Transaction Editor post Vasil HF

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

This is mostly a maintenance work. But the Transaction editor needs to incorporate the changes in behavior, outputs and features arriving with the new cardano-node for the hardfork era.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

I'm the author and developer of the Cardano transaction editor a Catalyst Fund 7 funded and completed project.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The transaction editor wraps command line utilities like cardano-cli & cardano-addresses and connects via API to cardano-wallet. It provides a powerful user interface to work with complex transactions for Cardano. The Vasil Hard Fork starts the Babbage Era(as defined on the code itself) and with it are reference scripts, reference inputs, inline datum, and collateral output. Secondly the interface to cardano-wallet needs an update to allow its latest features around token minting and burning and its new metadata format.

All these new features need to be handled by the editor as well to be a relevant tool in the next era. And they need a showcase on how to teach people how to use them.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

The transaction editor opened developers and advanced user a new scalable UX for flexible work. This maintenance update keeps this tool at the leading edge on how to handle transaction crafting. In many cases just crafting a complex transaction and extracting the output logs allows developers later to construct automation scripts for recurring transaction types.

The code is always open-source and I always document features and even release video showcase demonstrating workflows. Thus everybody can start with a quick overview, learn usage in depth and even investigate the code to learn about inner workings, and has a reference template.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Russia-Ukraine conflict escalates to Europe. I do plan a relocation to south america, that will delay me for 2-3 months but I can still go on.

I get covid again. It does take me a full month to recover, but then I can go on.

Any of the previous do lead to my death. In that case is a complete loss as I'm the sole developer and there is not yet a big contributor community for someone to jump in and steward the project forward. I consider given the scope of the project and funding amount. It is not worth to plan for it. Someone, someday, independently will spontaneously pick up the project.

Aside from those cases. There are no execution risks. I'm the developer of the transaction editor, it is no foreign code base and I'm already testing the Vasil-devnet and need this upgrade. It will most probably be completed even before Fund 9 results come, depending on my personal developer needs to work with the network.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

This update package is subdivided in two main goals.

Updates around cardano-cli for Vasil ~ work 64 hrs

• Build transaction on Babbage era
• Use cddl standard format by default
• Database update to manage reference scripts, and how to query them
• Interface update to manage reference inputs
• Interface update for inline datum

Updates around cardano-wallet for version 2022-05-27 ~ work 32 hrs

• Token minting and burning
• Simpler metadata format

Included in the working hours is writing the corresponding documentation. Updating the progress feed on the cardano Forum and releasing showcase videos.

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Disclaimer on other Proposals and workload.

This is not my only Fund 9 proposal, and is one 2 two projects around the transaction editor. I do keep my projects linked so that my own efforts compound, however it means that although the work hours is a good measure their weekly compounding would take more than 2 weeks. I already work on the cli updates because I need them and those features will became available even Fund 9 even awards winners.

For projects funded on previous rounds.

Fund 7 Transaction Editor is now a closed project

Fund 8 Ouroboros-mini query specification is a documentation effort and I will finish it before start of Fund 9. This project additionally includes a simple client implementation used within the Transaction Editor. This project now doubled the work as cardano-node 1.35 for Vasil includes a lot more internal changes and IOG is no fully enforcing version boundaries.

Fund 7 Web based transaction editor, I miscalculated the design and effort for this project, I will keep working on it well past its funding time and probably well over Fund 9. It has been a great challenge to deal with it and I had to recognize changing its design a few times on the way. It has inspired some features on the Transaction editor desktop application, unveiling the Ouroboros-mini query specification, dealing with cardano-db-sync to process data to deal with Plutus contracts. I don't request further funding for this project, because it is personally not clear to me what it end up looking like. Its closing feature is producing an interactive Coin-Join on Cardano, whether it ends up as the service I intended or an extension for Nami I still don't know. Thus for the opportunity to keep iterating on the design I take it on my personal effort. Every time I do come up with a clearly scoped feature again, it is due to working on this project.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

This project has only work compensation software is immaterial and I only need time to work on it. Costs of cloud infrastructure are still covered by fund 7 project and for the moment I do have VPS with enough resources to keep hosting some nodes. Depending on how much bulkier nodes will become in the future I might need funding for that in the future.

A total of 96 work hrs as specified in the previous section are budgeted at an hour rate of 75 USD/hr

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

I'm the sole contributor. Project coordinator and developer.

Óscar Nájera

https://oscarnajera.com

https://github.com/Titan-C

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

This project is closed in scope and I'll not return for further funding for it specifically. I can close it successfully. However, I believe Catalyst is a great system to sponsor people to work on community valued tasks. I as developer the more I work on Cardano, the more tools I need for it and the more Ideas I want to work on. Thus I will return to Catalyst to fund new projects or new modules for the Transaction editor. The community vote does help me prioritize what I shall build first and it also lets me meet other people.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

My projects progress is clearly auditable by the deliverables stated on the "detailed plan" section above. The software provided in this project is Open Source, GPL-3 licensed and available in the well known code repository GitHub. Although I do tend to develop on private branches, each feature release has a transfer to the public repository. Additionally, release video showcases about this project. You can see a working demo.

I do act with more flexibility on the timeline as I juggle other responsibilities. Yet progress can also be measured on the monthly reports.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Free software is not the license, it is not the code openly available. It is people being empowered to use the tools for their own means of computing. The transaction editor builds on this philosophy, on bringing the highest flexibility to the user. As such it always need to keep up with the Cardano blockchain updates.

My success is people embrace this. Regardless of all the convenience it represents for the user to use web-wallet as light clients. The transaction editor works with a full cardano-node promoting decentralization and accountability. It's code being open allows developer to have a reference on how use-cases can be solved. The transaction editor is built on top of worlds longest lived editor Emacs, a solid foundation for software you can rely on and I expect people continue the practice of developing with and for this text editor.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

As a maintenance update yes it is a continuation of a funded project. That project is already successfully closed and feature complete for the Alonzo Era. You can read about that project on:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/385056