Dot Leap 19
ENS adds KSM and DOT addresses, ink! smart contract language v3 is coming, new treasury mechanism: bounties, Moonbeam launches testnet, and more!
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KSM and DOT on ENS (Ethereum Name Service)
ENS has recently added support for KSM and DOT addresses. Once wallets update their ENS integration it will become possible to send someone DOT or KSM through an address like bruno.eth rather than a long and unwieldy CpjsLDC1JFyrhm3ftC9Gs4QoyrkHKhZKtK7YqGTRFtTafgp.
To make the process of adding your DOT and KSM addresses to ENS as simple as possible, the Web3 Foundation has published both a written guide in the wiki, and a video guide. Both go through the full process from start to finish.
Some reasons why you might want to use ENS:
no typos - a Substrate address is far from user friendly. Not only is it easy to remember something as simple as bruno.eth, but it’s also resistant to typo errors.
a single ENS domain lets you register several different chain addresses, as well as IPFS or HTTPS links for a feeling of that decentralized web.
an ENS domain is yours forever (for as long as you pay the renewal fees) - no one can take it from you, and no one can stop people from using it.
Polkadot (v 0.8.24)
Polkadot Governance
Polkadot Referendum #2 (which would increase the number of validators from from 197 to 236) did NOT pass.
There was a new active referendum #4, about which no information has been added to Polkassembly to explain it. The Council reacted by issuing Motion 19 to emergency-cancel it.
Motion 18 to approve funding for 8btc’s China meetup has passed.
Treasury proposal 12 is the first of a series of quarterly proposals on Polkadot network from PolkaStats. The motion covers 3 months of hardware operational costs. This submission represents half of the costs: the other half is to be covered by the Kusama treasury (approved). The proposal has been motioned as 21 and 22, reject and approve respectively and passed.
Motion 20, approved by Council and fast tracked by Technical Committee, upgraded Polkadot’s runtime to v24. It went from not on chain to enacted in 48 hours.
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!
Kusama (v 0.8.24)
⚠ Updates
m-of-n Account Recovery is now available on both Westend and Kusama.
🏛 Kusama Governance
Referendum #83 aimed to increase the number of validators to 700 but failed to pass. Referendum #85 takes it up a notch and shoots for 900 validators.
Motion 214, treasury proposal 47 looking to fund Polkastats’ infrastructure has passed.
Referendum #84 passed, expedited by Technical Committee - it updated Kusama’s runtime to version 2024 which, among other things, allows multiple instances of Treasury on a single chain and more nominators per validator.
A new motion is submitted to Kusama treasury for the first milestone of the Validator Resource Center and Ranking Website.
🔩 Core Stack
🚨🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 Substrate 2.0 is out! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🚨
We’re finally at that point - Substrate 2.0 is out and ready for public use. It’s been a long road, and after 6 release candidate versions and many breaking changes, the next generation of the world’s most flexible blockchain development framework is out.
Almost all the tutorials and recipes on Substrate.dev have been updated and the stragglers will be hunted down mercilessly within a week. Go forth and dive in - you can expect more stability and fewer breaking changes from now on!
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ink! v3 is approaching release - so much so that examples have already been updated to use the new version!
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You can now set a fixed index for a pallet in
construct runtime. This is a breaking change but a highly beneficial one as it prevents breaking when pallets change in the future. Details in the linked PR!The bump to increase maximum nominators per validator has been merged. In the next runtime upgrade, Polkadot and Kusama will support 256 nominators per validator as opposed to the current 64.
The SS58 registry PR has been merged. You can now easily see and query which network prefixes have been registered. Chain builders, please make a PR to update your information.
The Substrate repo now has an SS58 registry with additional details about each network which grabbed a prefix.
The Bounties pallet has been completed and merged! Hopefully it’ll land in Kusama’s runtime soon and bounties will become a first class citizen on the network!
1. A new governance tool finally merged into Substrate: github.com/paritytech/sub… Hopefully it should land into the @kusamanetwork and @Polkadot soon. With this powerful bounty feature, the council of both networks will have another way to spend the treasury effectively.
There is now a Prometheus metric for monitoring number or RPC calls over HTTP and WS.
Some progress is being made on code that’ll enable reserve-backed stablecoins on Substrate-based chains that implement the Assets pallet.
The Generic Asset pallet has been removed from Substrate due to lack of maintenance.
The type used to denote how many references an account have has been updated to u32 from u8. This paves the way for accounts having many more than 255 (u8) tokens. The change requires a migration which is also in the code and should be auto-executed on next runtime upgrade (v25 / v2025).
Substrate now contains basic documentation for benchmarking your pallets for appropriate Weights.
A new election algorithm PhragmenMMS has been merged but is not yet activated anywhere as it needs extensive testing first.
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.
There is now support for the four basic Ethereum precompiles in Frontier’s node template: ECRecover, Sha256, Ripemd160, and Identity.
Moonbase Alpha, Moonbeam’s first public testnet, has been released. A separate post exists for technical details, and for those looking to dive right in, the docs have been updated.
🛠 Tools
The Accounts page in the Polkadot wiki now includes an address format changer tool.
Polkadot-JS Apps now lets you sweep a wallet, i.e. transfer a wallet’s full balance, causing the original account’s deletion from storage.
Polkadot-JS Apps now lets you see how much stake you’re backing a validator with on the Staking -> Actions page. More info in this original issue.
Polkadot-JS API is now at version 1.34, and Polkadot-JS Apps are at version 0.59.
👨🎓 Education
This article explains in-depth how Treasury Proposals are made along with details of the first four recipients on Polkadot.
🤝 Ecosystem
A more detailed ecosystem overview is available in Polkadot News! See week of Sept 14th to 20th!
Dether added DOT and KSM to their app. This lets you buy and sell KSM and DOT locally in person and trade them for other cryptocurrencies.
LocalCoinSwap also launched their KSM integration:
📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars
October 15 - Sub0 Online: The Substrate developer community conference. Take a technical deep-dive into unique features of Substrate, and learn from projects that have built and deployed Substrate-based solutions across industries. All levels of experience welcome. Expect talks from Parity founders Dr. Jutta Steiner and Dr. Gavin Wood.
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.