Dot Leap 33
Dot Leap 33
Substrate 3.0 is out, Ledger issues resolved, ink! v3 is out, yet another Kusama redenomination attempt, Kusama fees reduced by 50x, Gilts as an alternative to staking in some chains, and more!
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Polkadot (v0.8.28-1)
The Rococo parachain testnet has been reset. It now has a total of 10 parachains.
If you sent DOT to a Kusama address on your Ledger, instructions for recovering it have been published.
Approval Checking (sharded parachain security) is being activated on Rococo today. This will require a rebuild of all validators with "-features approval-checking" using the latest rococo-v1 branch.
Centrifuge has launched ChaChaCha, a Rococo-based chain for people who want to try connecting their parachains.
Polkadot Governance
🚨🚨 The Polkadot runtime has been be upgraded to v28 at block #3,899,547.
✅ Motion 63: The Interlay team, behind PolkaBTC project, published a proposal for PolkaBTC Beta Testnet development: To achieve higher participation during Beta testnet, they designed a campaign for incentivizing users to actively test critical components of the bridge by handing out rewards for specific actions / challenges. With no native token given the project's nature, the team aims to request DOT tokens to incentivize participation. The proposal was documented here and passed.
❌ Motion 64: Figment published a proposal for DOT tokens to be used as incentives to grow the Polkadot developer ecosystem via its platforms Figment Learn and DataHub. 100% of the DOTs will be distributed to developers as incentives and Figment retains 0 DOTs for operational costs as part of this proposal. You can find the post here for review. The motion did not reach majority and is back on the drawing board.
✅ Motion 61 by SCS to develop milestone 8.2 of SubstraTEE scalability, working on Single Worker Block Production has passed.
✅ Motion 62 upgrading Polkadot Runtime to v28 has been passed and expedited by the technical committee. Some interesting changes: treasury tip slashes, free participation in Council governance for first-timers, refactor treasury pallet, changes for validators session keys to account for parachains, introduction of account existence providers reference counting and extensive multiaddress format in all runtimes.
✅ Motion 65, the Treasury Proposal to develop Stylo, a more user-friendly version of Parity Signer passed.
✅ Encointer delivers a sybil-defence for parachains demo for its treasury #9 proposal. It passed.
❔ Referendum 16, to increase the number of validators from 297 to 599, is currently failing.
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 (v0.8.28)
Likewise, if you sent KSM to a Polkadot address on your Ledger, instructions for recovering it have been published.
💥 Chaos
A ParityDB bug has caused the slash of a validator, full report here: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/490 - all CLI flags and options have subsequently been amended to include warnings against using the DB in production. This slash was canceled in a cancel motion.
With the latest runtime upgrade, Council members have a free initial vote on motions.
🏛 Kusama Governance
❔ After reporting on M1 completion, the Rotki team submitted M2 proposal for funding and development: this milestone focuses on history query, staking and rewards. More information on the proposal, timelines and resources/allocations can be found here.
❌ Referendum 101 failed to pass with no info provided.
Comments are welcome on a proposal to reward reviews of technical deliverables / milestones / proposals.
✅ Motion 270 has been approved. The proposal, by Rotki, aims to continue the integration of Kusama to their portfolio tracker. This milestone focuses on history query, staking and rewards. More information on the proposal, timelines and resources/allocations can be found here.
Motion 271 to cancel a slash due to a ParityDB bug has passed. The slash will be undone.
There is a PR to reduce Kusama fees and deposits by 50x (e.g., fees would be 1/50 what they are now). You can review and add comments here:
❌ Referendum 102, to transfer balance, failed. The proposer failed to give context.
❔ Referendum 103 (again 🙄) to redenominate Kusama in the spirit of Polkadot is being voted on and failing.
Kusama superfan Jam proposed a new bounty on Kusama, aiming to develop a mobile-first signing solution (Walletconnect equivalent) that’s open standard and preferably without requiring users to install additional applications on their devices (platform agnostic).
🔩 Core Stack
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
🚨🚨🚨🚨 Substrate 3.0 is out with FRAME 2 support!
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
All sentry-related code has now been removed from the Substrate codebase.
A new Gilts pallet has been merged in: A pallet allowing accounts to auction for being frozen and receive open-ended inflation-protection in return. 🤔 This is something of a conflict with the staking system of a chain, so it will be interesting to see it in action (possibly on Kusama in a few months?)
SS58 prefix 48 has been assigned to Neatcoin.
Events are now emitted for system remarks, which will make RMRK.app much more secure to use!
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.
A workshop on how to use Solidity contracts and Chainlink oracles on Moonbeam
Moonbeam partners with OnFinality to deliver the first API service for Moonbase Alpha
Frontier now uses a separate RocksDB database as a backend. This should not affect users of Frontier in any way but is an interesting development.
EVM pallet’s storage was not public until recently, so other pallets could not read it. Now they can.
🛠 Tools
Polkaview now shows historic minimum balance needed to be an effective nominator.
Polychain’s TX parser - a tool for multisig users to verify the contents of the TX they’re signing. Explainer post here.
Polkadot JS Extension is at version 0.37, most notably bringing along Ledger support!
Polkadot JS Apps will now warn you if you try to send to a validator instead of bond.
Polkadot JS Apps is at version 0.82. Notably - some added phishing protection, design changes, and the parachain UI’s skeleton is starting.
Polkadot JS Api 3.11 is out. Includes latest parachain types, minor upgrades, bug fixes.
srtool 0.9.6 is out - check runtime hashes and verify governance proposals with ease!
Substrate API Sidecar 3.0.4 is out with some bugfixes and new types built-in.
🤝 Ecosystem
Web3 Foundation encourages external evaluations of milestone deliveries as part of their Open Grants program. Successfully merged evaluations will get up to 5 KSM! Find out more!
A new community-launched Polkadot-focused forum: Polkacenter.
Remember the RFP for a public p2p full node infrastructure funded by the Polkadot and Kusama treasuries? It’s live for Westend and has been added to Apps UI as a network you can select!
There's an upswing in scam activity over the last few days. Please report all scam addresses and URLs to https://polkadot.js.org/phishing/ , and install polkadot{.js} extension to auto-block scam sites.
Centrifuge has launched ChaChaCha, a Rococo-based chain for people who want to try connecting their parachains.
👷♂️ Jobs
The Web3 Foundation needs backup! Several remote-friendly positions are open, including Technical Education, Ops, Community, Research, and more!
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.