Status Update

WEEKLY DEVELOPMENT REPORT

Daedalus

Cardano Wallet

This week the team completed and released Daedalus Flight, a pre-release version of Daedalus designed to test functionality and ensure smooth integration with the new Cardano node ahead of Shelley.

Application Platform

This week the team finished all the improvements to the Cardano launcher that were required for the Daedalus Byron reboot release.

Cardano Explorer

This week the team added the finishing touches, and the new Cardano explorer is ready to be released.

WALLET BACKEND

The team has been working hard this week to finalize and test all aspects of the wallet backend ahead of its release as part of the Byron reboot, as well as working on an integration guide for users.

NETWORKING

This week the networking team has been addressing some important issues that needed to be resolved before the latest wallet release. Timeouts were merged, and ΔQ parameters adjusted, which has increased performance when downloading blocks from a distant peer. The delay in DNS worker has also been lowered, making it much more likely that a node will reconnect to a peer on the same continent.

The team also improved the NTP client on Windows, and it’s now using the in-house Win32 network library. This required some refactorization, including moving the IOManager down the stack, but it made it much easier to combine the Win32 network library with the standard networking library. Logging for the NTP client has also been enhanced.

DEVOPS

This week the DevOps team assisted the Daedalus team in configuring and building installers for the new Daedalus Flight client. New relays were also scaled up to handle an expected increase in traffic load.

The team also worked on rewriting the faucet to use the new wallet CLI, which is expected to be live on the testnet by the end of the week. Finally, the team set up a node benchmarking job to run nightly and measure synchronization times.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

This week the team completely removed application versions from the ledger in the Haskell code, as well as greatly simplifying the update system. The formal specification was also updated with recent changes to the Haskell code, namely storing the protocol parameters for reward calculations, which will allow Shelley to start from genesis or Byron.

The team has also been working on establishing nightly tests in Buildkite, after the property tests were temporarily disabled. There are a handful of test failures, but the team has already identified the cause and is working on a solution.

GOGUEN

This week the Plutus team started work on adding a web frontend to the smart contract backend (plutus-scb). They also reorganized the content within some of the modules - the StateMachine content was moved to plutus-contract, the wallet content within the plutus-wallet-api module was moved to plutus-emulator, and finally the plutus-wallet-api module has been renamed to plutus-ledger. In addition, the capitalization of the label in the Blockly block has been changed to lowercase, in line with the smart constructor.

Meanwhile, the Marlowe team are working on a new updated design for the Marlowe Playground and made block explanations more compact within Blockly. They also added a taxonomy of potential problems when designing and using Marlowe contracts to the Marlowe tutorial.