Dot Leap 20
Progress in Kusama's NFT world, Subsocial launches their Web UI and Dot Leap cross-publishes, an overnight referendum to fix a bug on Polkadot and Kusama, Moonbeam completes seed round, and 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!
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
Dot Leap now also on Subsocial!
Subsocial is a Substrate-based chain for creating social communities - think Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Blog, all in one. You can create your own community or space for 0.25 SMN, and all interactions with the chain like likes, follows, replies and so on cost somewhere in the range of 0.001 and 0.002 SMN. To request a starter pack of SMN, just visit the UI and follow the instructions to go to the Telegram group where you can do so.
The main selling point of Subsocial is that all content is on IPFS which makes it permanent as long as people are still using it. Right now it’s stored and pinned on Subsocial’s own node, but you can also pin your content yourself, or use commercial pinning services like Pinata or even Filecoin.
Dot Leap will from now on host a copy of each edition on Subsocial - join and follow our space for interesting discussions!
News from the NFT world of Kusama!
With the pre-launch of RMRK, a lot of people got interested in the project: to the point of it being included in the official NFT plan for Kusama. The four teams working on NFTs in Kusama have discussed this during a Parity and Friends crowdcast, and we’ve also participated in the first edition of an Interchain NFT Standard call, spearheaded by ICF - more info on that soon.
So what can you do with RMRK right now? Currently, only specifications on how to build your tools have been published. This allows implementers like wallets and developers to build toolkits and UIs around RMRK. Official tools are next and coming soon!
🚨 Something I didn’t know! 🚨
Polkadot and Kusama Ledger apps cannot generate the same accounts from a mnemonic seed as used by Substrate.
This means a defunct Ledger app effectively prevents you from using your tokens because you cannot import your seed phrase into PolkadotJS. Interested wallet developers can use Substrate-BIP39 to add support for these seed phrases and resolve this problem.
Polkadot (v 0.8.24.)
🐛 The upgrade to runtime v24 moved staking elections on-chain due to a bug: the off-chain election produced solutions too big to fit into a block so the fallback of on-chain elections activated. Runtime v25 will contain a fix for this and move elections off chain again.
On a positive note, this runtime upgrade bumped the payout limit to 256 nominators per validator, so a lot more DOT holders can participate. For a more in-depth report and discussion on the matter, see this Polkassembly thread.
Polkadot Governance
Patract Labs finished the work on Redspot v0.1 (a Truffle-like toolkit for Polkadot) last week, and Lipeng Yue | Patract Labs shared with us a development report. The team wants to continue with the development of Redspot v0.2: you can read more about the roadmap here. The proposal has been submitted and motioned for approval by Council as Motion 26.
🐛 The upgrade to runtime v24 had a migration bug that would affect proxies. Overnight, an emergency fix was voted in by the Council and the Technical Committee via referendum 6 - arguably, this brings into question how much power the Council and TC have in the current setup. Why this wasn’t first tested on Kusama is not known, but at least the outcome is better protection for migrations going forward.
motion 25 schedules an increase of validator slots by 1 every era (14,400 blocks) with a repetition of 100 eras. The motion passed, and will next be voted on in the referenda queue for approx. 7 days if passed by council, after the technical committee fast-tracks, as explained here.
Motion 27 is for a treasury proposal for SubstraTEE by Supercomputing Systems covers the 1st milestone on the roadmap to scalability: the team proposes a 2nd layer asynchronous sidechain protocol that is validated by trusted execution environments. You can find the proposal here.
D5.ai proposes a very interesting project aiming to build Substrate ETL: allowing builders to convert blockchain data into convenient formats like CSVs and relational databases to explore on-chain activity and ultimately share their findings with the community. You can find the full proposal here.
Vote for a better tomorrow!
Unhappy with the Council’s performance? 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.)
User pepoospina delivered WP1 for the Council-Governed Wiki for Kusama. You can follow their progress on Github and review the demos for the first milestone here. The proposal for funding this effort has been approved as Motion 223.
💥 Chaos
Referendum 86, the Kusama version of Polkadot's Referendum 6 (see above), was also passed and executed.
🔩 Core Stack
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The XCM primitives crate has been merged to master, the first step towards integrating XCM v0.
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ink! v3 is here. The last PR has been merged.
Shawn Tabrizi has begun to work on a Substrate Name Service pallet which would be Polkadot’s version of ENS.
cancel_proposalandblacklistfunctionality have been added to the Democracy pallet. Cancelling can be done by either the Technical Committee unanimously or via Root origin. Blacklisting is only available to Root origin. This will make possible the weeding out of invalid and spam proposals and referenda (public and external), and blacklist certain proposal hashes so they cannot be re-proposed. The maximum number of public proposals in the queue is now set to 100, and if a proposal is canceled the deposit behind it is slashed.Pallets will soon have versions specified in their code, allowing for more granular control of features over time and across runtimes.
Shawn Tabrizi started work on the Participation Lottery Pallet which could be used to reward random participants in on chain actions. For example, to encourage voter turnout in democracy, the vote for a referendum could be wrapped in a lottery ticket. It would cost a bit more, but would give the voter or several voters a chance to win the pot when the vote is over.
The default Substrate node had a bug wherein it dictated the fixed number of people needed to interact with the treasury for an outcome to occur, like rejecting or approving a Treasury spend proposal. This has now been modified so it matches Polkadot and Kusama - half of all Council members need to reject a proposal to kill it, and three fifths need to support it to pass it.
The treasury’s initial funding can now be set during genesis.
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 now supports RPC eth_pubsub, meaning you can subscribe to and wait for events rather than poll for them. A full explanation of pubsub is available on the Ethereum wiki.
The EVM pallet returned timestamps in milliseconds, which didn’t match the EVM specification which requires it in seconds. This is now fixed, so chains using the pallet should update.
🛠 Tools
Want to grab a short account index and freeze it to your account? Use Shawn Tabrizi’s new tool to scan for free ones!
Polkadot JS Apps (now at version 0.60) changed the oversubscribed validators icon to a scale. Not sure if that’s clearer.
Substrate API Sidecar is now in Release Candidate stage, which means backward compatibility breaks will become rarer and the old API endpoints that are currently deprecated will disappear with the release of 1.0.
🐛 There is a bug on the Ledger side which currently prevents users from setting any account as the payout destination. With a Ledger, you can only set Stash or Account for now.
Polkadot JS API is now at version 2.0, matching Substrate 2.0. Support for old metadata has been dropped, defaulting to the new canonical one. Read the rest of the changes in the release changelog.
The Go Substrate RPC client is now compatible with Substrate v2 RC6, and v2 support is coming soon.
Polkascan’s Python tools for interacting with Substrate have been significantly upgraded, and thanks to the recent approved Polkadot treasury proposal there will be more active community support and feature development on Github as well.
👨🎓 Education
The Polkadot Wiki now has a page on how to protect yourself from scams.
The XCMP (Cross chain message passing) page on the wiki now has a video explainer.
🤝 Ecosystem
Detailed overview of the ecosystem during the week of Sep 21st to 27th on Polkadot News.
Phala published a new ecosystem update for the seek of Sep 21st to 27th.
"Uncharted Territories", a Youtube channel funded by the Treasury, with videos interviewing many Kusama council members about the future of Kusama and how it can impact the world.
Since last week’s launch of Subsocial’s web UI, a number of Polkadot projects have been claimed by their founders: Acala, DatDot, Usetech, SubstraTEE, etc. Full details on the launch here!
📅 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.