Dot Leap 24
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Our Network
Polkadot has been featured in Our Network, noting some advancements and impressive stats since the last edition in January. For example, did you know that the Kusama treasury already doled out 57,000 KSM (~$1.5 million USD), averaging around ~$50,000 USD per project? This and many more interesting stats in this week’s edition!
Polkadot (v0.8.26.1.)
Polkadot Governance
Access my transparency report in regards to these votes and some tips here.
Patract Hub has a new project - Megaclite: Zero-knowledge proof support in Substrate for ZK Rollup and privacy applications in WASM Contracts and Runtime Pallet. Megaclite will directly integrate more curves (alt_bn128 and bls12_381) and provide upper-level verification and tool libraries by pallet and contract. They intend to make a treasury proposal for it soon.
Motion 39 by Subscan for operating expenses has passed!
Motion 40 by Patract Labs for Redspot's v0.3 milestone, has passed.
Referendum 12 to move an Ethereum claim of DOTs to another address is sitting at 0.18% turnout with only 0.14% of all voters having voted Aye.
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 (v0.8.26.1.)
⚠ Updates
ArtProject.io happened Nov 11th to Nov 15th and featured a discussion panel on NFT progress on Kusama. Recording of the video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lep5PWTiKJg
🏛 Kusama Governance
Access my transparency report in regards to these votes and some tips here.
Motion 238 aims to increase the number of validators in Kusama Network by 1 per era, for 200 eras. The motion has been presented to the Council after Performance Report III review and passed.
Kusama's second bounty proposal is up! The proposal aims to integrate KSM to Rotki: https://rotki.com/ - the open source tax and crypto portfolio tracker. More info on the bounty.
With the v2026 runtime being on Kusama a bug that caused immature slashing of candidacy bonds in council was fixed, and now's the time to proceed with refunding affected accounts.
Motion 239 aims to reimburse candidates and runners-up who were slashed due to this bug. The motion wraps all of the reimbursement calls inside a
utility.batch, creating a single batch of force transfers from the treasury to the affected accounts.Post 297 to integrate robotic systems with Kusama has been re-submitted, and motioned for rejection by Prince Kusama. Others disagree with the rejection. Inspect the state here.
Proposal 38 is another attempt to redenominate KSM in 1:100 ratio, similar to Polkadot.
🔩 Core Stack
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A more extensible MultiAddress format has been merged in. This makes it possible to map arbitrary values to Substrate addresses and decode them in the node, opening the door to not only things like Ethereum to Substrate format translation, but a Name Service pallet like ENS and other custom naming formats for Substrate accounts.
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Substrate will now allow local DHT addresses in connections when the chain is Local or Development. Previously, this was only true when the
--devflag was passed in.Work on the chain extension feature has begun. This will allow ink! smart contracts to communicate with pallet functionality of the underlying runtime.
Connecting to different validators on different leaves is now a thing.
There’s an ongoing discussion about adding automatic bad-runtime-upgrade prevention into the nodes. A gossip mechanism would tell other nodes about the breakage and they would hold off on applying the upgrade, removing the need for manual intervention.
There is now a runtime-migration label on Github that indicates when a pallet may have changed enough to warrant a migration, so you don't trap your chain by blindly upgrading runtimes.
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.
For ease of development in Frontier, the dev signer has been implemented using some well known open keys (0x1111..1111).
In a further hunt for parity, the net_peerCount RPC call has been added to Frontier, returning number of peers just like in Ethereum.
A massive update was applied to Moonbeam’s testnet Moonbase Alphanet, applying recent runtime changes including but not limited to a merger of account states. In other words, Ethereum and Substrate account balance is now one and the same. Announcement post. Blog post.
🛠 Tools
Europa v0.1 - a runtime and contract running sandbox for ink!
Hydra, a recent Hackusama finalist, has evolved into a public Kusama indexer at https://indexer-kusama.joystream.app/graphql and hydra-cli toolkit: https://github.com/Joystream/hydra/tree/hydra_v1. One can use the indexer to filter and fetch Kusama events and extrinsics via rich GraphQL API, and hydra-cli to build an ETL pipeline for your dApp.
Polkadot JS API is at version 2.7 and Polkadot JS Apps UI on 0.67.
An
Unable To Reset Deviceerror has been plaguing Polkadot JS Apps users lately. This has been fixed in the most recent version of Apps, available at polkadot.js.org/apps now, and coming soon to dotapps.io.Substrate API Sidecar is now at version 2. This is a breaking change in that it no longer supports old types and metadata.
👨🎓 Education
Interested in getting your Web3 project funded? Here are all the options at your disposal: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/web3funding
🤝 Ecosystem
The first NFTs on Kusama have launched: https://twitter.com/obxium/status/1328323390818627584
I released a limited edition 1/1 series of the 5 platonic solids as #NFT art on the #Kusama network using the RMRK specification & wrote about it here: obxium.com/art-journal/rm… Only 3 pieces are available for sale, at 5 $KSM each.
Substrate Training Camp launched in China! https://twitter.com/btcinchina/status/1329368496250130434
A new in-progress resource on Governance in Substrate-based chains, from a technical perspective. Specifically, dealing with configurations and interactions of governance-related pallets so that Substrate devs can configure their own chains with the governance parameters that fit their needs.
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.