Weekly Development Report: August 4th, 2023

Author: Olga Hryniuk

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the networking team activated several default traces for node-to-client and node-to-node protocols, which are set to be released in node v.8.2.0. Additionally, they ensured that the cardano-client-0.1.0.x library (used by db-sync) does not use the experimental node-to-client protocol, while cardano-client-0.2.0.0 remains unaffected. They also merged the dynamic block production feature into ouroboros-consensus, which enables hot-swap P2P nodes. These are important for the deployment of block-producing nodes.

Finally, the team continued reviewing the implementation of big ledger peers for eclipse evasion.

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

WALLETS AND SERVICES:

This week, the Lace team continued the implementation of Posthog analytics and dedicated efforts to add Trezor support and implement the multi-delegation feature. Additionally, they conducted end-to-end testing for Edge support, refactored heavily used utility functions, and focused on the setup of collateral. 

Finally, the team prepared for the implementation of CIP-95. 

SMART CONTRACTS:

This week, the Plutus core team worked on adding decentralized governance support, as defined in CIP-1694, to Plutus v3.

The Marlowe team fixed the slot limit in the database, optimized the chain seek protocol, and added a contract source ID option to POST /contracts. 

Finally, they updated the Marlowe logo in Marlowe Playground and Marlowe Explorer and fixed some bugs in Marlowe Runtime.

BASHO (SCALING):

This week, the Hydra team conducted their July monthly review meeting, which is an ongoing effort to ensure transparent communication and project evaluation. They successfully migrated the core logic of the node to an event-sourced architecture, allowing for incremental writes of events to persistence. This migration significantly improved the project's performance and maintainability. See this report for more details.

The team also implemented a new feature that enables the reading of protocol parameters through the API and fixed the CI workflows to support pull requests from forks of external contributors. These improvements streamline the development process encouraging community involvement in the project.

This week, the Mithril team completed the Mithril protocol’s mainnet beta launch: the release-mainnet network is now consistently producing new certificates and snapshots! The team is monitoring the network and is preparing a new distribution that will be released shortly. They also kept working on the implementation of the stress test tool for benchmarking the aggregator, and implementing the refactoring of the serialization/deserialization of the entities of the cryptographic library. Additionally, they started creating a runbook for the production infrastructure.

Finally, they worked on upgrading the Cardano node to v.8.1.2, fixing the release-preprod network that stopped producing certificates, and troubleshooting the SPO’s signer node that received unexpected errors.

VOLTAIRE:

This week in Voltaire, the feedback collected from the CIP-1694 workshop is being reviewed and considered. 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 earlier this month, as a key institution for the ecosystem that brings 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:

The Project Catalyst level 0 and level 1 community review stages came to a close on August 3. The level 2 community moderation stage will begin next Thursday, August 10. In this week’s town hall, the LATAM Catalyst community gave a presentation about the upcoming Ideafest, Lidonation talked about Catalyst Explorer, and we got to hear from another successfully closed-out project, Grow East Asia. You can rewatch the segment from the main town hall here. Steven Johnson held an AMA for the Catalyst Voices proposal during the after-town hall. 

On the technical side of Catalyst, the team:

• Completed another QA dry run for the voting app

• Continued refining process alignment changes and successfully tested the API rate limiter

• Discussed how to improve error handling in the application

• Prepared initial Fund10 data for the next internal dry run

• Deployed the new snapshot module to the dev environment and are working on fixes to the continuous snapshot service and rewards eligibility checker before releasing it to the community

• Refactored the script being used to extract registration metrics from the snapshot service to include timestamps for easier reporting on changes over time

• Worked on integrating snapshot data into the continuous deployment framework

• Worked on bug fixes for the new IdeaScale importer

• Started testing for the new community reviews calculator and new fields in vit-ss

• Aligned on the approach for handling stageID changes in each fund within the auto-deployment framework

• Discussed pointing the app to the official Project Catalyst website for full proposal details rather than IdeaScale

• Continued manual testing of the moderation module

• Started load testing the voting node, including a run that sustained 800 tps over 1 million votes cast on the local machine

• Continued working on community documentation for new auditing tools.

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

EDUCATION:

This week, the Education team is preparing to deliver the Haskell Course in Kenya next week, training Cardano community members in conjunction with the African Blockchain Center.

For more information please visit essential cardano!