Dot Leap 9

A starter template for your Substrate dashboards, Polkadot has its first runtime upgrade, Polkadot for beginngers videos, CryptoPunks on Substrate, Substrate IDE new release, and more

Jun 05, 2020

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Dot Leap presents: Polkadash

Since last week’s launch of the new educational platform DotLeap.com, we’ve been hard at work polishing some dev resources for dapp and front-end developers who would like to enter the Web3.0 ecosystem. The new content is:

Polkadot (v0.8.3)

"Polkadot Behind the Code, Episode 1: The Idea", featuring Gavin Wood. Cool video about the origin and development of Polkadot.

Launch Process

Almost 100 accounts have signaled their intention to validate on Polkadot. The sooner we get this number up, the sooner NPoS can be activated. Consider running a Polkadot validator!

The identity pallet has been added to Polkadot’s runtime. This means everyone with some DOT will be able to claim an on-chain identity soon.

Polkadot Governance

The Polkadot Direction Riot room will be host to discussions about Polkadot’s governance, alongside Polkassembly.io for more long-form discussions.
Polkadot has already had its first runtime upgrade which was uploaded with this Sudo transaction. Reminder: here’s a video explainer about the Sudo module. This runtime upgrade included a fix for for the "never-ending election" when ForceNone (no new eras) is set, which prevented Proof-of-Stake from kicking off properly. A bug in vested balances was also fixed.
There is an in-repository proposal by Acala to allow a single account to cast multiple different votes. This is already possible, but only if one splits the stash and this cannot be done if the tokens are locked.

Kusama (v0.8.3)

There are now 60 validators in the Kusama 1000 validators program! Want to validate but not sure how to get the backing stake needed to be selected? Join 1kv!

⚠ Updates

Kusama now lives alongside Polkadot in the same code repository, and uses the same binary. To run Kusama, you need to pass in the option --chain=kusama or rename the binary to be called kusama. How exactly it’s possible to run two different chains from the same source code and not have them be identical is explained in this Dot Leap post - special thanks to Jam for putting me on the right track here!

🏛 Kusama Governance

One of the community members has been working on a Proposal for Treasury funding for several media pieces on Kusama, its governance, future, and the current Council. The Proposal has already been voted on and passed in Motion 151.
Referendum 55 to increase validator count to 350 has passed and will be enacted around block 2.635.200. This is the biggest bump in validator slots since genesis.
Liebi’s proposal to add a new registrar has finally turned into Referendum 56, but has been met with some initial resistance. The main complaints right now are that it does the exact same thing as registrar #1 does. I personally think a backup option in case Registrar #1 becomes unavailable or tainted is nice to have.
Council member Kevin Li has proposed an undescribed Proposal 23 in error. He also proposed another registrar in Proposal 24. Due to the error in P23, Kevin proposed a clearing of the active Proposals (23 and 24) which was sped up and enacted by the technical committee in Referendum 57, purging them from the queue. This resulted in the re-creation of P24 as Proposal 25.
Several new Tips are pending confirmation from council in the treasury.
LocalKSM’s second milestone has been funded by the Kusama Treasury and described on Polkassembly.
A new Proposal is being discussed in Polkassembly about integrating KSM into a cross-blockchain clone of Bomberman. Apparently, the game is play2earn and is quite popular.

🔩 Core Stack

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There is now a new parachain runtime skeleton in Substrate.
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An inspect-node-key command has been added to subkey. This prints the PeerId from a node key file.
It is no longer (easily) possible to get proposals that exceed a block’s weight stuck in storage forever. The clear call which clears a proposal no longer looks at weight and length, ignoring all computation costs.
It is now easier to find a block author’s account address using AuraAuthorId<T>.
Existential deposits can now be set to 0 in custom Substrate chains. This goes hand in hand with setups where users will hold many different tokens, but no native currency of the chain, like in Acala’s case.
An implementation of the Overseer has been merged into Substrate. It’s a component acting as a health-checker and message-passing bridge between background jobs (subsystems) in Substrate, explained in detail in the implementors’ guide.
Sentry nodes are now automatically reserved, so --sentry and --sentry-node imply --reserved-node.

🛠 Tools

Want to just include PolkadotJS libraries the old-school way in your next project? Use this bundle!
Polkadot API Server 1.16.1 has been released.
Substrate IDE, a graphical interface for Substrate development on Linux and Mac OS is at release 0.1.1.
Pierre from Parity has released his networking Grafana dashboard for Substrate. It’s what he uses when looking for connectivity problems between nodes, so if you’re seeing connection degradation or need to keep an eye on up time, check out the networking dashboard setup. If you’re unfamiliar with Grafana and Prometheus, I made an intro video, linked below.

You can use the sub-bench tool to run benchmarks against your substrate --dev chain.
Polkassembly now has comment anchor links so navigating long threads is much more pleasant!
Gantree released an all-in-one infrastructure setup and deployment kit for Substrate nodes and chains - set up a private network in a second!

👨‍🎓 Education

A handy guide (+code) for launching a Polkadot validator setup on Kubernetes.
A great beginner-friendly tutorial to generate a Bitcoin-like blockchain with Substrate and Rust by Nicole Zhu.

"Polkadot for Beginners", an entirely non-technical introduction to Polkadot featuring Bill Laboon and Dan Reecer. Explains the history of the Internet and blockchains, and how Polkadot is the next step in blockchain development.

🤝 Ecosystem

Darwinia launched the Crab Node Grand Prix: Darwinia Project Moon, 100 Million cRING Grand Prize.
LocalKSM have delivered their first milestone as a Treasury-funded grantee. They are building a local p2p trading experience for KSM tokens, and the flow has been illustrated here and visualized in this video. The docs and implementation are both online, and they even have a Riot group in which one can get in touch with the team.
Over 6000 DAI are up for grabs in the Polkadot Bounty Challenge - Polkadot is live, so time to start building.
The blockchain explorer Subscan has an application form if you’d like your Substrate-based chain listed there as one of the default options.
There’s a Substrate-based remake of the CryptoPunks game from Ethereum. SubstraPunks source code here. You will need to use their NFT chain to test this out.
Acala just finished their grant milestone which included implementing a stablecoin on a Substrate-based chain, collateralized in Bitcoin and other cross-chain bridged assets, with abstract oracle systems that can support Chainlink integration. The chain comes with a built-in Uniswap-like exchange for instant and fast liquidations.
P2P Economy wrote a comprehensive Polkadot nomination guide and put together a nice staking overview dashboard:
An paper was posted on arXiv.org which covers various blockchain interoperability protocols, including Polkadot's.
Lunie is an app which lets you stake on Kusama from a mobile device.

📅 Events

June 9 at 7am UTC - Web3 Builders: Gantree | An All-in-one Infrastructure Toolkit for Substrate Blockchains (Technical audience)
June 9 at 4pm UTC - Polkadot Staking Webinar hosted by Staked (Non-technical and Technical audience)
June 10 at 4pm UTC - Polkadot Launch Telegram AMA hosted by business, technical, and staking representatives from Parity and W3F. Submit questions in advance on Telegram by Friday, June 5th.
June 18 - Polkadefi conference by Acala

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.

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