Dot Leap 31
An RFP to build PHP tools for Substrate, lottery for chain participation coming up, sub-bounties coming soon, epic Polkadot explainer tweetstorms, and more!
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Polkadot (v0.8.27)
Now that Polkadot has ~ 300 validators, see the network performance analysis here.
The Rococo testnet has been restarted! Once the Plasm parachain reconnects, onboarding new chains will continue.
If you are running an upcoming parachain, make sure your Rococo validators (at least two) are running and using the latest version, and resubmit your parachain registration proposal on Polkadot-JS.
Polkadot Governance
Fearless’ wallet stage 3 development: The team published a new proposal for consideration, focusing on staking features in the wallet, general app improvements, and native mobile libraries expansion. This was proposed as motion 55.
Referendum #14 to move a claim is failing ~70% to 30% with 0.21% turnout.
Motion 54 is by Polkascan Foundation for the funding of their Social Contract with the Polkadot Community for operational expenses of running polkascan.io during 1 March 2021 - 31 May 2021. It passed.
Kusama (v0.8.27)
🎲 The Lottery Pallet is part of an effort aiming to increase participation in Kusama's governance design and should be understood in this context. The pallet interacts with Democracy, Collective, Staking and Elections-phragmen modules, by including the extrinsics within these as a mechanism to purchase a ticket for a lottery, upon certain conditions.
You can find the post and leave your questions and comments here.
🏛 Kusama Governance
My governance participation report from Jan 8th to Jan 27th.
✅ motion 257 by PolkaStats covering phase 2 - milestone 1 of the implementation for the Validator Resource Center and Ranking Website on Kusama has passed.
✅ Motion 258 by Kusama Comics passed. This proposal aims to publish one visual tutorial (Comics) every two-three weeks. Every comic translates or explains Polkadot’s technical documentation, developments and news.
✅ Motion 259 by OnFinality for high-performance public infrastructure for Kusama and Substrate chains, passed.
✅ Milestone 2 for Dotreasury, the Kusama treasury explorer, has been proposed and approved.
✅ Referendum 98, upgrading Kusama's runtime to v2027, has passed. Pre-image has been submitted and the proposal is now on enactment period until execution.
✅ Motion 260 is by Polkascan Foundation for the Social Contract with the Kusama Community for operational expenses of running polkascan.io during 1 February 2021 - 30 April 2021. It has been approved.
✅ Soramitsu’s Motion 262 for Fearless Wallet Phase 3: focusing on staking features in the wallet, general app improvements, and native mobile libraries expansion - was approved.
🙋♂️ Sub bounties: Raul submitted a new bounty proposal aiming to give more flexibility to the use of the bounty pallet for curators to reward completed tasks without closing the parent bounty.
❔ There is a new proposal, 41, which is an on-chain remark signaling agreement that Registrar #1 should continue to do human verification.
ℹ RAMP has finished adding KSM to their SDK and submitted a report about it!
🔩 Core Stack
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Are you familiar with BEEFY? It is a protocol to allow Substrate chains using GRANDPA-provided finality to bridge to non-Substrate chains.
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The ability for validators to kick their own nominators has been added.
A database corruption source for ParityDB has been resolved. Previously, it was possible to keep a chain running with a corrupt DB as a result of power loss. This corruption should be eliminated now.
You can no longer include two modules of the same name when building your chain.
WARP Sync will soon become a thing, making long sync times a thing of the past.
The node template pallet has now also been updated to use Frame V2.
SCALE Info is a Parity package to describe Rust types, geared towards providing info about the structure of SCALE encodable types. The definitions provide third party tools (e.g. a UI client) with information about how they are able to decode types agnostic of language.
Multi-address is now used across the board in all runtimes, meaning it’s a breaking change for transaction version. This means Ledger apps will temporarily stop working until the team catches up - but only after this runtime upgrade is voted into the chains (not happening soon).
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 releases plans for their mainnet and canary network.
Moonbeam eats up Ocean Protocol nom nom.
Polkadot decoded talk by Derek about Moonbeam and the multi-chain future.
🛠 Tools
Shardlabs has completed the Kusama/Polkadot Tips Widget: an embeddable, standalone widget allowing you to add “Propose a tip” or “Donate” functionality on your website. The widget is already in use on QuakeAid.
Substrate Sidecar API is at version 2.1.2.: High priority upgrade! This version is required for Polkadot 27, Kusama 2027, and Westend 47. This release ensures correct fee calculations and decoding of all blocks in the aforementioned runtimes.
Polkadot JS Apps 0.77 is out with a ton of new endpoints, persistent Ledger accounts, phishing checks for recipients, and more.
Polkadot JS API 3.6 is out with parachain and multi-address support and a breaking change when querying chain properties to support multi-token chains.
Polkaview Network: A dead simple tool for checking minimum and highest staked validator on Kusama or Polkadot.
You can now add a Ledger account to the PolkadotJS extension and give it a custom name. You can also select which network you’re importing an account for when importing via seed.
Substrate API Sidecar now lets you look up extrinsics by index per block via
/blocks/{blockId}/extrinsics/{ExtrinsicIndex}.
👨🎓 Education
🤝 Ecosystem
A new Element chat group for all things NFT on Kusama and Polkadot. Not an Element fan? Join us on Telegram.
There is a new RFP to build PHP tooling for Substrate chains.
LocalCoinSwap’s Polkadot non-custodial P2P trading integration has just gone live.
Dan Reecer put together an epic thread explainer on Polkadot. You should check it out and give him a follow.
There’s a Kusama art competition going on.
PARTY IS ABOUT TO BEGIN! DON’T MISS OUT🔥 We're thrilled to have launched the Global Digital Art Competition with @kusamanetwork and to support worldwide digital talent! @Polkadot For more info: t.me/BCAmarket #Upapāduka #NFTs #opencall #digitalart #cryptoart #art
Jobs
Web3 Foundation needs a Community Manager and Tech Education interns and juniors. Come work with us!
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.