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Parachains onboarding coming to Rococo

A parachains onboarding PR has been added to the Rococo relay chain. This means that alongside testing of parachain functionality (already enabled and used by ~10 parachains), Rococo users will now be able to test auctions and crowdloans to claim slots on Rococo. All this is already supported in the Polkadot JS UI, so you can expect to be able to play around with this immediately after the runtime upgrade.

Epic NFTs at Polkadot Decoded

Polkadot Decoded is coming up and has a voting system in place for the talks you want to see - by the community, for the community. The RMRK.app NFT team is preparing an epic launch to show you, so please vote for our talk: Workshops -> NFT Crash Course.

Polkadot (v0.8.29)

👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇

• Kian has provided an excellent, in-depth update on the current status of fixes to the lowest minimal nomination issue.

Polkadot Governance

• ✅ Motion 69 by Figment who amended their proposal to fund Figment/Polkadot Learn & DataHub adding an outline of the topics to be included as challenges on the platform has passed.

• ✔ Motion 68 by SCS focusing on Milestone 8.3 development of SubstraTEE passed.

• ❔ Referendum 19 proposing the cancellation of Proposal 10 in queue, is now up for vote by the community. Proposal 10, a force_transfer proposal, cannot be executed, since the address formats have changed and the entry is invalid: it does not matter which way the vote goes, it cannot be applied. Furthermore, the proposer explains they used the wrong method to submit this proposal, replacing no. 10 with no. 11 (currently up for vote as Referendum 18).

• ✔ Motion 70, proposing a runtime upgrade to v29, has been approved by the Council and fast tracked by the Technical Committee.

• ❔ A Treasury Proposal to develop an EVM NFT bridge has been proposed. Details here.

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

• ✅ Referendum 105, proposing an upgrade of the Kusama runtime to v2029, has passed. The upgrade has been enacted.

• ✅ Referendum 104, proposing Litentry as a new registrar service on Kusama focusing on automatic verifications, has passed community vote.

• ✅ Motion 278, proposing Hanwen Cheng as curator of bounty #3:Mobile Signers / Injectors / Walletconnect equivalent, has been approved by Council.

• ✅ Motion 277: by DeepDAO aiming to integrate Kusama to their platform, passed.

• ✔ Mario from Polkastats published a proposal for the Validator Resource Center and Ranking Website for Kusama, milestones 2, 3, 4 and 5 which passed. Along with the proposal, you will find the report for M1 delivery and a list of the completed tasks. You can play around with the Validators ranking HERE. Please note Milestones 2, 3, 4 and 5 have been completed already so the requested allocation covers work already developed.

• ✔ Everdreamsoft published their milestone 2 proposal for Canonizer (formerly PolkadotAssetJS). Milestone 1 report can be found HERE. The new proposal can be found HERE and has passed. The milestone aims to cover the implementation of the library working on different pallets and connected to relevant running nodes.

• ✔ Patract Labs submitted Ask! (ink! in AssemblyScript) v0.2 proposal which passed. Ask! aims to provide a set of contract framework and compilation tools using AssemblyScript (aka AS) as programming language. Contracts written through Ask! can run in the FRAME Contracts Pallet, and eventually can call each other with contracts written by ink! You can find a detailed timeline for v0.2, budget and features on this link!

• A Treasury Proposal for PolkaWorld to develop the polkaworld.pro website is under consideration by the Polkadot Council.

• ❔ Motion 72 focuses on a new type of identity registrar for the Polkadot network, optional real-world identity verification (without requesting the sender to disclose anything sensitive), and publicly-retrievable evidence of verification. Currently, none of the live identity registrars on Polkadot can adequately verify the "legal name" field of the identity and require you to trust the registrar: This new registrar aims at fixing that. You can review the proposal and the architecture behind the proposal here,

🔩 Core Stack

• Code for the Gilts pallet has been merged.

• Stakers (validators or nominators) can now set the destination of their rewards to None, meaning that they will deliberately burn all rewards to which they are entitled.

• Inflation will now be calculated on-chain, which could allow for dynamic auto-modification of staking params when needed.

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.

• Frontier has upgraded to Substrate 3.0!

• The Moonbase Alpha testnet has been reset due to a bug.

🛠 Tools

• Polkadot JS API 4.2 is out. Adds a new type and fixes some CommonJS module problems from 4.0.1, Kusama v2029 runtime upgrade and some other stuff.

• Substrate API Sidecar 4+ is out with v29 runtime compatibility and a breaking change - Enums in responses serialize with camelCase variants. Check spec diffs for details (#467).

• Polkadot JS Apps version 0.84 is out with tons of parachain functionality. You can now start to play with the entire Parachain onboarding process (crowdloan, auctions, registration, etc...). Using polkadot master, start a westend node with polkadot --chain=westend-dev --alice and then connect to your local node with the hosted Polkadot JS Apps. You should see a new Network > Parachains section.

  

• A new version (0.97) of srtool is now available. This new version is mandatory to build current and newer runtimes for Polkadot/Kusama/Westend.

• Crowdloan methods are now in the latest txwrapper release 4.0.0.

• A new validator monitor and alerter tool from ironoa.

• A new website for monitoring validators and nominators, an excellent effort from the community.

• The staking-payouts tool allows you to automate payouts for your staking operations.

🤝 Ecosystem

• Parity proposes Statemint, a generic assets chain, as a public goods parachain for minting tokens and NFTs. If confirmed as a public good chain by governance, this chain would not need to go through the slot auction process.

• Phala teams up with Bifrost.

• If you are interested in watching the Polkadot Ledger Live AMA, it is available for replay here.

• Acala an SubQuery have been working on finalizing an integration.

• You can now vote for which talks will be given at Polkadot Decoded.

📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars

Voting is now open for Polkadot Decoded 2021. Choose your favorite presentations and help select the program. From technical deep-dives to visionary talks, there are more than 200 eligible proposals to vote on up to April 4th. Check out the submissions and vote now.

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.