Dot Leap 16
Kusama-based NFTs, cross-chain smart contract invocation success, Polkadot redenominated, a tech demo of Ethereum on Substrate, and more!
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Follow @bitfalls and send out this tweet and you’ll be entered into a raffle to win one of 100 special edition Dot Leap NFTs deployed on Kusama (coming soon!) - the draw will happen on September 4th (delay from last time, sorry!) and the announcement and NFT distribution will happen in the next edition of Dot Leap!
NFT?
(design might change)
The NFT will allow you special access to swag, early releases of any media (Podcasts, tutorials), and voting power in some decisions Dot Leap (the newsletter) and DotLeap.com (the platform) will need to make in the future - more on that next time.
The NFTs are implemented on Kusama as remarks, so “hacks”, but they work well enough until we mature and replace them with the real thing™.
Polkadot (v 0.8.22)
🎉🎉🎉 The first non-Parity non-W3F parachains have connected to the Rococo testnet! Ful breakdown and announcement from Plasm in this article!
Soon after, Robonomics and Mandala followed!
Robonomics has joined Rococo 1st parachains party! 🥳 @Polkadot community now can use #IoT #connectivity functions 🤖 with @Plasm_Network #smartcontracts and @AcalaNetwork #DeFi 🤙🎉🎉🎉
👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇
Polkadot transfers are enabled, and redenomination has occurred! The DOT balance of each DOT holder has increased by 100x. Here’s why this happened and what it means!
Other updates
A bunch of initial parachain prometheus metrics have been added in!
Rococo got a pallet for easily proposing parachains to be added.
Early experiments in calling a smart contract parachain from another chain on Rococo have been successful!
Vote for a better tomorrow!
I’m running for Council Member on both Polkadot and Kusama! Read more about why and what I can bring to the table in this post or click the banner below - the post also explains how to vote in screenshots. Remember, voting costs nothing but a transaction fee - and can be done with locked and staked funds - but has the potential to change the landscape forever!
Polkadot Governance
🚨 With the application of the new runtime which activated DOT transfers, some new features crept in as well. Most notably, the Council terms are now 7 days in duration, which means anyone who’s elected has 7 days to prove their worth to the protocol. Be vigilant, vote the inactive members out, and vote for active members instead!
The anonymous and undefined proposal from last time is still pending on Polkadot. No new information was added. Know the proposer? Ping them!
Council motion 7 has approved treasury proposal 0 for the development of a Truffle-like environment for the Substrate ecosystem. Developer tools are incredibly important - let’s hope the team can deliver!
Referendum 2 suggests upping the validator limit to 236 from 197. It is currently almost unanimously passing.
A discussion on reducing the existential deposit is active on Polkassembly. Due to the redenomination, it is now 1 DOT, which is too much.
A discussion on scheduled increase of validator capacity is open on Polkassembly. However, mirroring Kusama in this might not be the best idea until we have parachain functionality enabled.
Kusama (v 0.8.22)
Kusama has been chugging along nicely, with a new suggestion in the air on defining the minimum desired stake in the system and auto-modifying the number of validators based on those numbers. Chime in on Polkassembly or look at the first version of the code here.
⚠ Updates
Participating in on-chain governance should not punish the participants. Shawn Tabrizi of Parity opened a discussion issue on the topic of removing voting fees for Council members.
The number of Council seats and runners-up have been increased (to 19 each) in the codebase; if approved, this will be seen in the next runtime upgrade.
🏛 Kusama Governance
Read the digest of the weeks August 9th and 16th in this post or look below for individual up-to-date entries.
Motion 207 for the fifth and final milestone of the - Non-Custodial P2P Trading for KSM by LocalCoinSwap has passed. 2300 KSM (~30k USD) are pending delivery.
Motion 208 for milestone 2 and 3 of a decentralized Kusama payment gateway has passed. 500 KSM (~6500 USD) are pending delivery.
Motion 209 cancels the auto-bump of validator capacity following this performance metrics discussion. It has been enacted after being sped up by the Technical Committee. Based on a new report, the network will move to either a manual increase mechanism or an automatic increase mechanism, as outlined here.
Treasury proposal 44 is up for vote: develop a configurable, reccurring lottery system that can be used to drive participation in Kusama. Details on Polkassembly, original idea here.
🔩 Core Stack
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
Support for sourced metrics added. This allows feeding existing counters and gauges into prometheus without having to duplicate them as
prometheus-crate counters or gauges and without having to declare counters as gauges or make extra gymnastics with the counter API.An issue was filed to restrict validator commission changes, so that validators can not, for example, set commission to 0% to gain nominators and then change commission to 100%.
Time-delayed proxies have been merged and will be included in the next runtime upgrade. This feature allows for a proxy type which needs to announce its action ahead of time, preventing account hijacks at the blockchain UX level.
Event parameter names are now documented in each event’s doc block. This should make consuming chain events through third party apps much easier!
Subkey had a bug where it didn’t respect the network parameter when outputting a generated or imported address. This patch fixed it.
You can now query the indices pallet for deposits placed when claiming an index.
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.
Snowfork is a Polkadot <-> Ethereum bridge under development.
Moonbeam had a tech demo, showing how to interact with Moonbeam and send tokens around and deploy contracts through traditional Ethereum tools. Recording available here.
🛠 Tools
Following a significant redesign in version 0.55.1, the Polkadot JS Apps UI sidebar has moved to the top of the screen into new, more readable categories.
Polkadot JS Apps will now also default to no-lockup conviction in democracy.
Some people got an unpleasant surprise trying to move their tokens and finding that they’re locked - this happened because the vote option defaulted to a 1x conviction vote which, on Polkadot, defaults to 28 days after the voting period on a referendum ends.
PolkadotJS Apps now come with a chain events calendar! Visualize future chain events at a glance!
The VSCode Substrate Extension now supports Accounts and Contracts for even easier local building and debugging! Docs here!
Substrate API Sidecar, the HTTP wrapper for many handy RPC calls to a Substrate node, is now at version 0.14. and offers a new staking-payouts endpoint for detailed output of past and pending payouts of any account.
Polkassembly now shows who’s a Council member with an appropriate little icon:
👨🎓 Education
If you are interested in asking for a change to the network on your behalf, this must be done via on-chain governance. The wiki now has a guide for doing so.
How to pick validators to nominate:
🤝 Ecosystem
DappForce released Subsocial node v0.4.0 and launched its betanet: https://telemetry.polkadot.io/#/Subsocial. Please note that the betanet is not a testnet. It can turn into a mainnet if it survives the evolution. Currently, the network is running as PoA, and it's planned to upgrade it to PoS in the future.
The Subsocial team has also signed the second technical grant contract with Web3 Foundation which, among other things, describes adding support for Kusama's Treasury in Subsocial.
The Web3 Foundation is looking for a team to build a public p2p auto-funded infrastructure system. The details of the potential grant are documented here. Completing this grant would provide the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem with a decentralized perpetual public infrastructure.
A community member’s experience with the tipping system in Kusama.
Evan Van Ness’ critique of Polkadot’s governance process.
Don’t forget to vote!
Your vote only costs a TX fee (a few cents) but it can change the protocol (both Kusama and Polkadot - depending where you vote for me!) for ever - good governance is responsible governance! Click the banner to learn more!
Note: your tokens will be locked, but are still usable for staking, referendums, etc. If you want to transfer them, just cancel the vote and they’re free, no strings attached.
That's it for this week - I hope this was as useful for you to read as it was for me to write!
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.
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