Welcome to this week’s Weekly Development Report, highlighting continued efforts in simplification, consistency, and system reliability across the ecosystem. This week, we cover improvements to CI efficiency, observability, consensus reliability, and the continued transition toward Mainsail. The Mainsail team improved CI by parallelizing automatically discovered unit tests, restoring coverage for missing packages, and reusing build caches to avoid unnecessary rebuilds. Validator block activity logging and improved error handling further strengthen consensus observability and reliability. In addition, ARK Core 3.13.0 was released, further deprecating legacy functionality ahead of Mainsail by retiring Magistrate transactions for several entities.
Development Activity Summary (August 14 – August 21, 2026)
Below is a breakdown of the total number of merged commits and contributing authors by project, highlighting development activity from August 14, 2026, to August 21, 2026.
| Project | Commits | Authors |
|---|---|---|
| ARK Connect | 0 | 0 |
| ARK Scan | 0 | 0 |
| ARK SDKs & Docs | 0 | 0 |
| ARK Vault | 0 | 0 |
| Mainsail | 36 | 1 |
In total, 36 commits were merged across all projects this week. As always, commit counts fluctuate with sprint focus and task complexity.
Mainsail Weekly Report
This week focused on improving CI efficiency, observability, and consensus reliability. Unit tests now run in parallel across packages discovered automatically, restoring coverage for four packages that had silently dropped out of CI. Build caches are also reused across commits, so only changed packages need to be rebuilt instead of running a full rebuild each time. We also updated all GitHub Actions to their current versions, added logging for proposed, committed, and missed blocks from the local validator, and improved consensus error handling so floating promise rejections are handled gracefully instead of crashing the process.
Next week we’ll continue working on consensus and P2P improvements, with a focus on reliability, performance, and better handling of edge cases, while addressing any issues identified during testing.
Other - New ARK Core Version Released
We have released ARK Core 3.13.0 this week. The release continues the deprecation work that started with the multisignature changes in 3.11.0 and 3.12.0, this time retiring Magistrate transactions. That covers entity registration, update and resignation for Business, Product, Plugin, Module and Delegate entities. None of these types carry forward into Mainsail, which is why they are being phased out now rather than later.
The change activates at mainnet height 36,937,100, which is roughly 08:00 UTC on Tuesday, 25th of August 2026. Existing entity data on-chain stays as it is. From that height onward, only new Magistrate transactions are rejected.
If you run a relay or a forging delegate, please update to v3.13.0 before that height. Running ark update is all it takes. Regular wallet users do not need to do anything.
Full details are in the changelog: https://github.com/ArkEcosystem/core/releases/tag/3.13.0
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:
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