Welcome to this week’s Weekly Development Report, highlighting continued progress across the ecosystem, with ongoing work focused on reliability, testing, and improving the underlying Mainsail architecture. This week, Mainsail saw further work on consensus reliability, particularly around timing, validator voting, and handling unexpected network conditions, alongside a significant expansion of functional test coverage. We also continued improving the Go Crypto documentation with new references for legacy address functionality.
Development Activity Summary (September 04 – September 11, 2026)
Below is a breakdown of the total number of merged commits and contributing authors by project, highlighting development activity from September 04, 2026, to September 11, 2026.
| Project | Commits | Authors |
|---|---|---|
| ARK Connect | 0 | 0 |
| ARK Scan | 0 | 0 |
| ARK SDKs & Docs | 4 | 1 |
| ARK Vault | 0 | 0 |
| Mainsail | 42 | 4 |
In total, 46 commits were merged across all projects this week. As always, commit counts fluctuate with sprint focus and task complexity.
ARK SDKs & Docs Weekly Report
This week focused on expanding the Go Crypto documentation by adding references for the legacy address functions, including generating and validating legacy addresses from passphrases, public keys, and private keys.
Next week, we’ll continue improving the documentation site by keeping the existing references up to date and adding documentation for newly introduced SDK functionality.
Mainsail Weekly Report
This week’s Mainsail work focused on making the consensus layer, the part of the network where validators agree on which block comes next, more reliable under difficult conditions, and on building a much larger set of tests to prove it behaves correctly. Docker files were also updated to allow pnpm scripts, along with some environment variable changes.
On the consensus side, several timing problems were fixed. If a validator is still assembling a block proposal when the network has already moved on to the next round, that proposal is now thrown away instead of being sent out late. Related to this, a proposal is now signed for the round it was actually started in, so a slow machine can no longer end up signing a block under the wrong round. The rules around locking were also tightened. When a validator has committed itself to a particular block, it now refuses to vote for any new competing proposal, and will only accept the block being proposed again if that re-proposal comes with valid evidence that the block was already agreed on earlier. A loophole where this evidence could be claimed but not actually provided was closed.
Error handling and visibility were improved as well. When enough validators vote to commit a block that a node never received a proposal for, the node now reports that gap clearly once per round rather than staying silent about it. Failures that happen in the background, such as processing a node’s own vote, are now written to the log instead of disappearing. Stored proposals are read back correctly when a node restarts, with any problems reported, and various internal safety checks were rewritten to be more readable.
The largest piece of work was a new set of functional tests that run real nodes against each other under deliberately hostile conditions. These cover thirteen different ways a proposed block can be invalid, from bad transaction ordering to incorrect rewards and timestamps, and confirm that honest nodes reject them and move on to a valid block in the next round. A flaw in the old test setup that made one of these checks pass without really testing anything was fixed. Other new tests confirm that a node with no validator keys can still follow the chain purely by listening to the network, that a node cut off from the network catches up correctly rather than getting stuck, that proposals arriving too late are handled safely, and that tampered or forged messages are rejected without disrupting the rest of the network. The tools for simulating these failures, such as dropped connections, lost messages, and withheld proposals, were gathered into one shared test harness.
Next week, work will continue on consensus refinements and P2P improvements, alongside further test coverage and stability fixes identified during development.
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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