by using the network slot duration to poll, rather than a stateful connection over a WebSocket. Using an understanding of the network chain tip, deterministic information on the client now reduces demand on the userÅfs connection to a minimum, using a lightweight GraphQL query and field selection.

WALLET BACKEND

This week has been a very intensive period of fixes, polishing, and tweaking to deliver the best possible experience for users during the balance check phase of the Incentivized Testnet. It has been very demanding for the team, and they handled the challenge incredibly well, although it has necessarily delayed further work on delegation features. Nonetheless, this is still a very important milestone, as it is the result of more than a year of hard work to rebuild and extend the Byron wallets.

Finally, it's not without disappointment that the team discovered a significant problem that had been lurking for almost two years, resurfacing from as far back as cardano-sl v1.1.0! Finding such problems is the purpose of the testnet, however, and the team is ultimately pleased to have found such a problem before it made it to mainnet.

NETWORKING

This week the networking team has been working towards the 1.0.0 release and making progress with peer discovery. The error policies pull request was merged, the typed-protocol driver was refactored to accommodate timeouts and size limits, and the logging messages were reviewed. Progress was also made on the peer-to-peer governor, as well as a basic simulation with dummy cold peer selection, which allows the team to draw diagrams of the network. Work is also being done to refactor the ntp-client, which was imported from cardano-sl.

DEVOPS

The DevOps team has been working with the Daedalus team this week to support the release of a new version of the balance check Daedalus client.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

This week the team finished up some work on the invalid trace generation at the level of transactions on the ledger layer. This provided a nice point to stop, review how the work on invalid traces was going, and decide how to proceed. In particular, the team has decided to go with QuickCheck instead of Hedgehog for testing purposes, and to stop work (for now) on invalid traces. The invalid traces are very helpful for conformance testing, but the plan for the Shelley ledger remains to continue using the exec specification as long as possible, which means no conformance testing. The team can now focus on finishing all the generators.

Elsewhere, the team now has the Shelley ledger API implemented, as needed by the consensus layer. The team also fixed several small issues that came from the auditors this week.

GOGUEN

This week the Plutus team started work on updating the multicurrency paper, as well as investigating how to handle mutually recursive datatypes. In addition, the team worked on some minor PureScript build improvements.

The Marlowe team added an extra restriction to MarloweÅfs symbolic counterexamples so that slot numbers in transaction slot intervals cannot be negative. They also changed the order of tabs in the Marlowe Playground to be more intuitive.