Welcome to our weekly development report, where we bring you the latest updates from our development team. As we bid farewell to the first full week of June, we reflect on the progress we have made across our product portfolio. Our primary focus has been directed toward enhancing the functionalities of ARKScan, alongside notable advancements in Dashbrd and Mainsail. In the upcoming weeks, these three products will remain our top priority, resulting in limited activity on ARKVault.
Development Summary
Below is a breakdown of total commits and authors by project for development activity over the last week from June 2nd through June 9th, 2023.
| Project | Commits | Authors |
|---|---|---|
| Mainsail | 57 | 2 |
| ARKScan | 94 | 3 |
| ARKVault | 0 | 0 |
| Dashbrd | 148 | 8 |
Overall, the team has demonstrated consistent productivity and engagement over this period, with a total of 299 commits across all projects.
The number of commits and data for each project will fluctuate on a weekly basis depending on internal sprints, objectives and difficulty.
New ARKScan Version Released
Over the past several weeks, we have dedicated our efforts to enhancing the user interface of ARKScan and introducing several new features to the platform. This week, we rolled out these updates, with the most significant changes being as follows:
- Improved and streamlined navigation menu with a simplified and well-organized structure.
- Easy access to Developers’ menu, providing quick access to APIs, Documentation, and Support.
- Convenient display of the current ARK price, with the option to customize the currency.
- Powerful Live Search Feature for quick searching of addresses, names, transactions, and blocks.
- Swift switching between Test and Production networks, as well as seamless theme transitions.
- Redesigned the Top Accounts Page with a new table layout, customizable record display per page, and improved pagination design.
- Curated page showcasing all exchanges and aggregators listing the ARK token, including an interactive table with filters for trading pair preferences.
- Compilation page of wallets that support the ARK token, offering users a wide selection of compatible wallets.
The aforementioned features are just a snapshot of the latest updates to ARKScan. For a more in-depth understanding of these and other new enhancements, we recommend reading our recent blog post, which delves into all the new features in detail.
Mainsail Progress
As we make headway on our journey towards the launch of Mainsail, our re-branded and upgraded version of ARK Core, we are excited to share the recent developments and enhancements we’ve made. From performance boosts to consensus improvements, our team has been diligently refining each aspect of the system. Here’s a detailed rundown of our progress over the past week:
- The JavaScript version of the BLS crypto package was swapped out for the @chainsafe/blst-ts , resulting in a substantial performance increase and allowing for 800-1000 verifications and aggregations per second.
- The BlockTime milestone was restructured to be expressed in milliseconds, with the default value now set to 8000ms.
- Deprecated packages, including forger, forger-tracker, and crypto-time, have been removed from the codebase.
- Consensus enhancements are in progress to improve the process of storing messages. With Mainsail, we will only store one message per stage from each validator to streamline the process. If multiple messages are received from the same validator within a stage, this is considered malicious evidence.
- The P2P package was overhauled and refactored. Handlers and broadcasters have been implemented for propose, prevote, and pre-commit stages, with more work required to transfer messages over the P2P layer.
- Improvements have also been made to the Crypto module, including allocating small buffers based on data size and the addition of optional metadata for blockId fields.
Development on Mainsail continues to make steady progress and we are excited about what the future holds.
Community 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:
What’s Next?
As we forge ahead, our focus remains on refining and expanding our suite of tools to better serve the ARK ecosystem.
Mainsail continues to be at the forefront of our efforts, with ongoing developments and improvements set to further refine our re-branded and upgraded version of ARK Core. Our aim is to enhance the robustness of the blockchain experience it offers and set new standards for functionality and performance.
In parallel, we will continue to focus on ARKScan which will be receiving another update in the form of a refined and expanded Address page with a new transaction export function that will allow users to not only export all of their transaction history but also relevant delegate data such as forged blocks and block rewards.
While ARKVault will be taking a brief hiatus in development after our last release, we assure you that it’s an important part of our toolkit, and we’ll be back to refining it once our key updates to ARKScan are complete.
We’re also preparing for the launch of Dashbrd, a project we’re excited to bring to our users in the near future. We will have more on Dashbrd soon.
A great way to keep in touch with our ongoing developments is to follow us on Twitter .
We are grateful for your continued support and continue to be excited about what the future holds for ARK.
