ARK Development Report - November 3, 2023

Welcome to our latest Weekly Development Report, where we spotlight the valiant efforts of our development team. In this edition, we highlight the ongoing efforts of our development team. November has arrived, and this week, we have progressed with the redesign of the Delegate Monitor, while our Mainsail team has worked on improvements to the validation and block production mechanics.

#Development Summary

Below is a breakdown of total commits and authors by project for development activity over the last week from October 27th through November 3rd, 2023.

Overall, the team has demonstrated consistent productivity and engagement over this period, with a total of 39 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.

#ARK Scan Weekly Progress

This week, our focus remained on the revamped Delegate Monitor page and improvements to the search results user interface. The following tasks were completed during the week:

• Addressed the issue of delegate names getting truncated when there was ample space available.
• Made several enhancements to the Delegate Monitor header section, including improving header loading speeds, displaying the next slot value correctly, resolving issues with values not updating, and ensuring proper synchronization of values.
• Fixed the problem of negative time until forging showing in the table.
• Improved the responsiveness of the mobile version of the Delegate Monitor page and optimized response time when adding favorites on mobile devices.
• Resolved an issue where, when selecting a favorite for the first time on mobile, the “My Favorites” header did not appear in the Favorites section.
• Addressed the handling of missed blocks display.
• Updated the overall design of the search results box to align with recent design changes. Different transaction types will now be displayed for improved readability and user experience.
• Hide resigned delegates by default in the delegate overview table to improve sorting
• Show exchange volume on the homepage statistics section

In the upcoming week, we are working towards releasing a new version of ARK Scan featuring the redesigned Delegate Monitor page, updates to the search results design and slight overall tweaks. Following that, our focus will be on addressing smaller bugs discovered during testing and ensuring they are fixed.

#Mainsail Weekly Progress

This week, our team has focused on enhancing blockchain and validation mechanics. To provide a more detailed overview:

• We have transitioned to using Postgres 16 Docker images.
• Node synchronization status is determined based on the height of one’s own peer and the median peer height.
• For variable string fields like id, address, and senderPublicKey, we now use varchar instead of fixed-length strings. This change allows users to utilize different cryptography methods without the need for modifying or rebuilding the database.
• If the size of the ActiveValidators is increased, an error will occur if there are insufficient active validators present. It is the responsibility of the specific network to ensure an adequate number of validators during the adjustment.
• We’ve added additional generator (the validator that forges the block) data to the block response via the API.
• The “Save” command has been replaced with “upsert” on block and transaction repositories to prevent errors when the same item is stored multiple times.
• The processing of the genesis block has been standardized to match other blocks by using the block processor. The key difference lies in the fact that the genesis block employs a value of 0 for active validators, meaning that signature checks are not conducted. However, other checks, such as transactions and nonces, proceed as usual. The genesis block is the only one allowed to create wallets with negative balances, known as the genesis wallet.
• We have completely eliminated bootstrap methods from transactions. All transaction processing and state changes now follow the same protocol, employing the block processor.

In the upcoming week, our primary focus will be on addressing the remaining aspects of the public API and implementing further optimizations for the blockchain mechanics.

#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 Scan
• ARK Vault

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