Dot Leap 12
Ethereum on Substrate! Plus: many videos, tutorials on reading identity data from the chain, $7500 tattoos, and more!
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We cover Polkadot, Kusama, Substrate, and all related Web 3.0 projects!
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.
Looking for human-friendly explainers and tutorials on how to get started building tools and UIs for Substrate chains? Check out our parent site: DotLeap.com
[Featured] DotLeap Tutorial: Reading Polkadot and Kusama Identities
I’m building an identity scanner / identity directory for the Hackusama hackathon, and I figured a tutorial on how to read identities from the chain would be useful. I encourage you to take a look at this tutorial and find out how to get output like in the image below:
[Featured] DotLeap Tutorial: Building a Page for Converting Between Address Formats
W3F tech ed intern Kirsten wrote up her first guest tutorial for DotLeap.com documenting how to extend our address filter tutorial. The end result is a page in Polkadash which loads your PolkadotJS accounts and allows you to turn them into any other network’s format with just a dropdown selection.
Polkadot (v 0.8.14.)
👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇
🚨 A new DOT Redenomination vote is up. The proposal is described in this post. The discussion is happening here. For reference, the previous discussion (from the vote when it happened on Kusama) is available here.
👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇
If you generated your original Polkadot ICO Ethereum wallet with Parity signer, you might have to use this method to recover it:
And if you’re claiming post-genesis, this is the video you need:
Kusama (v 0.8.14.)
The $7500 tattoo
Not much chaos in Kusama lately. I think it’s safe to say we’re well beyond the chaos phase. What started as an experiment and a canary network for Polkadot matured into its own ecosystem with its own rules (and breaking of those rules) and its own brand of enthusiasm.
One notable event was the candidacy and acceptance of a new member into the Kappa Sigma Mu human-blockchain society. The member had to get a Kusama tattoo to get in, and was rewarded with 1000 KSM. The picked tattoo design was the one in the bottom right, and it encodes to Gavin Wood’s pubkey:
🏛 Kusama Governance
Detailed version in the Governance Digest for week of July 6th!
Referendum 70 has been voted in. Among other things, this will fix the bug of the tx-pool returning the same transaction multiple times.
There is an interesting proposal from Jam to start a slow and measured push to > 1000 validators in an automated way, similar to how Polkadot went from 20 → 197 validators. It is currently passing.
🔩 Core Stack
BABE equivocation reporting is now activated across the board - in Substrate and all three runtimes (Kusama, Polkadot, Westend)
Basic up / down message passing has been added to the Polkadot runtime. This is a form of simplified XCMP with all message passing going on through the relay chain.
A custom gossip system for the Statement Distribution system has been implemented.
You can now easily register parachains on your local Relay Chain for testing using a new shell script from the Cumulus repo.
A PR was merged that adds a new trait
WeightInfoto all the pallets that have benchmarks. For now, this trait is not directly used by the runtime, so if you’re a Substrate-user it is good enough that you update your runtime configuration so that the pallets simply havetype WeightInfo = ();Soon, this trait will allow you to configure weights specific to your runtime configuration.
A bug was fixed in ink! which allowed a contract to be killed without a tombstone by pushing it below a subsistence balance amount. The only way to kill a contract without a tombstone is by using
ext_terminate.A Poll pallet has been added which allows for simple polling functionality on-chain. This is already in use on Polkadot JS Apps to vote for the DOT redenomination proposal and will likely be swiftly removed once this vote is over.
The scheduler can now schedule calls to happen based on relative block distance (i.e., “execute in 100 blocks”), not just at an absolute block height (i.e. “execute at block 500000”). This is useful when scheduling enactments for which you’re not sure when they’ll be voted in.
Ethereum Compatibility
As Moonbeam and Parity’s Frontier mature, I believe it’s worth having a separate section discussing Ethereum compatibility with Substrate and Polkadot in general. The potential for collaboration between the two ecosystems is immense.
Moonbeam released the docs for their alpha code. You can now test running Ethereum code on a Substrate chain of your own!
Parity Frontier added some types that allow you to use Polkadot JS Apps to inspect blocks that contain EVM transactions in Frontier-powered chains.
🛠 Tools
Polkadot JS Apps are at version 0.49.1! Go download an Electron version or fire up your own IPFS clone!
Sidecar, the HTTP API for reading Substrate data from chains, is at version 0.11.2, including types for the new Polling pallet.
Polkadot JS Apps will now show you a Withdraw option while staking or pending an unboding amount, so you can easily access your unlocked funds.
New releases of Substrate API server and PANIC Monitoring tool: https://github.com/SimplyVC/polkadot_api_server/releases/tag/v1.23.1 https://github.com/SimplyVC/panic_polkadot/releases/tag/v2.1.0 along with an installation tutorial:
a new tool, Lunie, is coming out of beta. It’s a dashboard for various blockchains - including Polkadot and Kusama - which lets you see stats about your account, validators you’re nominating, their stats, and more. Check it out - you can even use it in view-only mode, without providing a private key:
👨🎓 Education
Bill and Alistair from W3F explain shared security in Polkadot:
🤝 Ecosystem
Chevdor writes about using his Polkadot registrar with offline keys.
Joe Petrowski interviewed about the decentralized web:
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.