ARK Development Report - April 12, 2024

Welcome to our latest Weekly Development Report, where we spotlight the valiant efforts of our development team. This week, we released an updated version of ARK Connect, incorporating several user experience enhancements and introducing the ability to pass custom fees to the extension. Meanwhile, the ARK Scan and ARK Vault teams have been busy with Mainsail integrations. Mainsail itself has undergone a new testnet release and received further refinements based on feedback and internal testing.

#Development Summary

Below is a breakdown of total commits and authors by project for development activity over the last week from April 5th through April 12th, 2024.

Overall, the team has demonstrated consistent productivity and engagement over this period, with a total of 190 commits across all projects.

The number of commits and data for each project will fluctuate every week depending on internal sprints, objectives, and difficulty.

#ARK Connect Weekly Progress

This week, we released out a new version of ARK Connect, v1.7.0, which includes several additions and enhancements. Specifically, the updates include:

• Added the ability to pass custom fees to the extension
• Added a fee indicator to approval screens in case of high fees
• Added a pending transaction state after broadcasting
• Improve logo colors on the connection page and modal
• Various styling tweaks and improvements

For a detailed breakdown of the changes, please refer to the changelog on GitHub .

To download the latest version or update your existing one, you can visit the Chrome App Store or the Firefox Add-Ons Page .

We’ve also updated the ARK Connect Demo App with a new custom fee option supported by the extension. This allows users, similar to ARK Vault, to choose predefined fees or set custom ones for transactions. Various other improvements have also been made; you can view them all in our changelog on GitHub .

Moving forward, our focus will be on adding new features to ARK Connect as per the designed specifications and addressing any reported issues.

#ARK Scan Weekly Progress

This past week, we focused on further improving the Mainsail implementation and addressing several fixes:

• Resolved issues with price fetching from CoinGecko due to recent API changes.
• Corrected the year date format on the statistics page for the newest address.
• Remove timelock references for Mainsail integration.
• Limit exchange jobs to only run on networks with exchange data.
• Fixed tests and added missing coverage for the Mainsail adjustments.

In the upcoming week, our agenda includes making additional changes for Mainsail integration and beginning to outline new features for ARK Scan.

#ARK Vault Weekly Progress Update

This week, ARK Vault has made significant progress towards integrating Mainsail. Here’s a summary of our work:

• Fixed validator overview page ordering.
• Fixed input stepper problems related to custom fee selection (incrementing or decrementing by 0.01).
• Addressed a bug where increasing custom fees incorrectly affected available balance.
• Implemented username support in ARK Vault, enabling users to register or resign usernames.
• Added Mainsail icon to networks to have it stand out from ARK Mainnet and Devnet.
• Implemented validator registration and resignation for Mainsail.
• Renamed “Delegate” to “Validator” in the UI when using a Mainsail network address.
• Disabled Ledger functionality for the Mainsail network.
• Introduced new icons for username registration and resignation.
• Fixed caching issues in development mode.
• Improved Ledger support checks for networks.
• Fixed missing translations for forging tooltips.

In the upcoming week, we will continue integrating additional features for the Mainsail network and addressing any issues encountered during development and testing.

#Mainsail Weekly Progress

This week, Mainsail introduced a new testnet release, version v0.0.1-alpha.15, featuring various fixes and enhancements:

• Consensus now emits events for:
  • New round
  • Accepted proposal
  • Received majority prevotes or precommits
• LMDB has undergone additional refactoring in LMDB transactions.
• The config:publish:custom command now supports the --overwrite flag, enabling updates to individual configuration files.
• JSONB attribute sorting support has been added to the public API.
• Browser support for the bls12-381 package has been implemented.

If you’re interested in getting involved, you can check out our introductory blog post for the Testnet release.

In addition to the recent updates, we’ve also made progress on other tasks:

• Improved ban logic for P2P, introducing the ValidateIP plugin executed before any message deserialization.
• Added /peers/banned endpoint to the development API.
• Corrected response schema and protobuf for the postTransactions endpoint on P2P.
• Modified API responses to display the meta property followed by data for enhanced readability.
• Implemented default sorting of validators by round in the /delegates endpoint.
• Enhanced logging by including round along with height on block commit.
• Conducted tests covering various scenarios for prevotes and precommits in consensus functional tests.
• Tested rejection of invalid blocks in functional tests.

Looking ahead to next week, our focus will remain on expanding test case scenarios, particularly conducting end-to-end tests to confirm P2P functionality, and addressing fixes and performance improvements based on the results of our performance tests.

#Feedback & Feature Requests

If you are using our open-source products and would like to provide feedback or request a feature, please get in touch with us via the contact pages for the specific product you are using or open an issue on GitHub.

Quick access links to GitHub issues pages:

• Mainsail
• ARK Connect (Extension)
• ARK Connect (Demo)
• ARK Scan
• ARK Vault

#Follow on Twitter (X)

Follow us on X (Formerly Twitter) and keep checking the blog to stay up-to-date on all of our new releases. We post a weekly development report so you can easily see what we’ve been up to and follow along our journey towards making your decentralized future a reality.