High level summary
We released CIP-1694, our proposal for entering the Voltaire phase. Please come join the discussion, this will be an incredibly exciting transition for Cardano and we want everyone to participate!
We now have a sensible way to version all of the serialization schemes used in the ledger. The draft pull request was polished, reviewed, and merged this week. This solves many problems that have vexed us since the beginning of the Shelley ledger era.
Everyone working on the Cardano node is working together to improve our release process, and the ledger team in particular dedicated one engineer to help with these efforts for the next release.
Lower level summary
The Conway ledger era
The current proposal in CIP-1694 encompasses two new ledger eras. The first era will be called Conway, after the English mathematician John Horton Conway. The community facing aspects of the Conway ledger era will be very minimal, but it will pave the way for introducing liquid democracy. The details can be viewed here. We do not yet have a formal specification for the Conway era. Our plan is to debut the formal ledger model. Briefly, the Conway ledger era will:
- introduce SPO voting for hard forks (in the spirit of the now abandoned CIP-47)
- provide an on-chain mechanism for rotating the governance keys
- re-plumb the ledger rules involving governance to be in line with CIP-1694
Versioned CBOR
We now have the ability to easily tie our serialization schemes to the Cardano major protocol version. We still aim to preserve backwards compatibility as much as possible, but we now have a principled plan for resolving problems (see CIP-ledger-cbor). In particular, we can now address several long standing issues, such as issue-2444, issue-2965, and issue-3003.
The final (and massive!) pull request which brought us the versioning is pull-3138.
Deposit tracking
The draft pull request which was exploring how best to track individual deposits is much closer now to being ready to take out of draft (pull-3127). For background on the issue, see issue-3113. This is quite an invasive change which effects many of our tests, which we are now addressing.
Technical debt
As always, we keep working on technical debt. We have deduplicated a some things: pull-3129, pull-3162. We have memoized a problematic computation (though more due diligence is needed before we can merge): pull-3141.
Node release
We have been helping with the node release efforts. See pull-4608.