ARK Development Report - May 31, 2024

Welcome to our latest Weekly Development Report, where we spotlight the valiant efforts of our development team. Another productive week is behind us. This week, we released a new ARK Connect update, which now supports sending and receiving ARK and includes an address book for adding contacts. The ARK Scan team has been integrating WebSockets and fixing some minor reported issues. ARK Vault has been finalizing the integration of Mainsail’s multisignature server. The Mainsail team released a new testnet version with many improvements and continued working on the EVM implementation.

#Development Summary

Below is a breakdown of total commits and authors by project for development activity over the last week from May 24th through May 31st, 2024.

Overall, the team has demonstrated consistent productivity and engagement over this period, with a total of 175 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 a new ARK Connect update, adding major functionality improvements. Users can now send and receive ARK tokens natively within the extension, making it more useful as a hot wallet. We’ve also introduced an address book feature for managing contacts.

You can read the full announcement in our blog post titled ARK Scan Updates - Send, Receive and Address Book.

To install or update ARK Connect for your browser, use the following links:

• Google Chrome: Chrome Web Store
• Mozilla Firefox: Firefox Browser Add-Ons

Next week, our focus will shift towards a new development cycle that will introduce ‘Themes’ to ARK Connect. We’ll add and set a blue theme as the default to align with ARK Vault’s colors.

#ARK Scan Weekly Progress

The ARK Scan team has been working on WebSockets integration and fixing some reported issues. This week’s work includes:

• Worked on WebSockets integration for price updates.
• Implemented WebSockets events for the statistics page.
• Fixed incorrect network address color for ARK Connect integration.
• Updated PHP dependencies.

Next week, we’ll continue working on WebSockets implementation and test for performance improvements. We will also focus on optimizing them further through additional testing.

#ARK Vault Weekly Progress

The ARK Vault team has been finalizing the integration of Mainsail’s multisignature server and addressing other fixes, including:

• Added handling support for ‘Vote’ deep links.
• Fixed an issue to properly handle Mainsail’s deeplinks.
• Customized delegate pagination per network.
• Fixed mixed transactions display issue for mainnet and devnet.
• Added handling for multisignature vote recipient for Mainsail.
• Set up Mainsail’s wallets and network for tests.
• Optimized Mainsail’s SDK package dependency.

Next week, we’ll continue improving the Mainsail multisignature integration and start a new development sprint focusing on general UI improvements to the app.

#Mainsail Weekly Progress

This week, Mainsail rolled out a new testnet release, version v0.0.1-alpha.18, with several fixes and improvements:

• Upsert Mainsail version in PG on bootstrap.
• Add blockPrepareTime to bootstrap and refactor timestamp milestones.
• Add syncInterval option to api-sync instead of relying on blockTime.
• Insert transactions in chunks on very large blocks.
• Prepare block after the commit, instead of waiting for the round to start.
• Dispatch consensus events only once per round.
• Support query criteria on wallet attributes.
• Support query round by number.
• Accept validatorRegistration from multisig wallet.
• Expose validator round votes on the /rounds/{id}/delegates route.

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

In addition to the testnet release mentioned above, we’ve made progress on:

• Skip API sync logs on bootstrap.
• Implement getStatus JSON_RPC method on transaction-pool.
• Add response and request schemas for JSON_RPC actions.
• Always import to empty state on snapshot restore.
• Replace child processes with worker threads. Threads have faster boot time, don’t run extra V8 instances, and have smaller communication overheads.
• Refactor transaction pool to run in a worker thread.

Next week, we’ll be working on replacing JSON_RPC with IPC calls for the transaction-pool and conducting performance testing with a separated transaction pool. We’ll also continue working on EVM implementation, focusing on algorithms for gas calculations and their implementation.

#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.