Not content to rest on its laurels, Cardano continues to enhance network infrastructure by improving its native Daedalus wallet.
Daedalus Flight is a test wallet where volunteer users can assess changes within a live environment using real ADA transactions.
“Daedalus Flight is a new ‘pre-release’ version of the Daedalus wallet. Specially created for ada holders who want to help us test new Daedalus wallet features.”
IOHK CEO, Charles Hoskinson reached out to the community, via a tweet, asking users to download Daedalus Flight to provide feedback on the performance improvements.
We decided to release the performance update first on flight. Please download and try it out. Let us know about the performance improvements you see. https://t.co/ROWK4mqxdr
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) August 20, 2020
The Daedalus wallet has drawn user criticism due to the length of time it takes to sync with the blockchain.
Even the latest version 2.1, which launched for the Shelley mainnet just three weeks ago, is painfully slow in reaching 100% synchronization.
daedalus wallet still takes hours to sync
My anti virus software hates it as well which does help.
— British Miss 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 (@britishgirlxrp) August 16, 2020
IOHK acknowledges the problem but says that this is a characteristic of a full node wallet. Their latest help article, dated August 2020, refers the issue back to the user’s internet speed and machine specs.
“Daedalus is a full node wallet and requires a copy of the Cardano blockchain on your machine to operate. The blockchain is now over 6Gb in size on disk as of August 2019 so if your internet speed is quite slow it could take many hours. For most users with broadband connections and a relatively new machine, a full sync should take about one hour.”
So far, user feedback on the Daedalus Flight test wallet has been overwhelmingly positive.
One user commented that legacy blocks are quick to sync, whereas Shelley blocks, which make up the minority, are still slow. However, the net result was still a cut in sync time from 80 minutes to just half an hour.
WTF Charles
It's faster than it has ever been. My fastest 0 to 100% was 80 minutes and now I synced in 30 minutes. The Byron blocks sync super fast and the Shelley blocks sync noticeably much slower (last 8-10%). Again a huge improvement.
— gilian (@gilian1989) August 21, 2020
Cardano On Track as Planned
In a recent update video, Hoskinson talked about the up and coming Daedalus version 2.2 and node 1.19 rollouts.
Following the Shelley launch, some three weeks ago, community feedback has pointed to several performance concerns.
But Hoskinson spoke about the work he, and his team, have been doing to address the problems.
“After talking to QA, devops, and the rest of the gang it looks like there are very significant performance improvements. Some aspects of the software are 100 times faster.”
Elaborating further, Hoskinson gave a breakdown of the critical areas by saying improvements have been made to sync speeds, chain validation, and revalidation, as well as database accessibility.
Based on the feedback of the Daedalus Flight wallet, Daedalus 2.2 should go some way to improving the user experience.
With that, all eyes are turning to the Goguen (smart contract) stage of development. The latest murmurs have Goguen penciled in for an end of 2020 rollout.
Cardano is currently ranked 9th on CoinMarketCap and is up 1.6% over the last 24-hours.
Cardano daily chart with volume. (Source: tradingview.com)
