Dot Leap 18
Substrate Marketplace, EVM on Acala, tools to mint NFTs on Kusama, the beginnings of XCMP, abusing batch transactions to force logic gates onto Kusama, and much more!
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We cover Polkadot, Kusama, Substrate, and all related Web 3.0 projects! Want your content featured? Tweet at the author!
RMRK app
Last week we launched RMRK.app, a set of standards on which to build NFTs on Kusama.
From edition 15 to 17, we asked readers to tweet about this newsletter in order to be eligible for the NFT, and we’ve reached out to all 37 tweeters. As soon as the recipients get back to us with their KSM addresses, they will be able to see them in the upcoming RMRK.app NFT wallet. Meanwhile, feel free to study:
website code
standards
tools repository
All in progress, but all moving ahead at a rapid pace!
Polkadot (v 0.8.23)
XCMP is coming!
An interesting discussion on spam and cost control across communication channels (both XCMP and HRMP).
Polkadot’s next runtime upgrade will, among other things, remove the Purchase pallet and clear its data from the chain.
Polkadot Governance
Motion 17 is a request from Chinese community 8btc for funding a meetup. It’s the mysterious Proposal 10 we mentioned in Dot Leap 17, now clarified. The proposal looks like it will fail according to current Councilor turnout, but this is because the Council proposed to reject it before there was some information about it.
The Polkadot runtime has been upgraded to 0.8.23 by means of council motion 13, referendum 3 and technical committee speed-up. Read the release notes for a full list of now active changes.
Kusama (v 0.8.23)
All is calm in Kusama land. Must have something to do with that new awesome councilor. 😏
🏛 Kusama Governance
Proposal 46 from AlexPromoTeam aims to get funding for informational videos on Polkadot and Kusama. The proposal is documented on Polkassembly.
Referendum 83 to increase the max number of validators to 700 looks like it’s passing.
Polkastats opened a discussion on funding their infrastructure and paying for maintenance of the service. Outcome looks favorable.
🔩 Core Stack
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
Substrate Marketplace - a proof of concept marketplace for Substrate devs to pick pallets from!
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
🚨 BREAKING CHANGE 🚨
Modules can now define fixed indices when being included as dependencies. The API has already been adapted for this new Metadata v12, but if you’re an ecosystem developer keep this upcoming breaking change in mind (next runtime upgrade, so a ways off)!
The beginnings of XCMP! <- PR with code.
A node’s metadata will now expose more information about multi-sig constants, making off-chain multi-sig calculations much easier and more intuitive.
Valid equivocation reports will now always be free, no fees needed.
Dock grabbed network prefixes 21 and 22 and DarkNetwork claimed prefix 17.
Polkadot can now be installed from debian and rpm repositories with something as simple as
apt-get installpolkadot (with caveats documented in the README).If you’ve ever wondered why it’s not allowed for
system set_codeto be called directly unless viasudothroughunchecked weight, here’s a good clarification by Shawn Tabrizi.The treasury can now be instantiated, i.e. there can be multiple treasuries per chain.
The collective pallet (used for Council votes) got a new default vote mode. Previously, it only supported Prime voting where abstaining votes took the vote of the prime as their choice. Now it also supports a mode where abstains switch to Aye if more than half the votes are Aye, or follow Prime otherwise.
Proof of Work Substrate chains like Kulupu now have a uniform fork-choice tie-breaker.
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.
Frontier got loads of progress this week - public keys are included in transactions now, Truffle compatibility has been increased by forcing chain ID to be always convertible to a number, error handling improvements, and some bug fixes.
Acala announced that they too will support Ethereum smart contracts on launch!
🛠 Tools
🚨 Something I didn’t know! 🚨
Polkadot-JS Apps allow you to toggle the “Only this network” switch when importing or creating an address.
This switch makes your account exist only on the network it was created on if set to “on”. Set it to off to make an account available on all networks you connect to.
Polkadot JS API (version 1.33) will now auto-retry a failed WebSocket connection after 1 second. It will also be a bit more verbose on WebSocket errors where no other info is provided.
Polkadot-JS Apps (version 0.58) will now show you a validator’s commission as a graph. This particular visualization isn’t too flattering to SNZPool who recently bumped their fee up to 100% and subsequently got kicked out of the validator set by their nominators:
You can now set any account as the payout destination during staking in Polkadot-JS Apps.
Polkadot-JS Apps now support derivation and account paths for Ledger devices, meaning a single Ledger can support an infinite number of accounts. Follow the wiki guide to learn how!
Polkadot-JS Extension will now offer to remember an account’s password for 15 minutes:
Substrate-api-sidecar is at version 0.17 which brings big changes to API endpoints - full release notes.
Open Web3 Stack’s Guardian is a tool that monitors for on-chain events and state changes and triggers a notification when they’re noticed. Use it to monitor your validator for commission changes, your address for deposits, or any number of things.
Diener - a tool for easy changing of Polkadot or Substrate dependency versions.
Subxt - a Rust library to submit extrinsics to a Substrate node via RPC.
Polka-store is a tool which scans a Substrate chain and stores balance-relevant transactions in an SQLite database. This database can be used in other projects to easily access the transaction data.
👨🎓 Education
Robert Habermeier’s thoughts on governance, self-interested societies, and rules.
The Polkadot Wiki now has a handy “copy code” button on every code snippet.
New tech ed explainers:
All about Governance Proxies
Transaction hashes in a Substrate chain are not unique. Here’s how to tell them apart and why this happens:
All about using Multi Sig wallets:
All about anonymous proxies:
🤝 Ecosystem
DappForce launched the second part of Subsocial infrastructure: web UI (https://app.subsocial.network), IPFS cluster to pin posted contents (texts and images), and offchain services that build personalized news feeds and notifications for Subsocial users. The next step in their roadmap is to launch a token faucet.
A comprehensive three-part overview of Polkadot by CryptoSeq.
A guide for nominators on how to pick validators by DerFredy.
A guide for nominators on how to pick validators by the multi-chain staking wallet Lunie.
In a craze of creativity, Bryan Chen from Acala created logic gates on Kusama by (ab)using the
utility.batchfunctionality, and successfully executing the complex mathematical operation of 1 + 1. Full writeup here!A nominator’s experience after 1 week of staking, plus guides on how to use the UI to see rewards and claim payouts:
👷♂️ Jobs
Until we hit 1000 subscribers (not there yet!), this section will only appear when there’s room in the newsletter (character limit). From 1000 subs onward, it will become permanent.
PureStake (the folks behind Moonbeam) have many openings. Experienced with Ethereum, or Rust, or just want to leave your mark? Apply!
📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars
Sept 17th: Decentralizing The Cloud: The Promise and Potential of Distributed Storage, a crowdcast (webinar). Speakers: Michelle Lee (Filecoin), Pavel Bains (Bluzelle), Leo Wang (Crust Network).
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 the banner 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! Many thanks to Bill Laboon for his daily digest, which helps me not miss some important updates!
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.