The team works on applied research and consulting in formal methods that is directly applicable to evidence based engineering in Core Tech and beyond.

High level summary​

This sprint the team has been preparing several papers for peer review and knowledge sharing and consulting within IO and the community.

Details​

• R&D Seminar on experience participating in a member based organisation
• Full day tutorial on performance engineering presented at HiPEAC 2023 conference
• Finished preparing and submitted a paper on performance engineering to an ACM workshop
• Preparing a draft paper for future submission about verifying design refinements for distributed system design
• Consulting on performance design of other IO projects

High-level summary​

This week, the Hydra team completed the Hydra specification with a section about rollbacks and updated graphs (#448). In a next step, the specification will be made more approachable and an open standard. They improved their hydra-cluster tool to launch a local --devnet sandbox environment and continued aligning the hydra-plutus scripts with the specification by hardening the checks on close and contest transactions.

What did the team achieve this week​

• Completed the specification with a section about rollbacks and updated graphs #448, with a follow-up on making it more approachable and an open standard.
• Continued spec review with internal auditor and incorporated changes.
• Talked to TxPipe about how Demeter and Hydra could work together
• The hydra-cluster executable can be used to launch a local --devnet sandbox environment.
• Reproduced the “head being stuck on network outage” bug
  • relates to what liveness guarantees we can / want to give on the protocol level and needs to be discussed.
• Progressed with higher velocity by addressing more and more gaps #677

What are the goals of next week​

• Upstream our JSON instances to the ledger
• Close all transaction security related on-chain gaps
• Ideally release 0.9.0 with updated scripts
• Groom & plan (or not) protocol changes yielded from specification discussions -> updated roadmap

High level summary​

Much of the work the past two weeks involved integration efforts, cleaning up and debugging some serialization issues, adding tests, and work on large projects that are still ongoing. We also released a CIP this week that aims to make the ledger a registered CIP category.

Lower level summary​

Ledger evolution CIP​

We published a CIP that will make the Cardano ledger a registered category of the CIP process.

Serialization issues​

We had previously thought that we had found a serialization problem with the redeemers, but it turned out to just be particularly confusing code. We have now clarified the issue for the future.

See pull-3263, pull-3269, and pull-3268.

Starting in protocol version 9, we will no longer accept duplicate keys in CBOR maps.

See pull-3277.

New tests​

We added a new property test suite for some of our custom containers.

See pull-3270.

Progress on a better cost model serialization situation.​

We are still working our way through issue-2902. Towards this end, we are now properly gating the new flexible encoders until version 9.

See pull-3274.

Nightly tests​

We are still experimenting with moving more CI actions to GitHub actions.

See pull-3276.

Constraint based generators​

We continue to add to our proof of concept for constraint based generators. See the previous ledger update for more information about this project.

High-level summary​

This week, the Hydra team had a monthly review meeting with their stakeholders, contributors and interested people from the community. The monthly repot for January 2023 is a digest of the things presented and also includes a summary of the meeting. The Hydra specification was getting discussed and the team is incorporating suggested changes of reviewers. Last but not least, they compute and publish script information on every PR and also on the website now.

What did the team achieve this week​

• Had the monthly review meeting with a broader audience
• Published the monthly report for January 2023
• Reviewed the spec and discussed individual aborts with researchers
• Compute and publish script information along benchmarks on every PR and website

What are the goals of next week​

• Add rollback section to Hydra spec, update pictures and publish it as part of repository
• Discuss bigger spec findings (full minting policy, individual aborts, split fanout) as change/pull requests on the spec in the repository.
• Groom & plan actions required for a maintainable Head explorer + break down “align gaps” feature.

High level overview​

The Mithril team released a new 2302.0 distribution that activates the optimization of the snapshot digest computation on the signer and aggregator nodes. They have implemented a backward/forward compatibility mechanism for handling seamless soft updates of the Mithril networks without using synchronous updates when possible. The team also worked on the proof of concept to rely on an on-chain transaction to synchronously trigger the era switch of all the signer and aggregator nodes.

Finally, they finished upgrading the devnet, fixed the flakiness issues in the end-to-end tests of the CI, and upgraded the SPO documentation to set up a Mithril signer node.

Low level overview​

• Released the new distribution 2302.0
• Implemented a backward/forward compatibility mechanism for API messages #688:
  • Implement the mechanism for the signer registration #689
  • Implement the mechanism for the signature registration #693
  • Implement the mechanism for epoch settings #695
  • Implement the mechanism for certificate pending #696
  • Implement the mechanism for certificate #697
  • Implement the mechanism for snapshots list #698
  • Implement the mechanism for snapshot #699
  • Update enforcement of API version with Semver #705
• Completed the PoC implementation of backward compatibility with protobuf #677
• Completed the PoC implementation of backward compatibility with avro #678
• Completed the PoC to Read/Write transaction on chain for Era activations #672
• Completed the upgrade Cardano devnet to 1.35.4 #523