Dot Leap 10
Polkadot becomes decentralized, new Parachain demos, Telegram network-tracker bots, and so many awesome tools!
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The content in this newsletter is the author’s own opinion and not in any way endorsed by the Web3 Foundation. This is an independent and unaffiliated effort.
Polkadot (v 0.8.10)
An almost-single-line setup of a local Polkadot node and wallet UI by Fred, Parity’s CTO.
🎉🎉🎉🎉 PoS launch!
The network is starting with 20 validators to keep the lowest-backed one reasonably economically involved (no sense in validating if you have only 1 DOT behind your account) and this number will be increased through governance as more nominations come in. Annoucement post here.
The current state of staking is visualized on this dashboard from p2p.org:
A demo of tokens being sent to the Relay Chain from a Parachain and back
A demo of message sending between two parachains
Updates
If you specify sentry nodes with
--sentry-nodes <sentry node multiaddr>and--sentry <validtor node multiaddr>you do not need to duplicate the--reserved-nodesflag
A new runtime was Sudo-ed into Polkadot. This update contains the following new features:
Generalized proxies: you can set a proxy type (Any, NonTransfer, Governance, Staking) and each one is allowed to perform some subset of calls on behalf of the primary account. So if you set a staking proxy for your stash account, it could call
bond,bondExtra,setController, basically the stash account calls, but could not call the controller account calls likevalidate,setKey,nominate.For the technically-minded, here’s the mapping of allowed calls per proxy type.
Identities pallet has been enabled, allowing anyone to register an on-chain identity for a deposit of around 0.2 DOT. Feeling lost? This guide on setting up an identity will be helpful. Additionally, the first registrar was sudo-ed into Polkadot and you can now have Chevdor/Will verify your identity.
Once Governance launches on Polkadot, the Council will have the ability to move people’s DOT claims. This is already happening on Kusama - see Motion 160.
🚨 Something I didn’t know
To connect to multimple telemetry servers at once, use the flag multiple times:
--telemetry-url 'wss://telemetry-backend.w3f.community/submit1' --telemetry-url 'wss://telemetry.polkadot.io/submit/1'If person A bids on a parachain slot in an auction for year 1, and person B for that same slot on year 2, person A has their tokens locked for 1 year only, but person B for the full two years. It makes sense, I just never thought about it too much.
Kusama (v 0.8.10)
⚠ Updates
The referendum to update the validator count to 350 has been enacted - Kusama is operating at 350 validators.
🏛 Kusama Governance
A more detailed digest of the governance during last week of May is here and the week of June 8 is documented here.
Referendum 56 to add a new registrar into Kusama has failed due to some last minute high-convinction nay-sayers! Referendum 58 to add Council Member Kevin Li as a registrar shared its fate.
Referendum 59 was hastened into the runtime by the Council and Technical Committee. It was not verified by a tool like srtool, nor was it adequately explained.
The update was a companion upgrade for Polkadot - in this edge case Polkadot got these features before Kusama - but in my opinion this approach does not cast a good light on Kusama’s governance process. With that in mind, I will be creating a Polkadot Standards Proposal for runtime upgrade submission guidelines - stay tuned for next Dot Leap.
Referendum 61 passed, expedited by council and technical committee, modifying deposit values from runtime v2008, making Multi-sigs cheaper to use. Typically, multi-sig accounts need a deposit per pending operation because storing operations on chains costs storage. Once a multi-sig operation clears, the deposit is returned. This upgrade makes these deposits palatable again (used to be 9KSM for 2/3 multisig).
Referendum 62 is being voted on to increase the number of validator slots on Kusama to 400.
Polkawallet submitted a treasury proposal to further improve their amazing mobile Flutter-based wallet. The proposal has passed.
After the successful completion of Milestone 2, the LocalCoinSwap team has submitted a new Treasury Proposal for funding the next one. This has already been approved.
On Treasury-pallet Bounty Extension: the community has been working on a specification of the open questions for this extension after the last summary on Polkassembly - here is the current specification [google doc]. Bryan Chen implemented all of the open points and it's ready for initial review before diving into benchmarks and weights.
A new Treasury proposal is being prepared by Forgingblock for developing a decentralized payment gateway for Kusama.
Council Motion 160 moves a KSM allocation to a new address as requested by the owner. The entity contacted the Web3 Foundation for not being able to claim their KSM allocation due to using a Gnosis Multisig wallet back in 2017 for the crowdsale: the problem was they were unable to sign messages from the Multisig in order to claim the allocation. The council has approved this motion.
🔩 Core Stack (v2.0.0-rc3)
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
Substrate v.2.0.0-rc3 is out!
Runtime
Introduce stacked filtering (#6273)
Allow "anonymous" proxied accounts (#6236)
Allow over-weight collective proposals to be closed (#6163)
Fix Election when ForceNone V1 (#6166)
Client
Make transaction pool prune transactions only of canonical blocks (#6123)
Rename all the election operations (#6245)
Sentry nodes and validator nodes also imply reserved (#6251)
Fix peerset not filtering incoming connections in reserved-only (#6249)
Use Subscription Manager from
jsonrpc-pubsub(#6208)Add a Substrate networking Grafana dashboard template (#6171)
Add subkey inspect-node-key (#6153)
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
Multisig functionality has been moved into its own pallet: Multisig. If you’re building UIs that interact with Multisigs, make sure you detect where the functionality is first. Some chains will still have it in Utility.
Anonymous proxy accounts and general proxy accounts are now a thing. Explained on the Proxy page in the wiki.
Frozen indices are coming. These will let you freeze an index to always point to your account. Traditionally, when an account was reaped, its index slot was opened up and could be claimed by another account. Sending tokens to an index could therefore result in tokens being sent to the wrong address. With frozen indices, you permanently pay a fee to claim it, but then it’s yours for good.
The Polkadot Implementers' Guide has been split from one long file to an mdbook.
A reserved prefix (20) for Stafi mainnet has been added to Substrate.
A "process start time, measured in seconds since the epoch" metric has been added.
Events are now emitted for balance reserve/unreserve function calls.
Storage parameter types, which allow either reading from storage or providing a default value, have been added to Substrate.
You can now spawn Substrate nodes with temporary base paths using the --tmp flag. This will create a temporary directory for a node’s database and keys which gets auto-deleted when the node is killed, letting you easily spawn multiple nodes with the same command. Useful for demos and tutorials.
A new Prometheus metric to tell you how long your node’s been running.
The node template now also has the ability to run with the
--wasm-execution=compiledflag, which speeds up sync times dramatically.A new unsafe RPC call,
system_dryRunhas been added, which allows you to execute an extrinsic and see what it would do without actually executing it.Substrate now allows IPC RPC calls (formerly only callable via TCP).
You should now use /dns/ instead of /dns4/ in multiaddresses - /dns/ will accept either IPv6 or IPv4.
Vesting has been updated such that a root origin can now force an arbitrary account to vest funds for another account. This would require a Sudo call, or a referendum.
A new pallet for Atomic Swaps has been added to FRAME. This supports atomic time-locked swaps between two Substrate-based chains that both implement this pallet.
🛠 Tools
Polkadot JS Apps have a custom translation interface you can use to localize the Apps UI!
Polkadot JS Apps are at version 0.45.2 which comes with pre-built Electron and Docker images. You can now easily download and run the Apps UI locally on your computer without building from source! IPFS and IPNS now also host Apps automatically, and can be visited via {kusama,polkadot,westend}.dotapps.io 💖
Polkassembly now has signaling polls by both the Council and the Community. This is useful to gauge interest on a proposal before committing it to the chain:
A new Grafana dashboard setup by Phil Lucsok:
Ryabina made Telegram bots for monitoring interesting events on Kusama and Polkadot. Link to Polkadot bot. Link to Kusama bot. What’s more, the bot also lets you track nominations on your validator in real time by going to
Advanced -> Staking -> Extrinsics -> nominate -> FILTERS -> targets -> Enter Accound ID -> Create Alert:
Automate your validator payouts with Polkadot Payouts.
Polkawallet demonstrated social account recovery in-app. This is a method for retrieving lost account access by designating other addresses which can help you transfer assets from the locked account to a new one.
👨🎓 Education
How can Kusama and Polkadot both run from the same source code?
Polkadot for Humans
🤝 Ecosystem
There’s a comprehensive list of Substrate-friendly wallets on the Polkadot Wiki now, if you’re looking for one to use as a daily driver.
Acala developed an Oracle pallet which let you put off-chain data on-chain. Useful for price feeds and other third party information.
Figment launched a Managed Controller service. This is a paid service where you set them as the controller of your stash, so they can do the validation operations for you, optimizing your returns. Very handy for people who want a hands-off staking approach.
Swiss Staking put together a post detailing how the inflation rate and validator rewards work out at certain staking levels in the network.
P2P Economy documented the three reasons to stake on Polkadot as soon as possible
Polkapulse is a wonderful new visualization of time periods on Kusama:
An extremely comprehensive list of Substrate and Polkadot related resources
StakingRewards now shows Kusama information
That's it for this week - I hope this was as useful for you to read as it was for me to write! Special thanks to Bill for his Daily Digest!
The Dot Leap is put together by Bruno Škvorc. Got any links for me for the next edition? Find me on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at bruno@bitfalls.com.