Week 36 · 2026

Highlights

The DAO exploration turned into a specification (D5)

contracts-library was again the week's center of gravity, and the shift was from code to contract. On Wednesday the review note on #44 was blunt — "we're missing the specs" — and the next day a 451-line specs/dao/protocol-dao.md landed, then took four more rounds of refinement across the rest of the week (Sofia Bobbiesi and Francisco Joray).

It is a real protocol spec, not a README: three cooperating validators (stake, proposal, vote), each threading its own single-NFT UTxO whose policy id is the validator's own hash; NFT names derived from a consumed OutputReference so every position, proposal and vote is unique by construction; governance parameters read at runtime from a settings UTxO rather than compiled in (which is what keeps the three validators free of circular compile-time dependencies); an eight-step lifecycle from stake creation through draft, cosign, voting, batched tally and closure; and an explicit limitations section — one tally per transaction, no deadline on vote cancellation, create threshold read live while the rest are snapshotted at proposal creation. Design choices are tabulated with their rationale, including the stake-lock rule that freezes the maximum committed stake rather than the sum, so one position can back several concurrent proposals.

The on-chain side kept moving underneath it:

• The winning effect is now declared, not searched for (#44). EndProposal names the winner in its redeemer, which let am_i_the_winner collapse to a fraction of its former size (effect.ak shed ~120 lines to gain 33) and simplified proposal/spend twice over. Effect scripts still have to prove their own victory under the withdraw-0 convention — the protocol doesn't trust them.
• A cosign time limit on proposal/spend, with refined continuation checks, propagated the same week into both off-chain drivers: the tx3 e2e suite (plus a new end_proposal_failed transaction) and the MeshJS one, whose proposal redeemer structure was reshaped and its poll-effect redeemer dropped.
• Simpler NFT checks across mint/spend for all three validators, removing a helper from dao/utils rather than adding one.
• Tooling papercuts fixed along the way: aiken-fmt project-directory detection and path normalization, and a clearer devnet error when a port is already taken.

The settings protocol got its spec too (D5, #32)

The config-parameter-management branch spent the week entirely in prose — a rewritten specs/settings/protocol-settings.md with design choices, limitations and a glossary. The propose/delayed-apply split is the heart of it: the proposer can only write a pending (next, next_apply) pair and can never touch current; the applier launches, applies after apply_delay, and closes by burning the NFT. Values are arbitrary Data constrained by a deployer-supplied validate_datum hook, and the reference validator is honest that the predicate is a True stub. This is the protocol the DAO's parameters now hang off, so speccing both in the same week was the right order.

A third exploration opened: event-triggered assets (D5)

First scaffolding for event-triggered-assets — validator skeleton plus graduation, rules and types modules under onchain/lib/event_triggered. Early, but it is on the tracker.

The intermediate onboarding track shipped (D4, #1951)

Paulo Bressan's intermediate lecture series merged into the Developer Portal's new-onboarding branch: nine lectures, 61 files, +4,580 lines. The track's shape is the interesting part — lectures 2 through 8 are on-chain only (write the validator, compile it, test it, finish it, no app yet), and the entire off-chain half is lecture 9, where the vault finally gets an address, its transactions, offline tests and a browser page. All nine build one worked example: a vault that releases funds only to the owner who signs.

The runnable half sits in examples/onboarding/lectures/intermediate/vault/ — an Aiken project in the two states the lectures leave it in, and a Mesh + React app with offline tests that build and check each transaction without touching the network. Two details worth copying elsewhere: the app proxies its Blockfrost key through a small backend instead of shipping it to the browser, and the lectures import their snippets from the tested example via the extractRegion helper, so no code in the prose can drift from code that compiles.

Lectures 10–13 were polished in the same window, ahead of their own PR: the vault reworked around a service admin key, the gift card rebuilt as a one-shot NFT, the vesting example de-branded, "policy ID" spelled consistently across the track, and the onboarding writing rules applied end-to-end.

cardano-init: the roadmap caught up with reality (D3, #86)

One merged PR, twelve checkboxes. docs/ROADMAP.md now marks as done what the last two weeks actually shipped — the spec set and plugin-integration story, Aiken on-chain and MeshJS + Tx3 off-chain building green, Yaci DevKit in the devnet role, the interactive and one-shot CLIs, --dry-run and the optional Nix flake, determinism canonicalization with snapshot and contract-compliance tests, the widened per-role tool picks, the CI/CD gates and the weekly maintenance smoke run. What is still open is the honest remainder: formal-methods promoted from experimental, the public docs site, and the version-update check.

The tracker (D1)

devx-updates moved only for its own plumbing again — one commit gathering W35's activity.

A note on the commit count

The 93 commits attributed to contracts-library are inflated: the DAO branch was rebased, so its whole history re-entered the window. 23 commits were newly authored this week — 18 on the DAO, 4 on settings, 1 on event-triggered assets.