Dot Leap 36
Parachain auctions are here, Kusama's first native NFTs, a new runtime upgrade is in both chains, new Polkadot registrar, and more!
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Parachain Auctions are here!
Parachain auctions and crowdloans have landed on Rococo and are expected to launch in a matter of weeks on Kusama. Parachains are likely to be onboarded to Kusama gradually at first to make sure everything is running smoothly. Then, pending a full audit, governance can begin onboarding parachains to Polkadot. Read more about the parachain rollout process here, and Kusama parachain auctions and crowdloans here.
Polkadot (v0.8.30)
⚠ v0.8.30 is out! A ton of parachain functionality, and a different DB format, so backups from before this version will no longer work! The corresponding v30 runtime upgrade should also drop the minimum amount of DOTs needed for nominators to stake to get rewards to effectively 0 (currently 250). This is expected to happen in 2-3 weeks
You can interact with Rococo parachain crowdloans here: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Frococo-rpc.polkadot.io#/parachains/crowdloan
The first testnet parachain auction is taking place now on Rococo. You can follow along here: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Frococo-rpc.polkadot.io#/parachains/auctions
There’s a new Rococo faucet available: https://matrix.to/#/#rococo-faucet:matrix.org
Polkadot has been successfully upgraded to runtime v29.
A new trustless and costless registrar, Polkaregistry, has started up on Polkadot.
Polkadot Governance
⚠ I withdrew from the Polkadot and Kusama Council.
OpenSquare's proposal for integrating dotTreasury into Polkadot has been approved.
Voting on Referendum 21, to increase the validator amount by 3 each era every era for 234 eras (adding a total of 702 new validators), has begun. Note that there has already been a report on validator metrics. It is recommended you read it before voting on this referendum.
Patract published Redspot v0.4 for review - Redspot is one of Patract's Wasm contract development tool suite. The goal is to standardize the contract development process, hide the underlying compilation details of the contract and combine sandbox, library, API, SDK and other plugins to create a one-stop smooth contract development process. Please review the proposal and leave your comments and questions!
Litentry published their 2nd milestone roadmap proposal for its Governance-focused Mobile App: The tasks on M2 mainly focus on offering users the interface to interact with multiple accounts under each network, basic support on Push Notifications to subscribe to important events, supporting different Push Notification type based on user roles, basic customization support on the granularity of the Push notifications and further support of the governance dashboard by implementing missing views. A detailed breakdown of costs and tasks can be found here. The proposal has been submitted on chain as Treasury Prop 43 and submitted to council as Motion 74.
Kusama (v0.8.30)
⚠ Updates
Kusama now has native smart-contract-less NFTs in production.
⚠ v0.8.30 is out! A ton of parachain functionality, and a different DB format, so backups from before this version will no longer work!
🏛 Kusama Governance
⚠ I withdrew from the Polkadot and Kusama Council.
The DotHacks team published a proposal aimging to introduce a substrate pallet named SRC (Security Response Center) that enables usage of treasury funds to address cybersecurity issues in a more transparent, fair, and privacy-protected manner. Design, implementation plan, milestones and budget can be found HERE. Based on a discussion in the thread, the team decided not to pursue this further.
Cryptolocally published a proposal for discussion aiming to integrate KSM to their platform - CryptoLocally is a non-custodial, global P2P exchange, but also a community-governed by their tokenholders (see gov.cryptolocally.com). People can create proposals and vote (using their native token). If the proposal reaches a certain threshold of votes, the proposals pass and get implemented. The community has expressed interest in integrating the Kusama ecosystem, which is why the team drafted this proposal. Milestones, budget and context can be found HERE.
Hypercube was seeking comments on a potential Treasury Proposal for a video series explaining Polkadot/Kusama. This has subsequently been approved.
A new bounty proposal has been approved: The goal of this proposal is to develop a basic app that listens to on-chain calls and notifies Council members when their review and vote is needed.
Hanwen from Litentry posted a new message in the original bounty post to kick off development: the curator will be working with 3 teams on the mobile injector and related tools. The curator will be eventually using the sub-bounties extension (currently under audit) to divide organise the bounty.
🔩 Core Stack
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😵 Too many updates to list about Rococo, crowdloan, and parachain functionality. Iterative updates that change the whole system from day to day.
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Shawn Tabrizi brought up an interesting idea wherein new accounts would be initialized with their nonce set to the current block height. This would make replay attacks impossible, and would allow for an interesting mechanic in which the age of an account could be derived from the nonce, possibly opening to door to limited governance participation based on account age.
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.
Moonbase Alpha is at version 7. Notable changes: pre-funded accounts for easier development, like with Ganache and Substrate dev mode, debugging and tracing node APIs, and advanced block explorer support.
Biconomy and Moonbeam partner to deliver UX-optimized Ethereum interactions on Moonbeam: gasless transactions.
🛠 Tools
Payctl is a payout automation tool from a community member, similar to this one.
Polkadot JS Api 4.4 is out. No notable breaking changes, update to ParaInfo type and optional Council derive in Treasury config and some Rococo-related things.
Polkadot JS Apps 0.86.2 is out, now multi-pinned to different gateways so another IPFS.io downtime doesn’t break it.
Substrate API Sidecar 4.0.4 is out with some bugfixes, type updates, and performance optimizations.
Stylo, the UX-optimized Parity-signer alternative, now supports derivation paths.
Polkadot JS Apps UI calendar will now show parachain lease and crowdloan event dates.
🤝 Ecosystem
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.