Author: Olga Hryniuk

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the core technology teams tagged and pre-released node v.8.2.1-pre for use on SanchoNet, which is a new development network created to introduce the Cardano community to governance features from CIP-1694 – and to build and test together in a controlled environment, through a rolling series of regular releases. See release notes for more details. 

The networking team initiated the implementation of bootstrap peers. These peers are strategically designed to ensure the safety of nodes joining the network, while still harnessing the benefits of the distributed network for nodes that are synchronized. This marks an interim phase before Genesis, enabling the further distribution of the system. IOG, the Cardano Foundation, and Emurgo will initially oversee the operation of the bootstrap peers. The primary focus of these peers is on leaf nodes, such as full node wallets, that frequently engage in synchronization and require access to the honest blockchain. For more insights into the implementation plan, refer to the ouroboros-network pull request.

The ledger team mainly focused on implementing the Conway era. Their primary objective involved solidifying transaction-related types and their binary representation. The team also dedicated resources to help the Plutus team unblock their Plutus v3 integration. For more details on the Conway progress, see the technical update.

The consensus team focused on integrating the latest node version into the UTXO HD branch. Ad hoc benchmarks, involving syncing a node from scratch, revealed that the LMDB backend utilizes approximately 8GB of memory. Additionally, the team released updated versions of fs-sim, fs-api, and strict-checked-vars.

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

WALLETS AND SERVICES:

This week, the Lace team released Lace v.1.4 introducing new features, ‘ADA Handle’ support enhancements, and bug fixes. Users can now conveniently view personalized handles alongside regular ones under the receive tab and NFT viewing areas. The update also includes handle ownership monitoring, alerting users when a linked handle is transferred. Notable bug fixes involve the removal of unnecessary address validations, improved recipient address display in the ‘Send’ pop-up, and the resolution of a screen reappearance issue after transactions.

The team also worked on simplifying the setup of collateral, enabling ledger transactions within the DApp connector, and scoping the workload for CIP-95.

SMART CONTRACTS:

This week, the Plutus tools team worked on adding the final sidechain requirements to Marconi, rewriting the Marconi indexers using a new simplified API, writing integration tests, and updating the cardano-api version in plutus-apps.

The Plutus Core team focused on introducing a new feature to the Plutus Tx compiler. This feature will enable custom data types to be encoded as data, offering an alternative to Scott or sums-of-products terms. This enhancement will lead to reduced costs for generated Plutus scripts in various scenarios.

The Marlowe team enhanced Marlowe Runtime to execute arbitrary Plutus scripts alongside Marlowe, added an example usage of the Marlowe oracle, updated some instructions, implemented raffle scripts, and investigated the potential removal of dependencies to plutus-apps. They also fixed some issues, renamed Marlowe Explorer to MarloweScan, and wrote a specification for ‘Open Roles’ in marlowe-cardano. Finally, they implemented the ‘Open Roles’ MVP. 

BASHO (SCALING):

This week, the Hydra team updated the use case section for auctions on the unstable branch of the website, enhancing clarity around Hydra's practical applications. The team also implemented event-sourced persistence, which is a key enhancement in the project's architecture improving the performance of off-chain transaction processing. 

Finally, they introduced a new ‘submit-transaction’ endpoint to the API and participated in community reviews for several Catalyst proposals related to Hydra and Mithril. In case you missed it, see the July report for more details.

This week, the Mithril team released a new distribution 2331.1, which includes some optimizations and bug fixes: the bootstrap time of a Cardano node restored from a Mithril snapshot has been significantly reduced, and a bug that made the aggregator produce corrupted archives has been fixed. They kept working on the implementation of the stress test tool for benchmarking the aggregator: the first phase has been implemented, as well as a monitoring feature. Additionally, they kept implementing the refactoring of the serialization/deserialization of the entities of the cryptographic library, and working on the post deployment of the mainnet infrastructure.

Finally, they completed the rewriting and enhancements of the documentation website and kept working on the runbook for operating a production Mithril network.

VOLTAIRE:

This week in Voltaire, an update has been posted on the feedback collected from the CIP-1694 workshops. 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 is 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:

Project Catalyst level 2 community review commenced on August 10. During this week's town hall, Steven Johnson and Mike McNulty presented the Continuous testnet. The Continuous testnet is now accessible to the public and will initiate a phase of public testing. The objective of this stage is to gather feedback from early testers and gradually enhance the testnet over time. You can revisit the segment from the main town hall here. Be sure to register your attendance for the upcoming town hall.

On the technical side of Catalyst, the team:

• Conducted another QA dry run for the voting app

• Executed updates connected to challenge setting removal, elimination of scores from the proposal list view, enforcement of proposal title length limits, and the inclusion of an open-source flag to proposal details

• Engaged in discussions on accessing unmoderated review data for the upcoming dry run

• Arrived at a consensus on a novel approach to sharing pertinent experience details within the app

• Completed the whitelabel mockup for Voltaire and agreed upon a revised timeline

• Identified and initiated efforts to address issues in the Catalyst toolbox to enable proper handling of rewards addresses in the new registration format

• Progressed with the integration of snapshot data into the continuous deployment framework

• Successfully addressed the requirements related to IdeaScale stageID; identified and initiated supplementary tasks to finalize the testnet, encompassing integrations with EventDB

• Engaged in resolving bugs in the new IdeaScale importer

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

• Performed ongoing manual testing of the moderation module

• Concluded development and documentation of new auditing tools

• Successfully completed the testnet eventdb

• Testnet's governance voting center (GVC) is operational and accessible to the public

• Ensured that snapshots and the verification tool are functioning within the testnet

• Continued to augment monitoring and logging on a daily basis.

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

EDUCATION:

This week, some members of the Education team are on the ground in Kenya to deliver the Haskell Course. They are also preparing for the ITESO Cardano Days event at the end of the month.

For more information please visit essential cardano!