Normally, the dev updates try to cover the multitude of projects Tari is tackling. Instead, for this one we’ll be taking a different approach. We’ll focusing on developments in the Ootle, which we didn’t get to cover in our last update but not for a lack of love. There’s a lot of attention on the Ootle right now in the Tari community, and significant progress is being made

The Ootle will be a core part of the Universe experience once it’s live, and the success of Universe is pulling Ootle contributors directly into its orbit. Or gravity well. Actually, don’t worry about the metaphor, just check out their work below.

The Ootle Update

Consensus and Transactions

RocksDB development has focused on improving the models to handle more complex transaction queries, which is essential for improving the performance of the L2. Cross-shard pledges and numerous bug fixes have further shored up consensus mechanisms.

The Publish Template transaction has been added, improving the deployment of templates on the Ootle. And staying with templates, template syncing has been a focus to ensure that templates can be synced correctly with minimal performance impact and duplication of effort across validator nodes, although still in its initial stages.

On transactions, work to allow multiple signers on a transaction will, once implemented, improve the security of transactions involving numerous participants.

Wallet

Speaking of security, the wallet has come under the scrutiny of our contributors, and work is currently underway to incorporate WebAuthn for the wallet to better secure transactions and queries made of the wallet via JSON-RPC calls, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive transactions.

In addition, transaction input detection has seen some work that addresses existing issues in applications that depend on them, like Tari Swarm. In particular, the wallet will now ensure that all referenced substates in a transaction are detected, which it checks by calling on the indexer directly. Further development will be required to refine this process, but the fix has already improved the overall accuracy of transactions being handled.

Validator Nodes

Contributors working on Ootle validator nodes have been focusing on fees and fee management recently, with ongoing work to streamline fee claims across shards and address issues with zero balances post-fee claiming. Contributors also worked on improving the scanning process for fees and submitting claim transactions. A common claim key for validator nodes was also introduced to simplify the fee-claiming process, with improvements to estimating and submitting fee-claim transactions.

Universe Integration

While still very much in its early, experimental phase, groundwork is being laid for Universe users to have instant access to the Ootle, directly through the app. Whether it’s managing your Ootle wallet or deploying templates, we’re aiming to make Layer 2 interactions as easy as Universe has made mining tXTM on the Layer 1.