High level summary​

The open fronts that the crypto team is working on are:

• Mithril: Started looking into full-node verifier
• cardano-base: BLS12-381's PR merged. Creating test-vectors for verifying basic pairing properties.
• KES agent: Blockers overcome. Reaching a first MVP level of the KES-agent.
• Sidechains: Included BLS12-381 & JubJub to halo2curves
• MuSig2: Final modifs to C version.

Low level summary​

Mithril​

• Started designing how a full-node verifier would work. Issue comming in the next couple of weeks.

cardano-base​

• BLS12-381 branch merged PR#266.
• Testing strategy for BLS bindings:
  • Test-vectors for Groth16, and simple BLS signatures ready.
  • Test-vectors with different library, and created by different engineer.

KES agent​

• Resolved issues of circular dependency
• Got rid of separate DSIGN and DSIGNM, we now have DSIGN over mlocked keys, but the phantom type is the same.
• Opened a PR for raw bearer branch in ouroboros network PR4395
• Resolved a bug where the agent node did not properly closed connections
• Updated version of IOSim allowed us to finish a first version of KES agent.

Sidechains​

• Included BLS12-381 curve to our branch of halo2curves
• Included JubJub to our branch of halo2curves

MuSig2​

• Minor reorg PR#42
• Started including fuzz testing for deserialisation PR#

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