ARK Development Report - July 28, 2023

As we approach the end of the last full week of July, we are happy to present our weekly progress blog post. Throughout this week, we have successfully released minor updates for both ARK Scan and Core. Furthermore, our development efforts have remained focused on ongoing sprints for ARK Scan, Mainsail and Dashbrd.

Development Summary

Below is a breakdown of total commits and authors by project for development activity over the last week from July 21st through July 28th, 2023.

ProjectCommitsAuthorsMainsail142ARK Scan372ARK Vault00Dashbrd1177

Overall, the team has demonstrated consistent productivity and engagement over this period, with a total of 168 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, ARK Scan saw a minor release focused on better handling multipayments when the sender is part of the recipient, in addition to dependency updates.

During this week we have been focused on refining block detail pages and implementing various general improvements. These upgrades will be incorporated into the next week’s release. We’ve also made significant changes to the delegates page.

During this week we have implemented the following items:

• Implemented a new design for general block details, encompassing various components such as Block ID header, “generated by” block, block transactions section, block confirmations section, block summary section, and block details section.
• Enhanced the user experience for wallet transaction filtering.
• Rearranged section detail components to achieve a unified look and feel.
• Addressed the proper display of cryptocurrency user-set currency values below 0.01.
• Implemented lazy loading for block transactions with a large volume of transactions, resulting in a smoother user experience.

In the upcoming week, our focus will be on finalizing the updates for the delegates page on ARK Scan and start implementing those.

Dashbrd Weekly Progress

This week, we were primarily focused on general quality assurance and addressing internally reported issues on Dashbrd. We have also worked towards refining various options to improve loading speeds and enhance the overall user experience.

Key updates include:

Dashbrd General Items

• Feature flags have been added to enable or disable specific parts of the Dashbrd app easily.
• Improved loading states to better guide users in the app.

Dashbrd Wallet

• All aspects of the sending flow have been finished, allowing the user to send transactions and view their data.
• Improved edge case handling for portfolio token prices.
• Improved token loading by relying on lazy loading data upon scrolling.
• Handle chart data for wallets with loads of tokens more optimally.

Dashbrd Collections & Galleries

• Collection mint dates are now properly obtained, stored, and saved.
• Improved user experience when dragging gallery NFTs
• Gallery NFT search has been fixed for mobile devices.
• N/A is now displayed for NFTs without a known owner.
• The collection date has been added to the header of collections.

Currently, the Dashbrd app is in its final phase of internal testing, along with the final performance improvements being addressed.

For the upcoming week, the primary focus will be on enhancing the handling of gallery page load speeds by deferring more data. Additionally, prefetching certain token data will be implemented to improve the user experience of the portfolio. The QA team will also focus on extensive edge case testing with tokens and NFT collections to ensure robustness and optimal functionality.

Mainsail Weekly Progress

This past week, we made significant progress on the P2P aspect and network initiation for Mainsail. Here are the details:

• MaxPayload, a setting in P2P, has been removed due to inefficiencies in handling the increased traffic in Mainsail. We plan to explore alternative options for effectively limiting request payload in the future.
• Significant improvements have been made in downloading prevotes, precommits, and proposals. Nodes now concurrently retrieve missing data from peers when possible, and error handling has been enhanced.
• A new P2P class called PeerBlocker has been introduced. It maintains a list of misbehaving peers and automatically blocks their connection for a period of time. Peers may be blocked for various reasons, such as providing invalid response formats, missing or mismatched data, socket errors, or response timeouts.
• The database service has been extended to include a generator that reads committed blocks in ascending order, and this new method is utilized in the bootstrap process.
• The height of the Genesis block has been adjusted from 1 to 0, a modification made to simplify the codebase.
• In the default testnet implementation, the number of validators has been increased from 51 to 53. The decision to use 53 validators is based on the fact that 53 is a prime number.

Moving forward, the next week’s focus will be on ensuring peer verification is compatible with Mainsail. Additionally, improvements will be made to the P2P system, including message rebroadcasting and peer banning based on processing results.

ARK Core Update

This week, we rolled out a new Core version for the live network that includes minor updates such as Lerna and TypeScript improvements, and addressing SV issues in other packages. In addition, the API has been enhanced to optimize API queries.

Notably, the API has been enhanced to label address field queries as level 1 queries, and the install script now defaults to PG15 to optimize API queries further.

Looking ahead, there are no planned releases scheduled for ARK Core in the foreseeable future.

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
• Dashbrd (coming soon)

What’s Next

In the upcoming week, the plan is to release an update for the block details page on ARK Scan. This update will focus on unifying the design with the changes that were introduced to the transaction details page in the previous release.

Follow us on 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.