Dot Leap 27
Redspot - a WASM smart contract scaffold, thousand validators program on Polkadot is live, treasury-funded Substrate scholarships, an AssemblyScript version of ink!, and more!
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Polkadot (v0.8.26-1)
🎉 The Thousand Validators Programme is now on Polkadot! The Kusama version is also still running.
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The maximum number of validators in the active set has started to increase by 1 each era for 44 eras, leading to a new maximum of 298.
In the near future, in preparation for parachains, all validators will have to rotate their session keys to add approval assignment and approval vote keys.
Polkadot Governance
Motion 44 by LocalCoinSwap and motion 45 by Dorahacks have been approved by the Council.
Referendum 13 aims to correct a series of incorrect slashing episodes on Council members and candidates caused by an elections-phragmen pallet bug.
Motion 47 passed. The proposal was to fund 6 scholarships for developers who find the cost of enrolling to Substrate Developer Academy an obstacle to learn how to build on the framework. The ultimate goal: to create a hands-on and affordable educational environment where developers can learn from existing ones in the Polkadot ecosystem.
The Ramp team published their final report for DOT integration to the Ramp platform: walking us through the steps before any development and moving after to the technical approach, as well as explaining how they treated variables like speed, cost efficiency, and liquidity.
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)
The maximum number of Kusama validators in the active set has started to increase by 1 each era until it reaches 900 validators.
⚠ Updates
Kusama will be getting a native NFT implementation through two separate pallets, as part of the grander NFT strategy for the chain. More info in NFT Review.
🏛 Kusama Governance
Motion 246 has been approved. The motion, by Patract Labs, covers Himalia v0.1 and v0.2 milestones (WASM contract sdks in Go and Python). The project aims to provide FRAME Contracts SDK support in a multi-language environment for WASM DApp development.
Patract Hub has posted a new proposal for Ask! v0.1. Ask! is a smart contract language based on AssemblyScript and running on Substrate FRAME Contracts. Ask! uses procedural macros in the form of eDSL to write contracts by providing annotation types in AssemblyScript. Ask! will be similar to ink!’s existing implementation, and the final product will maintain maximum compatibility with ink!’s existing standards. The WASM and metadata files compiled by Ask! can be deployed on Substrate chains and run normally.
A discussion has been opened up for a Treasury Proposal for "Virtual Niche" - The World's First Crypto NFT Art Exhibition, featuring various Kusama-based NFT protocols and artwork.
Referendum 95, correcting a series of slashing episodes on Council members, runners up, and candidates accounts caused by an elections-phragmen pallet bug, has passed community vote.
🔩 Core Stack
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Shawn Tabrizi opened a discussion on what’s missing in Substrate, in terms of functionality, features, or other types of support here.
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We might be getting the ability to add multiple vesting schedules per account soon.
Basic cross-chain messaging has been merged in, allowing Relay Chains to pass messages down to parachains.
The Merkle Mountain Range upgrade is in, allowing light clients to efficiently import only relevant block headers. Context.
🐛It is now possible to create dust ( < existential deposit) accounts via bonding and rebonding - this PR will remove that possibility.
Participating in democracy is now free for first-time voters.
The Treasury pallet has been refactored into smaller pieces: the tips and bounties functionalities are now separate and opt-in.
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.
Moonbeam upgrades Moonbase Alpha testnet to V4, paving the way to multiple collators, a big step towards mainnet launch.
🛠 Tools
5 weeks ago, Patract Hub applied a Polkadot Treasury Proposal #23 for Redspot v0.3. It is a WASM smart contracts development scaffold which can simplify the contract testing and debugging workflow and connects with other tools as the core of Patract Hub. Detailed report for v0.3. Most of the functions of the design target have been finished and Redspot has been in production. Developers can now use Redspot as a powerful tool to facilitate their development of WASM contracts.
Substrate API Sidecar is now much more compatible with generic Substrate-based chains.
Subsembly - Limechain’s framework for building AssemblyScript based runtimes.
Polkadot JS API is now at version 3.0. A major version bump following a change to build with esm and adding usage of mjs files. Newer NodeJS versions will have an easier time doing treeshaking which should make resulting packages much smaller.
Polkadot Apps is at 0.71 which, among other things, makes sure erroneous judgements on identities are shown with a priority above valid ones.
vscode-substrate is at version 0.5.2. No notable changes have been added, it’s a pro-forma release.
Polkadot JS Apps now lets you share the custom types in your setup through a simple link which will compress the types into the URL you can send to other people.
👨🎓 Education
A section on Bounties has been added to the Treasury section of the Polkadot Wiki.
Curious what all those filters are on the Polkadot-JS Targets page? The Polkadot Wiki just added explanations.
🤝 Ecosystem
Subsocial publicly released their brand assets so you can absorb their ecosystem more fully 😏. Other than that, they’re working on custom RPC methods for Substrate which should allow JS scripts to get data ready for processing x50-x100 times faster than through raw @polkadot/api.
Polkaworld trace the development history of computer applications to predict the development of blockchain applications and try to explain why we, as a community, are optimistic about Polkadot’s technology.
BUIDL Labs published a staking survey looking to find out what’s tripping up existing and potential stakers in the Kusama and Polkadot networks.
If you are interested in building Substrate runtimes, you should check out the Substrate Runtime Developer Academy.
Ellipal has announced DOT support for their hardware wallet.
📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars
Friday, 18th December: a Spanish-language crowdcast introducing Moonbeam, an Ethereum-compatible smart contracts parachain planning to run on Polkadot.
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.