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 saw updates to transaction processing, signature verification, state handling, and EVM functionality, alongside improvements to test stability and coverage. Work also continued across ARK Scan, ARK Vault, and ARK Connect as the latest changes moved into internal testing and refinement.
Development Activity Summary (August 28 – September 04, 2026)
Below is a breakdown of the total number of merged commits and contributing authors by project, highlighting development activity from August 28, 2026, to September 04, 2026.
| Project | Commits | Authors |
|---|---|---|
| ARK Connect | 0 | 0 |
| ARK Scan | 0 | 0 |
| ARK SDKs & Docs | 0 | 0 |
| ARK Vault | 0 | 0 |
| Mainsail | 36 | 2 |
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’s Mainsail work focused on simplifying transaction processing, improving test reliability, and strengthening consensus and EVM-related functionality. Legacy transaction processor extensions were removed as transactions are now processed directly inside REVM, while transaction signature verification was hardened with an isLowS check and unnecessary hash validation was removed. State root calculation was also updated to use byte encoding, making it independent of REVM serialization details that could change with dependency updates, and transaction logs are now stored in recipients using Alloy’s log format. EVM dependencies were also updated.
Testing and code quality received further attention throughout the week. Latency-sensitive tests were made more reliable for CI; failing validator tests and flaky consensus tests were fixed, and functional tests now calculate validator positions based on their order within each round to keep results stable. The forger and consensus packages were also improved and brought to 100% unit test coverage, with the main consensus class excluded as it will be refactored separately. These changes also included improved naming, additional safeguards, and fixes for several issues found during testing.
Next week, work will continue on consensus and P2P improvements, alongside further testing, stability fixes, and general refinements identified during development.
Other Development Updates
This week, ARK Scan, ARK Vault, and ARK Connect moved into internal testing as the main development work nears completion. The focus is now on validating the latest changes, identifying and resolving any issues, and ensuring consistency across the products. Internal testing and refinement will continue next week as we further validate the current state of the products.
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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