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 working on final drafts of two papers for internal review and planning next steps of analysis of consensus design refiniments.

Details​

• Preparing final draft of DeltaQSD algebra paper for internal review

• Preparing final draft of verifying design refinements for distributed system design for internal review

• Planning next phase of consensus design refinement analysis

High-level summary​

This week, the Hydra continued work on finishing mainnet compatibility. The semi-automated smoke tests and some missing documentation is still preventing from calling that fully done. They fixed smaller issues and made a step in the Head protocol more robust. Besides development, they met with interested people from the community who want to get started collaborating on communication and marketing materials.

What did the team achieve this week​

• Groomed and followed-up on GetUTxO user request discussion #797
• Fixed hydra-node crashes after forks #560
• Made collectCom more robust and aligned with spec #786
• Completed configurable API feature #380
• Met potential contributors about Hydra communication and marketing materials
• Versioned documentation: we have a unstable bleeding edge version available as well now, seperate from the last released version

What are the goals of next week​

• Follow-up backlog and roadmap clean-up
• Complete mainnet compatibility feature #713 (documentation updates)
• Integrate Hydra specification into repository #693

High level summary​

We are still heavily involved in work related to preparing the next release. The other main thing we have worked on is experimentation about how we will handle the DRep stake distribution for CIP-1694 in the conway ledger era. Lastly, we merged a fix for node-4826 into our main branch (there will be a post-mortem shortly).

Low level summary​

Support for the next release​

• pull-3363 - Fix problems relating to Arbitrary instances used by consensus.
• pull-3361 - Remove the alonze genesis from the conway genesis.
• pull-3360 - Translate bad pointer addresses to valid ones in conway.
• pull-3357 - Fix a bug relating to zero valued ADA in the script context.
• pull-3356 - Added needed instances (Arbitrary and Serialization) for conway integration.
• pull-3345 - Added helper functions for the CLI.
• pull-3342 - Fix a bug with a CLI helper function (having to do with deposit tracking).

Experiments for DRep stake distribution​

Adding another stake distribution to the ledger state presents some new challenges. We would like to be able to use the current stake distribution at the epoch boundary for DRep voting so that people can always vote themselves in time for any proposal. To this end, we have a prototype of an incremental computation based on the incremental lambda calculus, together with tests and benchmarks (which are very promising). See pull-3344.

Additionally, more of the ledger state is going to need to be rearranged to accomodate the new incremental computations. We have two draft PRs up for possibles solution. See pull-3353 and pull-3364.

Technical debt and bug fixes​

• pull-3343 - A fix node-4826.
• pull-3333 - Moving more code out of the shelley packages.
• pull-3347 - Bug fix for the multi-asset generators.
• pull-3341 - Removal of code duplication.

Documentation changes​

• pull-3354 - Rename "optional datums" with "supplemental datums" in the alonzo spec.
• pull-3352 - Add a section to the Shelly errata about the individual deposit tracking.
• pull-3351 - Further clarify the details regarding the script integrity hash.
• pull-3350 - Some cleanup of the Babbage spec.

High level summary​

Since the last update (2023-1-13) we did more improvements on our Test Framework, added more automated tests, kept analyzing and fixing nightly jobs failures, tested the 1.35.5 and 1.35.6 releases (and their predecessing release candidates) and ran tests on branch with the UTxO-HD functionality.

Workstreams​

Framework improvements:​

• improvements in searching for unexpected error messages in log files during test run
• added support for UTxO-HD testing
• added support for the new P2P topology format
• added local cluster variant that has the same properties as mainnet (epoch length, fees, etc.)
• added preliminary support for the Conway era
• added support for running tests on the Preview testnet

Full list of closed PRs

Node:​

• ran tests on node branch with the UTxO-HD functionality
• tested the 1.35.5 release
• tested the 1.35.6 release

DB-Sync:​

• improvements in db-sync sync tests
• improvements in db-sync functional tests

High-level summary​

This week, the Hydra had a team workshop and conducted the monthly review meeting for March. They demonstrated a Hydra Head on mainnet, which was running the hydraw demo application. While this marks an important milestone, they also emphasized that more features are still to be added as needed for applications to run on Hydra. Besides this, the roadmap is getting cleaned up to encourage discussions and provide more space for user requests.

What did the team achieve this week​

• Monthly review meeting slides/recording, full report of March next week
  • Opened a head on mainnet with hydraw demonstration
  • Hydra pay updates
• Team workshop in Austria
  • Hydra presentation at the Cardano Foundation in Zurich
  • In-person grooming session, marked many items as candidates to be rather :idea: dicussions
  • Improved head protocol #786 and investigated a potential bug in rollback handling #784
  • Team building and retrospective

What are the goals of next week​

• Follow-up on backlog and roadmap clean-up
• Complete mainnet compatibility feature (documentation updates)
• Make API more configurable #380
• Integrate Hydra specification into repository #693