WHAT IS CARDANO?
Cardano is home to the Ada cryptocurrency, which can be used to send and receive digital funds. This digital cash represents the future of money, making possible fast, direct transfers that are guaranteed to be secure through the use of cryptography.
Cardano is more than just a cryptocurrency, however, it is a technological platform that will be capable of running financial applications currently used every day by individuals, organisations and governments all around the world. The platform is being constructed in layers, which gives the system the flexibility to be more easily maintained and allow for upgrades by way of soft forks. After the settlement layer that will run Ada is complete, a separate computing layer will be built to handle smart contracts, the digital legal agreements that will underpin future commerce and business. Cardano will also run decentralised applications, or dapps, services not controlled by any single party but instead operate on a blockchain.
This is the first blockchain project to be developed from a scientific philosophy, and the only one to be designed and built by a global team of leading academics and engineers. It is essential that the technology is secure, flexible and scalable for use by many millions of users. Consequently, considerable thought and care from some of the leading experts in their fields has been devoted to the project and informed design decisions. The scientific rigour applied to mission-critical systems such as aerospace and banking has been brought to the field of cryptocurrencies, with a high assurance implementation. We believe this is the first time that this has been done.
A major innovation of Cardano is that it will balance the needs of users with those of regulators, and in doing so combine privacy with regulation. The vision for Cardano is that its new style of regulated computing will bring greater financial inclusion by providing open access for all to fair financial services.
THE DAEDALUS WALLET
To use Ada you must download Daedalus. Daedalus is a secure, multi-platform, HD (hierarchical deterministic) wallet for the Ada cryptocurrency. Install Daedalus on your computer and open the application. Watch the Daedalus tutorial video if you require help to set up your digital wallet:
Now you can send and receive Ada, and view a history of the transactions you have made. For more information about Ada transactions that have taken place and about the Cardano blockchain itself, you can use the Cardano Block Explorer. This specially built tool can be used to search for transactions. You can also see information about the state of blockchain, for example about its slots and epochs. Beyond being used to send and receive Ada, the Daedalus wallet has many special features, which make it easy to use and give you a high degree of confidence about its security. These include:
Encrypted private keys and spending passwords, offering protection against security threats such as malware.
Wallets can be exported to paper certificates, giving the maximum security option of placing funds in cold storage.
Ada redemption is built directly into Daedalus and supports encrypted and unencrypted redemption certificates.
Configurable transaction assurance level monitoring, allowing users to be sure when transactions become irreversible.
Engineers are in the process of designing and building many more useful features. Plans for development include:
Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin support.
A mobile wallet for Android and iOS.
Staking, which enables Ada holders to participate in the block generation process, and earn more of the currency.
An application store with community-built applications and support for virtually any cryptocurrency.
DOWNLOAD AT WWW.DAEDALUSWALLET.IO
RELEASE NOTES
DAEDALUS 0.10.1
UNDEFINED
The issue with printing PDF documents with paper wallet certificates caused by some printers running out of memory was fixed by reducing the complexity of the PDF document.
Daedalus had a limit of showing only 10 wallets. Users who created more than 10 wallets were unable to use all of them. This has been changed and Daedalus now supports up to 20 wallets. Also, a check has been introduced which prevents the creation of more than 20 wallets.
The Daedalus installer bug causing corruption of the configuration when it was used to install an update, while Daedalus processes were still running, was fixed.
CARDANO 1.2.1
Shell script for launching wallet backend, used mainly by the exchanges, was fixed to work regardless of the locale on the host machine.
DAEDALUS 0.10.0
FEATURES
Paper wallets allow users to store their funds securely offline. Paper wallet certificates can now be generated in Daedalus. They contain a 27-word recovery phrase, of which the first 18 words are printed automatically on the certificate and the remaining 9 words the user writes by hand. This improves security because the printed certificate, which could be cached by the printer or compromised in some other way, does not include everything needed to restore the wallet. The wallet from the certificate is initially empty when it is created and users can send funds to it using the wallet address printed on the certificate.
Paper wallets can now be restored and brought back online in Daedalus.
The restoration of Cardano wallets is now a non-blocking, background operation. As soon as wallet restoration is initiated, a user is presented with the wallet in the user interface. The wallet balance is immediately visible and restoration of the transaction history will be running in the background. A progress indicator will show the percentage of restoration that has been completed and a time estimation until the operation is complete. The transaction history is populated as each transaction is recovered from the blockchain.
The wallet summary screen shows up to five recent transactions. When the wallet has more than five transactions, a “Show more transactions” button appears that links to the transaction history page.
Daedalus now has a new support page in Settings. This page includes links for accessing the FAQ with solutions to known issues, access to a form for sending support requests and a link for downloading logs. Clicking the "bug" icon in the sidebar no longer opens the form for sending support requests but takes the user to this page instead.
An option to include logs with support requests is now on by default.
Wallet addresses displayed in the Daedalus user interface now link to the address details page in the Cardano Explorer.
UNDEFINED
For improved security, the spending password is on by default when creating or restoring a wallet.
An opt-in feature for automatically sending logs to the remote server is now removed because the high volume of logs aggregated through this feature was unmanageable.
All timestamps appearing in Daedalus logs are now in the UTC time zone, for easier analysis of the log files.
The Daedalus “About” dialog now includes an updated list of Daedalus and Cardano team members.
The selection of some text elements in Daedalus using a mouse is now disabled, which improves the look and feel of the application. Text elements such as addresses and amounts are still selectable and it is possible to copy their values to the clipboard.
CARDANO 1.2.0
FEATURES
A new and improved version of the wallet API is now available for cryptocurrency exchanges and other parties. This makes the previous V0 version obsolete. Everyone using this API is encouraged to switch to the new version. Documentation for both versions is available at cardanodocs.com/technical/wallet/api
UNDEFINED
Wallet backend performance has been improved, especially for retrieving wallets using the API endpoint.
DAEDALUS 0.9.1 + CARDANO 1.1.1
A presentation bug has been fixed that caused only five recent transactions to be shown on the transaction list, even though there were more than five transactions in the wallet.
An issue has been fixed that stopped copy and paste operations from working when initiated using the right-click context menu.
A "Couldn't pack log files” error which was happening when Cardano node crashed has been fixed.
On Windows, the desktop icon was not showing the Daedalus image; this has now been fixed.
An error has been fixed that in some cases prevented users creating a wallet with a name containing non-latin characters, like Japanese Kanji or Chinese.
DAEDALUS 0.9.0
FEATURES
A new "Support request" feature enables users to report a problem and attach their logs directly from Daedalus. This feature is accessible from the main user interface and from the loading screen when there is a delay while connecting to the network or when blockchain syncing stops. This feature will help the development team investigate and solve the problems that users are experiencing.
Daedalus detects when the time on a user's machine is out of sync with the global time and displays an error message asking the user to fix the issue. Before this feature was added, when there was a time difference of 20 seconds or more, the Cardano node was unable to connect to the network and validate the blockchain, and Daedalus would be held on the loading screen with the "Connecting to network” message. This feature will eliminate the problem of users being held on the loading screen because of the time difference issue.
Improved handling when restoring a wallet: when the wallet is being restored from the recovery phrase, instead of blocking the user interface a friendly notification is displayed to indicate the operation is in progress.
When restoring a wallet, the text input user interface control for entering the recovery phrase is replaced with autocomplete input control for easier and quicker word entry.
The loading screen is updated to include both the Cardano and Ada logos.
Handling of connected/disconnected state is improved and a lost internet connection is now detected, and brings the user to the loading screen to indicate that wallet is not currently operational.
The ‘About’ dialog is updated to include the version of Cardano and build number along with the Daedalus version number.
FIXES
Electron, an essential part of core application infrastructure, is updated to version 1.7.11, which resolves security issues.
Frontend log files are moved from Logs to the Logs/pub folder where the rest of the log files are located that do not contain sensitive information.
The method for storing local preferences is replaced with a more robust solution to avoid potential edge-case concurrency problems. After the update, this change will prompt Daedalus to ask users to choose the language and accept the terms of use again on the first application launch.
CARDANO 1.1.0
FEATURES
Logs are compressed when sent to the reporting server to reduce bandwidth usage.
The Cardano launcher configuration is improved with support for the YAML format to remove the need for custom scripts for launching the Cardano node.
A new option for launching the Cardano node allows usage of API endpoints without TLS encryption for easier testing while developing integrations.
FIXES
Fixed improper node shutdowns, which caused some of the ‘connecting to network’ issues when using Daedalus. Improved Cardano node shutdown behavior by improvements to concurrency and exception handling, providing fixes to rocksdb database bindings.
Fixed transaction queuing and resubmission logic to remove some of the issues reported by cryptocurrency exchanges.
Several minor fixes to the update system for correctly receiving and installing updates from the blockchain to remove some of the reported cases of failed updates.
Fixed several space leaks in the operation of the Cardano node, fixing the Cardano node using all memory resources issue.
Fixed a bug with block retrieval, causing the extremely slow syncing after blockchain syncing reaches 99%.
Fixed a bug with blockchain syncing in case of unreliable internet connection, causing the blockchain syncing to never complete.
Fixed a bug causing block syncing to stop working in some cases when the Cardano node is left running for an extended period of time.
Improved performance of blockchain syncing by the removal of some unnecessary serialization and deserialization.
Fixed a bug causing the Cardano node to fail to start on slow computers, caused by a too-restrictive 5-second timeout.
Improved networking policy by allowing more time to connect to the network, resolving connectivity problems for users on slow internet connections.
Significant performance improvements for API endpoints for handling wallet operations, where the issues previously caused slow performance for users operating wallets with a large number of addresses, such as cryptocurrency exchanges.
Logging improved by making logs less verbose when that is not needed and by expanding the logs to cover more cases necessary for better issue diagnostics and easier quality assurance.
Improved automated issue reporting for some previously uncovered cases of Cardano node failures.
