Intersect Development Update #45

Intersect Development Update #45 - January 17th

15 min

January 17

Welcome to the Intersect development update, where we break down all the essential Intersect happenings. This week, we have updates on progress towards Plomin, Cardano budget updates, committee activities, member meet-ups, and community tooling. P.S. Don’t forget to join us for January’s Town Hall on January 23 at 15:00 UTC!

Plomin upgrade - SPO votes are in!

At the time of writing, the 51% threshold has been passed following larger pools voting on Friday, January 17th. It’s now over for the interim Constitutional Committee to cast their votes to ratify and subsequently enact the upgrade.

Readiness page updates
In light of the 10.1.4 hotfix release, the hard fork working group continues to review and update the readiness status of major tooling components. Developers confirm the following key tools do not require new releases to be compatible with 10.1.4: Cardano wallet, DB Sync, Rosetta, Rosetta-Java, GraphQL, and Ogmios.

The hard fork working group maintained readiness page on the knowledge base provides further information on the readiness status of many tools, libraries, and projects.

To add to this readiness page, please email hard-fork@intersectmbo.org or raise a pull request to this public repository via Github/HF-WG-Documentation (see how-to guide).

Node versions
Node version 10.1.4 is almost identical to nodes 10.1.2 and 10.1.3. Like those node versions, it is designed to cross the Plomin hard fork. It implements the remainder of the governance capabilities defined in CIP-1694, enabling all seven governance actions and DRep voting. It also enables a number of new Plutus cryptographic and other primitives.

All Cardano stake pools and relays must upgrade to this node version to mitigate a potential DoS attack following a hard fork to protocol version 10 (Plomin hard fork on mainnet). All other node users should also upgrade. Node users who do not upgrade risk a potential DoS attack following the hard fork.

Node performance
Consistent with expectations, standard benchmark results indicate no notable performance differences between node version 10.1.4 and version 10.1.2/10.1.3. You can find the benchmarking and performance reports here.

Participation in Governance
Despite passing the necessary thresholds, SPOs and exchanges are strongly encouraged to continue to participate and vote on governance actions, especially hard fork actions such as Plomin. You can read full details here in this dedicated Plomin bulletin.

For clarity, those not wishing to participate are still asked for initial involvement and to vote to abstain explicitly. An explicit vote to abstain removes your vote power from the total sought for any governance action. An implicit action, ie doing nothing, counts as a ‘no’ vote, and your voting power would count towards this total. In some circumstances, implicitly abstaining may actually increase your participation in governance, as your voting power will count in the governance action.

Because of this, the stake pool operators play a vital role in decision-making and leading change within the Cardano network.

Mainnet Hard Fork Governance Action Update
The governance action for the Plomin hard fork is set to expire on January 24 (end of epoch 535).

Current status:

Block producing nodes %: 73% (guardrail threshold 85%)
SPO vote %: 52% (governance action threshold 51%)
ICC vote %: 0 (governance action threshold 66.7%)

Technical steering committee

Building Cardano’s development roadmap:
Have your say in shaping the future of Cardano and shaping Carano’s development roadmap.

Step 1: Proposals are now publicly available on our public backlog.

Each project provides an elevator pitch for a proposal, with a description of the work, the expected benefits, key deliverables, and an effort estimate. Most projects also include a short video explainer.

Step 2: Complete the prioritization survey and share your feedback:

Full instructions are on page 1 of the survey.

Budget committee: updates and initiatives

The Budget committee continues to focus on facilitating a proposed Cardano 2025 Budget and setting up key working groups for members to help investigate key challenges. The working group volunteer leads are currently tasked with creating a term of reference that outlines the scope of the work to be completed.

The five groups will cover budget process review, taxation concerns, treasury management, auditing, and smart contract technology for budgeting.

Working Group channels are now open on the Discord server.

Delivery assurance

Delivery assurance is the process that assists the accountable committees and helps provide transparency to the community, ensuring that core infrastructure work contracted via Intersect is being carried out as planned and promised. Intersect handles milestone delivery, providing reports and other artifacts that help the steering committees and membership make effective delivery decisions and promote transparency on progress.