Dot Leap 34
A new Polkadot client by Chainsafe, PolkaBTC is in beta (Bitcoin bridge), new client release and new runtimes in Kusama and Polkadot, Ledger Live integration, Balancer entering Polkadot's ecosystem...
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Chainsafe’s Gossamer Syncs to Kusama!
Chainsafe’s Gossamer Polkadot Host (the app running the Polkadot / Kusama / {insert-chain-here} runtime) has successfully synced with Kusama network! A multi-client future is nigh!
If you would like to contribute to Gossamer, please take a look at ChainSafe's Github for good first issues.
Once the team is ready, be sure to run a Gossamer node with Kusama and Polkadot and report any bugs!
Polkadot (v0.8.29)
👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇
Important
Foo
Polkadot Governance
❌ Referendum 16, proposing an increase in the number of validators to 599, has been rejected by the community.
❌ Referendum 18 (no preimage submitted yet) proposes a
force_transferrelated to a scam, and is up for vote for the current launch period. It will fail regardless because the Address format changed mid-way due to a runtime upgrade.❔ Motion 67 proposes the cancellation of proposal 10 (referendum 18 above) due to
1. change in address format,
2. replacement of the proposal by the submitter with proposal 11 (up for vote now as referendum 18).
Polkadot had the first two external reviews of technical deliverables. These are paid community-member opinions on work being done as a grant. For now this is being rewarded with tips but a bounty is planned.
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 (v0.8.29)
🏛 Kusama Governance
DeepDao published a proposal for review: DeepDAO<>Kusama Integration.
The proposal aims to list Kusama (and in the future other Substrate organisations) on their web-based platform. Kusama will work as a first experimentation approach to organise the data collected and will allow them to understand governance and treasury mechanisms better. The project includes two big steps (divided in various milestones): an API development for this particular type of project (open source) and the integration itself.
❌ Referendum 103 proposing a redenomination in Kusama network, has been rejected by the community.
❌ Motion 273: seeking funding for a validator setup, has not reached majority. ✅ Motion 274 rejected this proposal submission altogether. The discussion on this can be found here or above on this channel.
✅ motion 272, proposing a bounty for the Mobile Signers/Injectors bounty proposal has been approved by the Council.
❔ Proposal 45 by Litentry is being voted on. The proposal introduces a registrar service that focuses on automatic verifications, leveraging well-designed cryptographical challenges to further reduce human interventions.
After delivery of M1 report, OnFinality is ready to continue with the development of their project for high performance public infrastructure on Kusama: this time with Milestone 2. M1 included the Implementation of more comprehensive analytics for developers to report on exactly what requests are being made to their API service accounts. M2, described here aims to implement geolocation routing: allowing to maximise the use of different pools of nodes across their userbase, to quickly fall over to alternative pools located in different regions in the case that one goes offline.
✅ Motion 275 upgrading Kusama Runtime to v2029 has been voted in and executed. Release notes, runtime changes and hash can be found here.
🔩 Core Stack
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
Polkadot v0.8.29 has been released!
Upgrade priority is low - removes some unused code, and adds in storage chains, a.k.a. the ability to serve transactions over something like IPFS.
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
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.
🛠 Tools
Polkadot JS Apps UI (now at version 0.83) has the UI option that lets validators kick certain nominators. It now also relies on ESM modules, for the devs out there - this means you’ll need NodeJS 14+.
Polkadot JS API v4 is out, now using ESM modules, so it’s a breaking change for anyone not using node 14+.
Substrate API Sidecar 3.0.5 is out. Just a Polkadot API version bump.
🤝 Ecosystem
SubQuery explorer has launched. SubQuery Explorer is an online hosted OnFinality service that provides access to published SubQuery projects made by contributors around the world and managed by the SubQuery team. It aims to provide infrastructure services by making accessing Polkadot network data even easier.
PolkaBTC is in beta. Go mint some test BTC! So far, 8.581 PolkaBTC minted (considering faucets only give ~0.01BTC this means many people testing and heavy BTC users/miners testing), 498 successful issue requests, 194 successful redeem requests, 29 Vaults running, 20 Relayers running
Patract Labs launched PatraStore - an incubator for WASM contract dapps. There are already 3 DeFi and 3 game applications usable as examples:
PatraAsset (one-click issuance for ERC20 assets)
PatraSwap (simplified Uniswap)
PatraMaker (simplified MakerDAO)
PatraPK (encrypted rock-paper-scissors)
PatraPixel (public canvas)
PatraLottery (BABE randomness lottery)
Ledger live integrated Polkadot! Staking and using your DOT right from the app!
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.