Carp has Been Integrated into Flint! What Does This Mean?
We are incredibly proud to announce that we have integrated Carp (a blockchain indexer developed here at dcSpark) into Flint wallet. This is just one of many steps along the road in the continuing development of Flint as we strive to keep Flint one of the most innovative, advanced, and user-friendly wallets in the ecosystem.
So what is Carp? How does it compare to other similar tools in the ecosystem? And what does this all mean for Flint?
What is Carp?
Carp is a highly-flexible and modular indexer for the Cardano blockchain. It saves its data to a Postgres database (SQL) and is designed as a replacement for core Cardano component db-sync. What does this mean?
Blockchain indexers sort all the data on the blockchain, tens if not hundreds of gigabytes, into a searchable format for dApps, wallets, and other applications to query. This data organization makes it easier for them to find the specific information they need to serve their users. Not all indexers are created equal. Carp is specifically designed to be flexible and modular. This flexibility allows dApp and wallet developers to organize data the way they want it organized and to search that data, running multiple independent tasks simultaneously, to receive the information they’re looking for much quicker. Carp does not store off-chain data or the ledger state, which contains information like reward history. Also, it should be known that Carp only provides CBOR and not parsed data, so it is not useful for those that do not have a good implementation of Cardano’s binary specification.
Carp is open source and funded by a grant from Project Catalyst. The Cardano community voted on it, and we are incredibly thankful to all those that voted for the proposal and the flexibility they have enabled us to provide for developers on Cardano. We have entered a proposal into Project Catalyst Fund 9 asking for funds to continue the development and maintenance of Carp, to keep improving it now and into the future.
Carp is an open-source project, as promised in our original Catalyst Proposal. This means that all developers of Cardano dApps and wallets can use it to enhance the speed of their data querying! Some projects already using Carp include Spectrum (ex-ErgoDEX) and NMKR (formerly NFT Maker).
For a more detailed rundown on how Carp functions, its benefits, and its use-cases, read this article by Sebastien Guillemot.
What Does This Mean for Flint?
Flint is a user-friendly, advanced light wallet for the Cardano blockchain, available as a browser extension and on mobile for both iOS and Android devices. Since we integrated Carp into Flint, users have experienced up to 25x faster transaction history load times, significantly improving the experience for users of the Flint browser extension and the iOS versions of Flint, and soon for Android. Carp makes Flint faster because it only indexes the properties needed to query blockchain data. The days of waiting for your transaction history to load are now in the past!
Here is what one user commented about it:
This user mentioned the importance of Carp:
Finally, another user who tried it out had this to say:
It is important to note that NFT previews are pulled from their storage location, typically the IPFS (Inter Planetary File System). Carp only indexes and retrieves on-chain data from the Cardano blockchain. This means that Carp does not, unfortunately, improve the loading speed of NFT previews.
Flint Developments
We have been working hard to continue improving Flint in addition to the integration of Carp. We recently created mobile versions of the wallet for Android and iOS, integrated the Milkomeda Bridge Transaction browser, and added a fully open mobile dApp browser, enabling you to interact with any Cardano dApp from your mobile device.
We are constantly innovating and improving the Flint wallet to ensure it is one of the ecosystem’s most advanced and user-friendly wallets. Future Flint developments currently in the pipeline include Bluetooth support for Ledger Nano X on mobile and the integration of transaction unwrapping for Milkomeda into both the browser extension and mobile versions of Flint. Find out more about recent updates outside of Carp and all these upcoming updates in more detail here.
Continuing to Innovate
We will continue to advance and innovate Flint to ensure it is one of the ecosystem’s fastest and most advanced wallets, helping drive adoption. We continue to contribute to blockchain interoperability and offer one of the best user experiences. To keep up-to-date with the development of both Flint and Carp, follow the Flint and dcSpark socials!
Flint
Website: flint-wallet.com
Twitter: @FlintWallet
Follow dcSpark!
Twitter: @dcspark_io
Medium: /dcSpark
Discord: /dcSpark
GitHub: /dcSpark
Website: dcspark.io
