Status Update

WEEKLY DEVELOPMENT REPORT

Daedalus

Cardano Wallet

This week the team successfully released Daedalus 2.3.1-ITN1, which introduces new versions of the cardano-wallet and Jörmungandr node, as well as fixing an issue with stake pools not loading in the interface. The latest release also resolves a problem with the Daedalus installer on MacOS Catalina systems and includes improvements to network performance and reliability.

In the scope of regular maintenance tasks, the team implemented multiple improvements to the automated test suite and updated important third-party dependencies such as Node, Yarn, and Electron packages.

The team is now entirely focused on the preparation of the upcoming Daedalus Byron reboot release which, includes a new cardano-launcher and new Haskell Cardano node.

Application Platform

This week the team implemented several improvements to the cardano-launcher which were required in order to integrate it into Daedalus for the Byron reboot.

Cardano Explorer

This week the team was working on UI improvements for the mobile view of the Cardano Explorer.

ADRESTIA

This week the team has been fixing some bugs found on Windows and finalizing end-to-end integration with cardano-node. Work is also being done to close the gaps between the new API and the old one currently used by Daedalus on the Cardano mainnet. The team is aiming for a smooth transition for both end-users and cryptocurrency exchanges, while continuing to preserve the functionality of the legacy API to prevent breaking changes. This requires some careful considerations regarding what ought to go in the new API.

The team also added support for cold wallets this week, enabling the wallet backend to work only from an account public key without ever seeing a private key. This, combined with the proxy transaction submission added a while ago, enables clients to build integration with hardware devices such as Ledger or Trezor.

NETWORKING

No update from the networking team this week. They’ve been helping out other development teams this week.

DEVOPS

This week the DevOps team has been working on creating the installer for the Byron reboot version of Daedalus, as well as performance testing different node relay configurations, the results of which have been very positive. Performance tests indicated that a handful of relays can serve thousands of wallets without any problems whatsoever. The team has also been writing a testnet faucet using the new Byron reboot node, and generating Windows bundles for running Ouroboros network tests on native Windows hosts.

The team has also worked on improving the cardano-db-sync and cardano-rest Docker images so that they have finer granularity and support secrets in the Docker Compose files for PostgreSQL credentials.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

This week the team finished renaming some of the packages and modules, and have also been investigating heap exhaustion problems that are affecting the test suite (rather than the code itself). Some of these issues have been solved, but work is ongoing to fix the last of them.

The team also fixed an edge case problem with the optimization of the active slot coefficient this week. Work has also progressed on the CDDL tests, with one half complete (generating from CDDL and deserializing in Haskell). The other half of the tests (serializing from Haskell and checking against the CDDL) will be added soon.

Finally, some minor tweaks were made to the CDDL, such as using the CBOR tag for rationals. Lenses were also removed from the Shelley ledger, and a handful of examples were created illustrating how to construct various transactions, including what the abstract size and minimum fee for them might be.

GOGUEN

This week the Plutus team investigated a new approach for how the error term is treated in the metatheory package. They also made updates to the code to reflect the new EUTXO terminology and added a missing rule for the data script hashes.

Meanwhile, the Marlowe team concentrated on improving the usability and layout of Blockly. This included changing colors to make them more distinct, adjusting width layouts so that contracts occupy less space, removing the Case block and merging it into a different action, as well as making a new block for currency/token. Finally, they also worked on the layout of Marlowe contracts in the Marlowe Playground.