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Ledger Team Update

· 2 min read
Jared Corduan

Ledger Update​

Since finishing up support for the Vasil Hardfork, the ledger team has been focused on two main things: a new ledger era and technical debt.

New minimal ledger era​

We have implemented a new ledger era named conway which is nearly identical to the babbage era. This has been the first time that we have been able to see what a minimal ledger era looks like. We have finished this task, modulo any integration issues that might come up. The only thing that the conway era does differently from the babbage era is provide support for rotating the master keys using the hardfork combinator's state translation. We may end up adding features to the conway era, but it is a nice exercise seeing what it looks like to get a minimal ledger era supported in all the downstream components.

Addressing technical debt​

We have been addressing technical debt, mostly in an effort to make the repository a more friendly code base to work in.

  • We have begun work on a ledger API, called cardano-ledger-api.
  • We have done a big re-design of the major type classes used in the ledger. With hindsight on our side, we now have something much more organized and easier to use.
  • We have done a lot of re-naming. The names across eras are now much more uniform, avoid certain confusions that plagued us, and are clearer in where they are from.
  • We have reduced a lot of code duplication that could lead to bugs if you do not have the whole code base in your head.
  • We have added a handful of performance improvements.
  • We added type safety in a number of locations. In particular, the type of values that can be minted in a transaction no longer allow for Lovelace in the type, and some functions which used to handle both timelock scripts and plutus script now correctly enoforce at the type level that only one of them can be used.
  • We made our generators so that they now produce a much richer set of valid serializations. There is room within CBOR to serialize the same data structure in multiple ways, and it is helpful to have the generators use a wide variety.
  • We have begun re-organizing our test suites.