Weekly Development Report: June 23rd, 2023

Author: Ivan Irakoze

Core Technology

This week, the core technology teams continued working on node, networking, consensus, and ledger components.

As always, see this technical development report for more details from different teams.

WALLETS AND SERVICES 

This week, the Lace team released the wallet’s latest version, Lace v.1.2, which brings new browser support, new ways to organize your NFTs, a new privacy feature, increased speed, and more. The Lace product design team also published a blog post on the design differences between Web3 and the traditional web.

The Adrestia team focused on updating cardano-wallet to support node v.8.1.1, enhancing the database layer, and multi-signature wallet delegation functionality.

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the Plutus Tools team worked on:

• Finalizing the Marconi GetUtxoFromAddress and GetTokenBurnEvent indexers for the Sidechain Tribe.

• Comparing the GetTokenBurnEvent indexer result with cardano-db-sync.

• Updating the marconi-sidechain JSON-RPC request and response to reflect the API specification.

• Adding an AssetId filter on the marconi-sidechain's CLI.

The Plutus Core team worked on:

• Improving the callsite inliners used to wrap the function body of a function variable in 'Dupable', making it possible to independently rename the function body, creating free variables. This is being fixed.

• Ensuring that the callsite inliners in PIR and UPLC no longer require the function to be fully applied for inlining, allowing for more optimization to happen.

• Changing the builtins machinery in the metatheory and updating the executable to the new design, to ensure the executable is reliable to test against during future changes to the builtins machinery. The change was requested here. 

• Switching from Nat to Word in the `Flat Index’ to speed up deserialization by an estimated 5% and make smart contract validation faster.

• Adding useful conformance tests to the builtins’ syntax, as requested here.

• Removing dead golden files. 

• Ensuring trivial scripts compile to trivial programs.

• Renaming misspelled conformance tests.

The Marlowe team worked on Marlowe Runtime improvements by allowing tracing to be disabled, fixing console logging, and upgrading Runtime to v0.0.2.

The team also implemented an automated test scenario for the Marlowe Playground. 

Marlowe Run Lite was improved with a redesigned landing page, a UI for withdrawal with Role tokens, and a graphical flow of the contract prototype.

BASHO (SCALING)

This week, the Hydra team focused on investigating and experimenting with how to operate a head on mainnet. They addressed several bugs and issues. The team will soon release a new version, 0.11.0, which will bring many improvements and bug fixes.

This week, the Mithril team worked on the signer deployment model for SPOs to run Mithril on their Cardano mainnet infrastructure. They started working on the design and implementation of a stress test tool to benchmark the aggregator. They also worked on refactoring the Mithril Stake Distribution entity and the uniformization of the date types in the nodes. Additionally, they fixed the bugs that prevented the aggregator from detecting new signed entity types from time to time, and from restarting when a critical error is raised.

Finally, the team completed the Mithril networks upgrade to Cardano node v.8.1.1 and kept investigating flaky end-to-end tests on the CI.

VOLTAIRE

This week in Voltaire, conversations continued on CIP-1694 to establish an initial Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) framework. This framework is crucial for the advancement of participatory governance within the Cardano ecosystem. By collecting feedback from community members, diverse viewpoints can be incorporated to ensure the governance system aligns with the community’s needs and desires. 

The following workshops, hosted this week, yielded some valuable feedback:

• Minneapolis, USA by [lidonation]#0849 6/23

• Accra, Ghana by mercyA1#1150 (6/24)

• Hanyang University or Belgium Jazz Cafe, Seoul, South Korea by Oscar west#6547 (6/24)

• Midgard Vikingsenter, Horten, Norway by Krypto Labs#0504, ANP#2862

• La Plata, Argentina by MauAndreo#5309

• Virtual by Jennycita#0721, patrick_#3434 (6/24)

Check out workshops happening near you and join the conversations.

CIP-30 and CIP-95 are mechanisms proposed in Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) to empower ada holders with voting capabilities. These proposals, once implemented by wallet providers, will enable community members to express their democratic consent for governance actions.

It's essential for community members to actively participate in providing feedback for CIP-1694 and CIP-95. By voicing opinions and suggestions, you can help shape the future of governance within Cardano. This collaborative approach ensures that the governance mechanisms implemented best represent the community's needs.    

CATALYST

The Project Catalyst team kicked off the official launch of Fund10 at this week’s town hall. The celebration started with riveting talks by two people whom you may already know very well, Tamara Haasen - President and Chief of Staff at IOG, and Tim Harrison - VP of Community and Ecosystem. The team gave an overview of all the Fund10 changes you will need to know about and showed some of Fund10’s supporting documentation (Fund10 launch guide, Catalyst gitbooks). 

Finally, the challenge teams gave the community a walkthrough of the different Fund10 Catalyst categories. If you aren’t already, make sure to stay tuned and register your attendance for the upcoming town hall.

Moving on to the technical side of Catalyst last week:

• Finalized environments to support Fund10 (prod), dry runs (preprod), continuous testnet (testnet), and development (dev) for the duration of the next fund.

• Initiated final dry run for registration release in 2 weeks.

• Started load testing with new fixes to the node.

• Continued implementing test coverage for the new Catalyst Data Services APIs.

• Created plan for sunsetting the old vit-servicing-station with minimal disruption post-F10.

• Continued investigation of tally tools and aligned on approach for developing tools to enable community verification of tally in F10.

• Continued work to merge snapshots from both preprod and mainnet, and aligned on approach for the "check my voting power" UX.

• Beta of continuous delivery was finished and is being tested.

Watch out for more information on how you can participate, which we will share in the coming days!

Lastly if you’re trying to stay up to date with everything happening in Project Catalyst, join the Catalyst Telegram announcement channel. Check it out here.

EDUCATION

This week, the Education team reflected on the recent delivery of a successful Cardano Days event, which received very positive feedback. They also worked on updates to the Haskell Bootcamp and made progress with planning for an in-person Haskell course later this year. Additionally, they focused on certification for the Plutus Pioneer Program.

For more information please visit essential Cardano!