Week 44 · 2026

Highlights

The onboarding stack collapsed into one branch (D4, #2059, #2063, #2062, #2087)

Four stacked onboarding PRs merged on Wednesday, all into the new-onboarding integration branch. The site's default branch only receives them when #2058 merges into staging. That PR remained open at the end of the week, so none of this is on the published portal yet.

Together the four PRs complete the course:

• Advanced lectures: detecting vulnerabilities, optimization, higher assurance and going to production. Each lecture has runnable Aiken projects. The oracle is carried through Preprod with operator scripts, deployment records and a browser application.
• Design patterns: nine patterns, from transaction-level validation and UTxO indexers to linked lists, Merkle trees and Merkle Patricia tries. Each page starts from a concrete problem, compares the pattern with a baseline and reads its execution units, sizes and fees from committed costs.json measurements. All transactions are built and evaluated offline, so no wallet, provider key or test funds are needed.
• Introduction: the onboarding welcome, and the design patterns moved into the Advanced track as lecture 3.
• Example CI: a workflow that discovers every example project, 19 Aiken and 16 Node, and runs each as its own job. Aiken projects are built with their pinned compiler, and the rebuilt validator hashes are compared with the committed blueprints and their off-chain copies. Pages import code, hashes and costs from these projects, so a stale figure fails CI. The workflow also runs every Monday, which catches breakage from newly released dependencies. The scheduled run starts once it reaches staging.

The contracts library ran a code-quality pass (D5, #58)

The team opened a quality tracker on Tuesday and worked through it on an improve-code-quality integration branch. Seven PRs merged into that branch; the branch's own PR to main, #61, was still open on Sunday.

• Stabilization (#60). The settings contract gained 21 Aiken tests. CI now typechecks the e2e package, enables the Biome linter, and fails when the devnet suite skips every test. Before, a missing devnet could produce a green job with zero tests run.
• Documentation (#64). The READMEs now list all five shipped contracts. Vesting gained a usage guide, and stale script hashes in the vesting READMEs were corrected.
• Hygiene (#65). A committed blueprint-sync script regenerates the MeshJS blueprints from plutus.json and fails CI on hash drift, which is the cause of the stale hashes fixed above.
• Property-based tests (#67, #68, #69, #71). Francisco Joray added 67 properties across all five contracts: asset conservation, time boundaries, spending-limit rollovers, DAO thresholds and vote refunds. Unit tests that the properties fully cover were then removed, along with duplicated publish tests. The suite went from 568 tests to 528 (461 unit + 67 property) while covering more cases. Each PR runs them at 100 samples; a scheduled job runs 1,000.

None of these PRs changed compiled validators. Two security items found during the review, for the settings and DAO contracts, are tracked separately as the next phase.

Vesting closed three claim gaps before formal verification (D5, #72)

Robertino Martinez opened #72 on Friday as the last pass on linear vesting before the formal team proves properties against it. Each fix closes an over-release or griefing path in Claim:

• Duplicate entries. A datum listing the same asset twice let one continuation satisfy both entries. The bundle must now be strictly ascending with non-negative totals. A malformed instance fails closed: no one can claim it, and the locker recovers it after the recovery time.
• Delegation hijack. Only the payment credential of the continuation was checked, so a claim could change the stake credential and redirect the locked ada's rewards. Continuations must keep the full address.
• Token spam. A claim could add unrelated tokens or a reference script to the continuation, making the locker's later Cancel more expensive. Continuations may hold only ada and the vested assets.

The spec gained matching clauses and threat entries, and the vesting script hash changed. The Lean proofs and devnet e2e tests had not been re-run against it. The PR merged on Monday, November 2, after this week's cutoff.

The Dijkstra readiness tracker went public and retargeted node 11.2.0 (D1, #183, #186)

#183 merged on Tuesday, putting the readiness work described last week on the public site. /map/dijkstra lists every catalog tool whose shipped code touches a changed surface, with its blockers and its devnet results. It leads with a critical path of upstream fixes that ends at the tools DApps build on: Mesh, Lucid Evolution, Hydra, Mithril, PyCardano and others with more than 10% survey usage. Separate pages cover the devnet checks, the cited protocol changes and every decision with its quoted source line.

The node team tagged cardano-node 11.2.0 on Wednesday, marked as a prerelease. On Sunday, #186 re-ran the assessment against that tag. The integration-branch assessment is kept byte for byte under a new history page. All 39 runtime results that could be compared at the same versions matched, so the tag did not change any devnet outcome. Seven tools changed state:

• cardano-c and Plutarch moved to ready. Both released Dijkstra support.
• Adder moved to in progress. Its fixes are underway but unreleased.
• The node, CLI, submit API and cardano-testnet are now target components. They are the release itself, not tools waiting on it.

The site now reports 206 tools: 110 break, 9 in progress, 4 ready and 4 target components, with 45 unverified and 34 dismissed. The same PR fixed the repository's 15 open Dependabot alerts. Next is sending each component with a confirmed devnet failure (Ogmios, Kupo, db-sync, Pallas, CML and gouroboros) a packet covering what fails, how to reproduce it and which tools it blocks.

Evidence on how applications depend on tools arrived for review (D1, #185)

#185 proposes an evidence directory on application dependencies. It extends the map snapshot to 302 entries and 304 links, ranks projects by transaction volume, and adds preliminary package-importance scores and a register of repository gaps. It does not change the live map. The PR was open at the end of the week.

cardano-init took the --json flag and a large cleanup (D3, #99, #107)

#99, proposed last week, merged on Monday. Machine-readable output now comes from a global --json flag, and --format json fails. The JSON payload and schema_version are unchanged, so scripts and agents only need to change the flag.

Paulo Bressan's #107 then reorganized the CLI internals, splitting the 1,500-line output module and the argument and error handling into focused files. The change removed about 1,100 lines net and changed no behavior. Both changes are on main but not yet in a release.