Weekly Development Report: July 21st, 2023

Author: Olga Hryniuk

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 Daedalus team released Daedalus v.5.3.0, which brings support for the new Project Catalyst registration process, improves the stability of the exchange rate conversion feature, and more.

The Lace team worked on a semi-automatic collateral setup for CIP-30, refactored complex areas of code, increased end-to-end test automation coverage, and started looking closer into CIP-95 ahead of work related to Voltaire. They also worked on the UI flow for multi-delegation and ran load tests on the backend using HD wallets.

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the Plutus tools team kept working on setting up the runtime monitoring for the Marconi sidechain, adding response fields to the indexers, and investigating the standalone emulator functionality. Finally, they were focused on planning and prioritization for the upcoming months.

The Marlowe team added GET APIs to contract sources, a POST contract sources endpoint for importing contract bundles into the Runtime, and contract import and export APIs for working with object files. They also filtered contracts by address in Marlowe Run Lite and focused on planning and prioritization for the upcoming months. 

BASHO (SCALING)

This week, the Hydra team focused on exploring the event sourced persistence to improve hydra-node performance. This triggered the need to refactor snapshot emission in the protocol logic and also to update the specification with the new details. The team also revisited their goals and product plans for the next quarter and conducted some security fixes related to multi-signatures.

This week, the Mithril team completed the deployment of the mainnet infrastructure for the beta launch. They also kept working on the implementation of a simple stress test tool for benchmarking the aggregator. Additionally, the team started working on the refactoring of the serialization/deserialization of the entities of the cryptographic library.

Finally, they worked on enhancing the documentation, started working on the cleanup of the legacy store adapters in the aggregator, and published a blog post recapping what Mithril is in preparation for the mainnet release.

VOLTAIRE

This week in Voltaire, the feedback collected from the CIP-1694 workshop is being reviewed and integrated. An update will be published shortly. As CIP-1694 moves to its final form, the community will have the opportunity to vote on whether this MVG is an acceptable way to move forward together. This represents a powerful option for the crucial advancement of participatory governance within the Cardano ecosystem.

Intersect was announced last week, as a key institution for the ecosystem, bringing together companies, developers, individuals, and other ecosystem participants to shape and drive the future development of Cardano. As such it will be an administrator of processes that govern the continued roadmap and development of the Cardano platform and protocol.

All participants in the Cardano ecosystem are welcome to become Intersect members. Made up of a distributed group of participants, including the foremost experts on Cardano and current ecosystem contributors, Intersect will facilitate healthy discussions and sound decision-making amongst its members, and the community at large, to uncover pain points, while championing successes. To join as a founding member, click here.  

CATALYST

This week in Project Catalyst, the level 0 and level 1 community review stages have begun. LV0 and LV1 community reviewers will read through the proposals and assign them a score between one and five for each of the three criteria (impact, feasibility, and value for money). This first stage of community review will last until August 1, 2023. Once the first stage of community review is complete, the second stage of review with Level 2 reviewers will begin. The process that LV0 and LV1 community reviewers are expected to follow was discussed during this week's town hall. If you haven't already, make sure to register your attendance for the upcoming town hall.

On the Catalyst technical side, the team:

• Completed development to align the voting app with process changes, including voting options for fund operations, denominations in ada, and the ordering of challenges

• Completed development to implement the new user analytics solution to better understand opportunities to improve the experience

• Started the review of the backend search service to identify and document outstanding needs to implement in the voting app

• Updated supported wallets in Gitbook to reflect recent updates from Yoroi

• Started work to extract and share registration metrics on a weekly basis

• Worked on deploying the merged snapshot tool to the dev environment for testing

• Uncovered access issues required to start testing the moderation module

• Refactored EventDB and Catalyst data services to improve data structure

• Continued development of test automation for Catalyst data services

• Started creating documentation and guides for using new auditability tools

• Started work to enable users to fetch voting history (proposals only, not choices) given a voting key

• Started internal end-to-end testing of the Voting Center

• Started work to enable create/update/delete access for event data.

Finally, to stay up to date with everything happening in Project Catalyst, join the Catalyst Telegram announcement channel.

EDUCATION

This week, the Education team planned the curriculum for the Haskell Course that will be delivered next month. They also worked on internal Plutus training content.