I did experience many hurdles with the fact that the cardano-cli works already on Babbage era(Vasil HardFork) however the hardware wallet ecosystem has still to reach that state. At the moment it is still necessary to create Alonzo transactions in CDDL and those can be passed to the hardware wallet.

The cardano-hw-cli, which is the project I'm wrapping for the transaction editor does not provide a convenient text API everything works based on files. Since that application holds no state key management becomes a nightmare as for every key the user must track 2 files and for every address it is 3 files. I have decided to perform the management in the editor because I can control state on top of that I have a running database for it.

I still face the main limitation to constantly create new files to feed them to cardano-hw-cli. I started to develop a more Unix like too where I can pipe data into the process and save the hassle of naming and keeping track of so many key files. The editor will have its own transmission protocol, certainly packets of json objects as the main Hardware wallet HID interfaces are in TypeScript. I'm essentially simplifying cardano-hw-cli to pipe the communication to the hardware wallet.

The address management on the editor side is currently architect ed to use the cardano-address binary from IOG.

The application now supports direct in wallet token minting/burning with CIP-25 token metadata. The latest blog post around this feature is https://arsmagna.xyz/post/20221104-web-tx-editor/ I additionally recorded a full demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ienVqXtNFEI

This month I finally released the minimal viable application and it is usable by anyone with an internet connection and a web wallet. This project suffered many times delay because of infrastructure, of how I wanted to expose the Cardano node to the general user. That was not possible ensuring the security of my Servers and to provide the user with a fast application. After I pivoted to the idea to assume the user has a web-wallet and that my service only provides the transaction editor on top of the user wallet I could finally focus on releasing a standalone application. You can try it here https://arsmagna.xyz/apps/web-tx-editor/

I also wrote a lengthy blogpost explaining my latest decisions on how to steward this project forward. Since then the application has received 2 minor updates around management of network (mainnet,testnet) and error validation for the min value for a transaction output. You can read that post here: https://arsmagna.xyz/post/20220912-web-tx-editor/

This project has been quite a challenge, yet now I enjoy more time resources to complete it, also the tools on the cardano ecosystem are improving and I have the opportunity to use that infrastructure.

I already completed the project. Documentation is live and project completion report is submitted too.

I have found it complicated when writing a specification to be able to test it. Documentation is not yet code and I'm trying to find a way to execute it. It has also been a process of trial and error to find the query wrappers in the cardano code.

As I stated on my previous report. The original ideal of providing a web interface for the cardano-cli seems to be flawed. It opens the system to much security issues. Certainly a better way is to build around the cardano-serialization-lib and to create transactions directly in the browser. That implies a complete redesign of the work, which is fine. I have worked mostly on reading how online wallets are working. The most inconvenient design problem is that wallets are designed for convenience, the editor is designed for flexibility, keeping flexibility high has a larger operational cost. I'm working on pivoting this work, certainly constraining the outcome as many things have changed on the way

The project is at the draft stage. I understand I need this report to start the test transaction for fund 8.

I'm still figuring out how to open it as a service, I wanted this tool to be an open interface to the cardano-cli. Yet I realize that such vision is not applicable for an online tool, I can't have such interface with the host operating system. This tool must evolve to provide a wallet integration. For such a lot of infrastructure changes. That is part of the experiment.

I spend quite a lot of time dealing how to manage data user relevant data and keeping organized for the user. This editor is not a service, but something the user runs on his computer, thus path to upgrade are harder and thus larger testing need to take place.

It would be really useful from the cardano-db-sync QA, which according to the release notes needs to do a full database sync before release to report their resource utilization measurements, time to sync, hardware specs and server configurations. It is rather complicated for people trying to work with it to have that little documentation and outdated readme files.

Project has recovered from my previous delay due to covid illness. I'm on track on the feature set promised on the catalyst proposal. On top of that I have run into the need to develop some extra features that arose from my use of the project that weren't part of the deliverables.

This project is already open sourced on https://github.com/Titan-C/cardano.el

Not for the moment I'm still building the host & codebase for the service.