Welcome to this week’s Weekly Development Report, covering continued improvements across the ecosystem, with ongoing work focused on reliability, performance, and compatibility. This week, Mainsail received several improvements to transaction pool handling and dependency management, while work continued on consensus and EVM-related functionality. We also made further updates to block processing and network configuration to keep the system aligned with its evolving architecture.
Development Activity Summary (August 21 – August 28, 2026)
Below is a breakdown of the total number of merged commits and contributing authors by project, highlighting development activity from August 21, 2026, to August 28, 2026.
| Project | Commits | Authors |
|---|---|---|
| ARK Connect | 0 | 0 |
| ARK Scan | 0 | 0 |
| ARK SDKs & Docs | 0 | 0 |
| ARK Vault | 0 | 0 |
| Mainsail | 58 | 2 |
In total, 58 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 transaction pool handling, updating the underlying dependencies, and continuing work on block-related data used by the consensus layer.
The transaction pool service received several fixes to make transaction processing more predictable and reliable. Transactions are now handled correctly at batch boundaries, preventing the same transaction from being returned twice when moving between batches. We also improved the handling of rebroadcast cooldowns by cleaning them up when transactions leave the pool, preventing stale state from being retained unnecessarily. Pool events now also include the relevant transaction data, giving consumers of these events better visibility into changes happening within the transaction pool.
All package dependencies were updated to their latest compatible versions. Keeping dependencies up to date helps maintain compatibility with the rest of the Mainsail codebase while also incorporating upstream fixes and improvements.
Work also continued on block.prevrandao, which is now exposed as an environment variable during transaction execution. Mainsail uses this value in consensus.sol to introduce deterministic randomness when sorting validators. The value is derived from the genesis hash and the current block height, then signed using the validator’s passphrase. The resulting signature is stored in the block and used to provide the prevrandao value to the REVM when a new transaction begins execution.
Block timestamps were also updated to use seconds instead of milliseconds, bringing the representation in line with the convention expected by the EVM and simplifying timestamp handling across the system.
Finally, the network configuration files were regenerated to reflect the latest changes to the network and its configuration requirements.
Next week, work will continue on the consensus and P2P components. The focus will be on improving validator coordination, block processing, and communication between network nodes.
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.
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