ARK Development Report - April 19, 2024

Welcome to our latest Weekly Development Report, where we spotlight the valiant efforts of our development team. This week, we began developing new features for ARK Connect while continuing to integrate Mainsail into both ARK Vault and ARK Scan. Additionally, we released a new version of ARK Scan with several improvements and fixes. The Mainsail team also made progress by releasing a new testnet version with improvements and working on additional features.

#Development Summary

Below is a breakdown of total commits and authors by project for development activity over the last week from April 12th through April 19th, 2024.

Overall, the team has demonstrated consistent productivity and engagement over this period, with a total of 232 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 began implementing new previously designed and outlined features. These features aim to introduce native extension support for ‘Send’, ‘Receive’, and ‘Vote’ functionalities, along with displaying the latest transactions within the extension and implementing various quality-of-life improvements. What’s been accomplished this week:

• Added a ‘Latest Transactions’ section, featuring a default placeholder for empty transaction lists.
• Enhanced transaction handling to include transfers and votes in the latest transaction overview.
• Expanded support for additional transaction types: Registration, Resignation, Second Signature, Multisignature, and Other.
• Designed a placeholder layout for the transaction details page.
• Implemented a ‘View More’ button at the end of the transaction list, providing access to the full transaction history via ARK Scan.

In the upcoming week, our focus will remain on finalizing the ‘Latest Transactions’ section. Additionally, we will begin integrating the ‘Send’ functionality into the extension.

#ARK Scan Weekly Progress

This week, we rolled out a new version of ARK Scan , v2.25.0, packed with several notable improvements and fixes:

• Added an ARK Connect promotional banner to the Wallets page.
• Modified job execution to fetch exchanges only in the production environment.
• Corrected hex conversion for Vendorfield/SmartBridge to accurately display transaction data.
• Optimized the ‘Delegate Monitor’ to handle block production more effectively. Testing on lower-spec hardware or high-latency database connections revealed issues, which are now resolved to ensure accurate block display and stability during round changes.
• Introduced a new icon in the Delegate Monitor to indicate when a delegate is missing blocks, providing visibility into their last forged block.
• Upgraded the codebase to Laravel version 10 in preparation for the update to 11, and updated other JavaScript dependencies.
• Implemented updates to delegate aggregates caching.
• Fixed issues related to fetching ARK prices from the CoinGecko API.

For a detailed list of changes, refer to our changelog .

In parallel, we continued advancing Mainsail integration and addressing other fixes, including:

• Removed unused transaction types from the Mainsail network.
• Finalised missing coverage and skipped tests.

Looking ahead to next week, our efforts will focus on ongoing general improvements, resolving reported issues related to Mainsail support, and preparing for an ARK Scan update that includes comprehensive enhancements to the application.

#ARK Vault Weekly Progress Update

During the week ARK Vault has seen great progress on basic Mainsail integration as an additional network inside it. We have also worked on some general user experience improvements and general fixes which we aim to bring in with the next release. To be more precise work done this week included:

• Added a new transaction pending state that will show the transaction as pending until confirmed for better user feedback.
• Added ‘Mnemonic’ import information box to give more tips for users who have trouble importing addresses with some basic checks they can do.
• Improved Ledger support checks on supported networks.
• Added missing translation for forging tooltip.
• Renamed Delegate(s) to Validator(s) when selected network is Mainsail.
• Made adjustments for Validator Registration and Resignation transaction types.
• Added TransactionPublicKey component for Validator registration.
• Fixed typing errors on username registration validation.
• Added support for stack traces on error pages.
• Hide the ‘Magistrate’ transaction type for Mainsail.
• Fixes to ensure advanced fee value is always defined.
• Fixed an issue to show the correct validator key in form validation.

Next week we’ll continue with the remaining aspects to support Mainsail in ARK Vault and start preparations for an initial release. This will allow those who wish to help test the Mainsail integration in ARK Vault and open the option to have additional interaction with the network with a variety of transaction types.

#Mainsail Weekly Progress

This week, Mainsail rolled out a new testnet release, version v0.0.1-alpha.16, with several fixes and improvements:

• Corrected the postTransaction schema and proto on P2P.
• API response now displays meta property before data property.
• Updated default sorting for /delegates endpoint.
• Added logging for commit rounds.
• Moved proposal signature verification to the main thread from the worker.
• Eliminated redundant block generator check.

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

In addition to our release updates above, we’ve made progress on various other tasks:

• Implemented end-to-end (E2E) tests and optimized workflow processes.
• Conducted further performance tests to ensure optimal system functionality.
• Implemented partial proposal deserialization to enhance broadcast performance.
• Modified RoundStates to run pending processes only once.
• Added an option to encrypt validator secrets with a password.

Next week, we will continue addressing any reported issues by delegates and testers on the Mainsail testnet network. We will also dedicate efforts to testing Mainsail’s overall performance and developing additional tests to simulate real-life scenarios that could occur on the live network. Additionally, we will continue our work on integrating the EVM into Mainsail.

#Feedback & Feature Requests

If you are using our open-source products and would like to provide feedback or request a feature, please feel free to contact 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.