Dot Leap 17
Kusama-powered NFTs, a parachain launch roadmap, tooling updates all around, a crowdcast for deploying Ethereum apps on Moonbeam, and more!
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We cover Polkadot, Kusama, Substrate, and all related Web 3.0 projects!
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NFTs on Kusama via RMRK.APP!
Tip: if you need a refresher on what NFTs are, this article is all you need.
As announced in the previous edition of Dot Leap, those who share this tweet qualify for a special kind of NFT on Kusama. The NFTs are now live-ish via RMRK.app!
The Dot Leap NFT will allow you special access to swag, early releases of any media (Podcasts, tutorials), and voting power in some decisions Dot Leap (this newsletter) and DotLeap.com (the platform) will need to make in the future.
To find out how the NFT works, please go to rmrk.app! It’s a work in progress but pretty far along already!
Want in on the action? Follow @bitfalls and send out this tweet!
Polkadot (v 0.8.23)
🔗 PARACHAINS 🔗
Rococo now has 8 parachains connected along with an additional candidate. Polkadot JS Apps UI now allows you to explore 7 of the 8 chains (change the network, all parachains are under Testnet→Rococo). If you are interested how far away parachains are, see this roadmap.
Polkadot Governance
Motion 10 rejected an erroneous proposal treasury proposal. The proposer re-submitted the same erroneous proposal to setCode. It looks like the UI has a long way to go to make it clear that this is not how things are changed on-chain.
Proposal 1 is still undefined and no one knows what it’s supposed to do. Curiously, it’s being seconded by some accounts.
A discussion of bumping the validator count and the approaches to take has been opened on Polkassembly. Meanwhile, with only a few days to go, it looks like Referendum 2 to bump the max number of validators in Polkadot is passing.
A discussion about funding Centrifuge’s maintenance of a go-substrate-rpc-client (GSRPC) library for Substrate based chains. The proposal was submitted as Treasury Proposal 7 and passed.
Motion 13 is submitted: Polkadot runtime update to v23. Specs of the runtime can be found here. The motion is currently blocked by a pending audit of the new codec for NPoS selection, as you can see in the release notes. As soon as the audit passes, the technical committee will speed up this proposal and get it on-chain.
Motion 14 was Polkascan’s Treasury proposal for maintenance of their Python libraries for Substrate. It was approved.
The Encointer team’s proposal for a grant to continue the self-sovereign identity and local currencies parachain(s) was up for discussion and passed as motion 15.
Motion 16 dealing with the reversal of Web3Italy validator slashes in eras 69 and 70 has passed. You will find a short summary with the main points from the discussion on Polkadot Direction channel here.
Proposal 3 is an unknown submitter’s attempt to move an unclaimed DOT amount to another Ethereum address.
Treasury proposal 10 has not been clarified by its submitter. The beneficiary is attempting to pay himself 1500 DOT.
Proposals 4-7 are attempts to raise the max validator count to 299, 399, 499 and 599 respectively. The proposer has not come forward with details or metrics to substantiate the proposals.
Over a dozen tips are pending approval in the treasury.
Kusama (v 0.8.23)
How to Submit a Kusama Treasury Proposal
Looking to submit a proposal to the Kusama Treasury? The Council isn’t an easy group to convince - make sure your proposal is up to standards by following these guidelines!
🏛 Kusama Governance
v2023 runtime has been voted in and sped up via technical committee. It was in Motion 213, Referendum 82. Among other things, it included a bump to the number of council members and runners up - both at 19 now!
Proposal #32 (referendum 81) to upgrade the runtime code contains a hex-encoded suggestion in ASCII for changing commission calculations, instead of actual runtime code 😬
Some tips have been proposed and endorsed. As Council member, I published my activity report card here. Thank you for your vote!
Phala Network’s treasury proposal to build milestone 1 of a darkpool on Kusama has passed in motion 212. Full info on the darkpool proposal in this separate thread.
There are 3 proposals in queue aiming to increase the number of validators to 700 (proposal 33), 900 (proposal 34) and 1000 (proposal 35).
🔩 Core Stack
This tracking PR will let you keep track of the changes currently being developed for elections (validator and Council).
Prime candidate member election has been improved.
Staking payouts can now be sent to any account (not just controller or stash).
Valid equivocation reports (for BABE and GRANDPA) will have tx fees refunded.
Scheduled times can now be a relative value (for when you don't know when a proposal will actually be enacted).
The light client database and the full client database will soon be able to coexist in the same location, preventing the need for two separate databases for these two types of nodes on the same machine.
A Prometheus alert was added to the built-in Substrate Prometheus setup which reacts to too high numbers of open file descriptors.
Next-generation staking and election is under heavy discussion, with several alterations already being prepared.
Due to heavy oversubscription, there is an open PR for increasing the max number of nominators per validator from 64 to 128 in Kusama / 256 in Polkadot.
Manual seal is now consensus-agnostic, allowing developers to forge "fake" new BABE blocks for testing purposes.
NPoS elected set size is about to be dramatically reduced, slowing storage bloat.
GRANDPA prevotes and precommits have now been added to telemetry.
Dock has claimed network prefixes 21 and 22.
Valid equivocation reports will now always be fee-free.
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.
September 21st: Deploying an Ethereum Smart Contract to Moonbeam, live follow-along Crowdcast as we port a raffle built on Ethereum using standard Eth tools to Moonbeam’s testnet.
November 6th: Sign up for TruffleCon and see how easy it is to use Truffle with Moonbeam to deploy and automate your smart contracts as if you never left Eth!
Also, Moonbeam is hiring!
🛠 Tools
PokadotJS API now has built-in support for historic queries wherein it auto-injects past metadata when dealing with blocks from a previous runtime. All this means is that it’s *much* easier to query past state from archive nodes now! The queries are a bit slower now, but to speed that up support for hard-coded chain-upgrade tracking was added, so the API doesn’t naively inject metadata into each block, instead it knows in advance when it will have to do so.
Sidecar v0.15.0 is now out. Since v0.13.0 a few new endpoints have been introduced. See the README.md for more info.
Hydra is a recent Hackusama entry and a smooth way to provide powerful GraphQL queries to app developers over any Substrate blockchain’s state and its history.
The Polkadot JS Apps (v 0.57.1) (now available in Italian too) will now show how many tokens will be burned in the next Spending Period’s burn. More info on burns and how treasury works in the wiki!
There will no longer be a toggle to vote for Aye/Nay on the Democracy screen, and no default value. Instead, a voter needs to be explicit:
The tips UI now has a “fighter jet” icon which is a shortcut for “just match median and send tx”.
The Apps UI will also allow for canceling individual slashes, not all pending slashes. Useful when dealing with collateral damage as in Polkadot Motion 16.
Shawn Tabrizi’s new tool to quickly launch Polkadot testnets
Polkassembly now lets you tag users in discussions.
👨🎓 Education
Curious about time periods on Polkadot? They are now all clarified in the Wiki.
🤝 Ecosystem
Subsocial has been added to Polkadot JS Apps network selector.
Subscan’s 0.3.5. update - one of the best block explorers for Substrate-based chains just got better
Ledger support has arrived - the process of using your Polkadot or Kusama account with the Ledger hardware wallet is documented on the wiki.
StaFi, a Substrate-based network which allows stakers to access liquidity of their staked tokens, has launched their mainnet.
Phala, a confidential smart contract network built on Substrate, are currently running a parachain on Rococo.
📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars
Sept 21st - SIGN UP - we'll go through a hands-on introduction to deploying Eth apps on Moonbeam and we'll cover some caveats you should know about when doing this!
Sept 22nd - European Blockchain Convention - panel on the Web3 future featuring Bruno Škvorc, Alex Siman, Alfonso De La Rocha, and Carolina Velasquez
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 here to learn about my candidacy!
Note: your tokens will be locked in democracy, but are still usable for staking, referendum voting, 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! Special thanks to Bill Laboon’s daily digest for alerting me to many of these novelties!
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.