Weekly Development Report: August 25th, 2023

Author: Ivan Irakoze

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the ledger team continued working on the Conway era functionality. Downstream components can now utilize voting for delegate representatives (DReps) and stake pool operators. The team introduced new ledger state queries that enable the verification of governance state changes, including vote placement, governance proposal submission, inspection of DRep stake distribution, and more. 

Finally, the team integrated treasury withdrawals, marking the completion of all governance actions' enactment, except for hard fork initiation.

The DB Sync team integrated multiple new Conway era features allowing db-sync to sync with SanchoNet, and continued testing and improving the new db-sync options.

The networking team released a new version of the ouroboros-network package (v.0.9.0.0), which includes the big ledger peers feature to defend against eclipses. They aligned the CDDL specs for network codec with the highly polymorphic implementation, enhancing the clarity of specifications. The team also introduced a redesigned API in the ouroboros-network-framework package, streamlining communication between ouroboros-consensus and the network layer. 

Finally, they conducted a major review of their Nix setup, resulting in an optimized flake.nix file that enables cross-compilation and provides a comprehensive shell with essential build tools. 

The consensus team worked on the UTXO-HD reaching an important milestone, where they handed over the implementation for benchmarking and testing. They are now working on addressing the issues found during the integration tests. Within the Genesis development, they are finalizing the argument that justifies the exclusion checkpoints for the initial release, while also providing support for this argument. The team also worked on the new node release and several improvements to the code base.

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

WALLETS AND SERVICES 

This week, the Lace team continued working on basic support for Trezor model T devices, improving hardware wallet transactions with the DApp connector, setting up the collateral in a round-trip action, extending CIP-30 to clear the path for enabling additional extensions, and adding more automation tests.

Finally, they started working on extending the SDK for Voltaire functionality and implementing CIP-95 features. 

Work is ongoing on Metadesk functionality. The team created E2E tests for swapping native tokens, added instrumentation for metrics and traces, implemented filters by token name or ID, and worked on swap functionality. 

SMART CONTRACTS

The Plutus tools team continued rewriting the Marconi indexers using a new simplified API, implementing and testing the new indexer resuming strategy for the new API, and updating the cardano-api version in plutus-apps.

The Plutus Core team added an optimization to Plutus IR that makes more bindings strict, which can improve the performance of Plutus scripts. They also fixed an issue in the Plutus Tx compiler that can cause exponential behavior when compiling Plutus Tx code in rare circumstances.

The Marlowe team:

• Updated the Jupyter notebooks to work with the new environment

• Added payment information to Runtime’s REST API

• Generalized era usage in Runtime

• Released Runtime 0.0.4

• Prepared integration with Wallet Connection Widget

• Reduced the size of the library components

• Changed Cardano Serialization Lib to reduce the size of the lib

• Added access to Runtime (Legacy)

• Fixed e2e tests

• Configured changelog management for marlowe-ts-sdk repo

• Added Marlowe-to-JSON conversion to marlowe-cli

BASHO (SCALING)

This week, the Hydra team released version 0.12.0, a significant update that brings support for Cardano node version 8.1.2, along with performance enhancements and various API improvements. The team also onboarded a new contributor, who is now actively participating in operating a Hydra head. They took part in a meeting of the Intersect open source committee and prepared the Hydra master class for RareEvo, an educational initiative for the community.

If you happen to be at RareEvo, register for the Hydra master class using this form. The team aims to make this a hybrid session and will announce more details on the Discord Hydra announcements channel.

This week, the Mithril team focused on performing cleanup tasks. They enhanced the clarity and reduced verbosity of the logs for the signer and aggregator nodes. They also streamlined the process of verifying the registration status of a signer. 

VOLTAIRE

This week in Voltaire, participatory governance advances with the first iteration of SanchoNet, an evolving technical testbed for CIP-1694’s on-chain governance actions. It is a new playground for the Cardano community to experience CIP-1694 in a controlled testnet environment. New governance roles, such as future delegate representatives (DReps), will be available to the community to experience and weigh in on the advancement of participatory governance. Visit SanchoNet to learn more and join the conversation on Discord.

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. Join Intersect today as a founding member to receive an exclusive newsletter with a first look at the latest highlights and monthly town halls.       

CATALYST

This week in Project Catalyst, the community has been gearing up for the voting phase to begin next Thursday, August 31. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the Catalyst proposal and proposal pitch videos here. Michael Madoff, the Group Product Manager for Voltaire, joined Kriss Baird to discuss the relationship between Catalyst and Voltaire, you can catch the recording of that here. If you haven’t already make sure to register your attendance for the upcoming town hall.

Moving on to the technical side of Catalyst last week:

• Updated supported wallets gitbook with latest updates

• Completed integration of snapshot data with autodeployment / orchestration framework for continuous voting events

• Multiple community version of “check my voting power” built against testnet APIs

• Optimizing snapshot service to eliminate manual downstream work (eg remove delegation tx, take latest registration as valid), and clean up testing framework

• Defined work required to automate reviews importer and calculation, including integration with moderation module - aiming to have importer process mimic users posting reviews directly to backend from any interface

• Created tutorial for using interactive API dashboard for testnet data service

• Completed final dry run on voting app - no significant issues uncovered, completed several optimizations based on findings

• Pending deployment to stores

• App now pointing to Project Catalyst - Innovation grants to build on Cardano for proposal details

• Aligned with team on plan for monitoring active voting; made sure everyone has access

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 is continuing the virtual delivery of their Haskell course with the African Blockchain Center, teaching the fundamentals of Haskell and smart contracts to local aspiring blockchain developers. Also, members of the team are on site hosting a Cardano Days event on Thursday and Friday at ITESO in Guadalajara, Mexico. The team are also planning the next in the series of these events at the University of Malta in September. If you are part of the local Cardano community in Malta and would like to attend this Cardano Days event, please send us an email. 

Additionally, some of the team have been invited to take part in a panel session to deliver a virtual conference as part of the Breaking Barriers: Women Pioneers and Frontiers in Web3 event.

For more information please visit essential cardano!