Dot Leap 7
No redenomination for DOTs, an open source mobile Flutter-based wallet, a directory of Kusama projects, and more!
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Story of the Week: Redenomination Proposal
A little over a week ago, Logan Saether of the tech ed team at Web3 Foundation used Kusama’s governance to put forth a referendum.
The goal of the referendum was to gauge people’s opinion on changing the redenomination of DOT. The decimal point would be moved two digits over and all DOT balances would effectively be increased by a factor of 100.
The proposal was explained on Polkassembly.
Fast-forward one week, and the referendum has been the most controversial and most active in Kusama’s short history. Not only was the turnout impressive (way above the officially reported 13% given that W3F and Parity - both large holders - abstained), but the amount of discussion it generated showed us that KSM holders are able and willing to participate in on-chain governance.
The referendum did end up having more Aye votes than Nay votes, but given that the opposition of the minority was so strong and definitely not trivial in numbers, the Web3 Foundation decided not to go ahead with the redenomination until it can be accurately gauged on Polkadot once launched.
Here’s the full post about the matter from W3F.
Polkadot
👇👇👇 LAUNCH INFO 👇👇👇
This article lays it all out in skimmable, readable fashion. A slightly longer version is available in the wiki.
Kusama (v 0.7.33.)
Remember a few weeks ago when we mentioned that due to a bug the Kusama treasury hasn’t been getting the fees it should have been getting? Well, that’s fixed now - observe the treasury balance after block 2.2m! Wheee! 📈
🚨 Something I didn’t know! 🚨
When batching transactions (sending multiple extrinsics at once), you can batch a bond and a nomination together. 🤔
In other words, if you’re bonding some tokens with the intent to nominate with them, and you immediately declare validators you want to nominate, it works just fine despite the bonding transaction not having been “mined” yet.
This is because transactions mutate state directly, not after a block is sealed, and so the data needed for the nomination to go through is already there - this is opposite to how other blockchains work. All that matters is that the order of transactions is correct - nomination after bonding.
🏛 Kusama Governance
A new tip has been proposed by Jam for 1000 KSM to Polkawallet. While this may sound like a lot, the result will be a median of endorsements from other council members so 1000 is probably the upper limit. There’s also the fact that Polkawallet deserves it - it’s an open source mobile Substrate wallet based on the highly performant Flutter framework.
Treasury Proposal 19 has been approved at 2000 KSM (~15000 USD at current market value) - originally mentioned in Dot Leap 5, this proposal by UseTech has been a long time in the making and targets a much simpler and more efficient staking user interface for Kusama and other Substrate-based chains.
🔩 Core Stack (Alpha 8 is out)
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Substrate licenses have been updated!
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BlockHashCount is now exposed as a system metadata constant. Your client (UI, wallet, etc.) will now be aware of this value from the chain’s metadata and be able to construct mortal extrinsics accurately regardless of chain. This constant is the number of blockNumber => blockHash mappings to keep around on chain.
This means that when building a mortal (expirable) extrinsic, you can have it be mortal from one to blockHashCount number of blocks. It’ll either expire if set to more than blockHashCount, or be immortal if sent as immortal.
Additionally, this value has been upped from `250` to `2400` which means a typical node of any Substrate-based chain now defaults to keeping the last 2400 block mappings around before pruning.
A new Prometheus metric now allows you to monitor rejected transactions as invalid from the pool:
sub_txpool_validations_invalidSubstrate CLI now allows multiple log statements. This lets you track a certain target in one mode (e.g. trace) and another target in another (e.g. debug), customizing verbosity of the output to your liking.
Operational and normal weights are now tracked separately. This prevents a deadlock which was previously possible if operational weights got placed into a block first, thereby not leaving room for normal weights.
Transaction versions have been added to signed transactions. This allows hardware wallets to know which transactions they can safely sign.
Successful and failed block imports are now also tracked and can be visualized via Prometheus / Grafana.
There is now a
babe_epochAuthorship RPCcall enabled in Kusama which lets one query the chain for slots that a validator can claim in an epoch. The list of slots is a result of the VRF computation.
🛠 Tools
Emerald Moonbeam is an open source network crawler for Substrate chains, currently optimized for Kusama. It’ll connect to all available nodes and aggregate all peer data for current network stats and topography visualization. Launch post here.
Polkawallet, the mobile Polkadot / Kusama / Substrate wallet has been released in a new form: based on the highly efficient and popular Flutter framework. It’s open source too!
Polkadot Apps now let you clear expired democracy locks from the Account list, which makes freeing up your funds post-vote a breeze!
Polkadot Apps now display turnout next to the active referendum.
Polkadot Apps now display the threshold and signatories of a multi-signature account in the sidebar if you click on that multi-signature account’s address or name.
The validator monitor PANIC is on version 2 featuring easy setup and reconfiguration and customizable alerts. Grab it on their release page! Using it already? Give them some feedback!
Polkadot Apps now support ECDSA key pairs when creating accounts.
👨🎓 Education
A refresh of the Polkadot Wiki page on Bridging to other chains
An explanation of the root origin and root calls or what the point of the Sudo module is:
🤝 Ecosystem
The Quora Web3 space is at 340+ members now. To recap, most of the links I post in this newsletter will be there first, so if you want a head start on some of them, check the space out!
KusamaProject just launched - a directory of projects built on and for Kusama 💕
Interesting overview of PoS guidelines for communicating with users, published by POSA (Proof of Stake Alliance), condensed by Messari, and aimed at Proof of Stake networks like Kusama and Polkadot.
📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars
[Panel] May 19th: Fireside chat on Crowdcast featuring Zoé Meckbach as host and Bruno Skvorc, Joe Petrowski, and Dieter Fishbein as guests (subscribe to the channel for notifications!)
[Conference] ANON Summit, May 19th to 20th: I participated in an interview which is coming out on the 19th, and on the 20th I’m hosting “Web 3.0 And Polkadot”, a non-technical introduction and Q&A session
[Conference] ReImagine2020: May 21st: Build your own blockchain in an hour by Bruno Skvorc
[Webinar] May 21st: Polkadot for Beginners, non-technical intro by Bill Laboon and Dan Reecer
[Conference] May 25th - 28th, Blockconf Digital: talks by Bruno Skvorc (workshop - build your own blockchain in an hour), Jack Platts, and Dan Reecer
That's it for this week - I hope this was as useful for you to read as it was for me to write! Special thanks to Bill for his daily digest!
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.