DotLeap 40
Polkadot nodes fail and recover. Encointer team meets with Kusama Council (video). Acala partners with Current to create hybrid finance (HyFi).
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Polkadot Updates
🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain
Runtime v0.9.3 was released as a HIGH PRIORITY upgrade for all relay chain validators. A couple of things to note:
Both Kusama and Polkadot validator nodes should upgrade to this release, although for Kusama validators it is more urgent
This release sets
--wasm-execution Compiledas default. If you've set this flag before you can remove itPolkadot validators can remove the
--execution nativeflag.This fixes some Docker issues with PvF for parachains. Kusama validators that use Docker should upgrade ASAP
On 24 May 2021, Polkadot nodes failed with an out-of-memory (OOM) error on block 5,202,216. The issue was resolved and precautions were implemented to prevent this from happening again in the future. Read the postmortem report published by Web3 foundation.
In a bid to promote decentralization, Polkadot-JS has been made available on IPFS. dotapps.io will always point to the latest version on IPFS.
🔴 🏛 Governance
📃 Winkrypto published a proposal for discussion: aiming to boost the brand recognition of Polkadot, Kusama and Substrate to a broader audience in Asia-Pacific Region. Polkadot has gained good traction with blockchain audiences but certainly still has room to expand its media exposure and community awareness: "Winkrypto and ChainNews are here to help bring the general awareness of Polkadot to the Chinese speaking community to new levels". The scope of work and budget covering 2021 efforts can be found on this link.
❌ Referendum 23, to add a lawyer as a registrar to Polkadot to verify real names, did not pass.
🗳 Referendum 24, to increase the Wasm heap page size, is now up for a vote. The original proposer, RTTI-5220 from Polkadot, has asked for this to be rejected, stating that “the team decided to include heap pages increase on an upgrade and this seems to be the best way to approach the issue - If you vote on this, please be so kind to reject the proposal as it stands now.”
🔴 ⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others
Current, a financial services app with over 3 million American users, announced a partnership with Acala to integrate Acala’s DeFi services into its core banking product. The partnership is the first of its kind, establishing a new category of hybrid finance (HyFi) that combines both traditional and decentralized financial applications.
Crust Network partners with Manta Network to build a layer of privacy for Crust’s decentralized storage network.
HydraDX announced the start of their incentivized testnet where community contributors are rewarded with HDX tokens.
Moonbeam partners with API3 to bring off-chain APIs to Polkadot.
Kusama Updates
🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain
Runtime v0.9.3 was released as a HIGH PRIORITY upgrade for all relay chain validators.
The variance in staking rewards to validators and nominators is expected to increase. This is because the validators randomly selected to connect to a parachain will receive more era points. It is also expected that the rewards will even out over time.
🦅 🏛 Governance
✅ Motion 299 to upgrade the Kusama Runtime to v9030 has passed as referendum 113. The proposal was executed in block #7,668,600.
📃 The second Kusama Town Hall was held on 27 May to discuss Encointer's proposal for a common-good identity parachain. You can watch a recording of the e-meeting here. Encointer has an ambitious plan to give everyone a Universal Basic Income with the goal to create a sustainable, inclusive economy.
📃 VaLibreNetwork has submitted a proposal for Sube v1.0, a library for submitting extrinsics to Substrate-based chains. VLN aims to become Kusama’s "bridge to the real world" by providing the decentralized infrastructure for fiat on-&-off-ramps to the Kusama-verse.
🦅 ⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others
The NFTs given out as part of Polkadot Decoded’s treasure hunt were minted and given away using Singular (RMRK)
HydraDX, a cross-chain liquidity protocol on Polkadot, announced Basilisk, a liquidity bootstrapping protocol designed to operate as a parachain in Kusama.
Zenlink, a cross-chain DEX protocol based on Polkadot, launched SlotVault, a smart pool product that allows users to obtain multiple token benefits from the crowdloan sponsors and their supporting projects. They are dubbing the new product PLO (Parachain Lease Offering) as mining.
Darwinia released the parachain auction strategy for Crab, their canary network on Kusama.
🔩 Core Stack
A new Gift pallet is being built by Shawn from Parity. This would allow Alice to “pre-send” some tokens to Bob, who has no idea about Polkadot yet. When Bob sets up an account, he basically uses a “coupon” to transfer some amount from Alice to himself without needing to have DOT for initial transaction fees.
If for some reason the validator election mechanism fails like it did on May 24th, instead of freezing the network it will just not try to roll a new set that time, and will reuse the old validator set.
🛠 Tools
Substrate API Sidecar is out with a bugfix release of 6.2.1, mainly relating to custom assets on Statemint.
The Polkadot JS Extension is at 0.38. which adds a batch account exporter, support for IPFS/IPNS URLs in blocking phishing, and more.
A release monitor for Polkadot and Kusama nodes capable of auto-replacing a node’s binary on new releases. Careful - without verifying the hash of the binary, you might be subjected to a binary hijack attack if someone takes control of Parity’s Github.
Polkadot JS API is at version 4.12, adding support for some new types and runtime upgrade blocks for Kusama and Westend. Upgrading is recommended but not required.
🤝 Community News and Articles
🔩 Speculative Rationality launched Parachain.live, a website tracking the progress and plans of the various parachain candidates out there, was launched.
📖 What Are Parachain Auctions? — All You Need to Know — Article by Gilbert Bassey
📖 Polkadot crowdloans (and how to use them to your advantage) — Article by Polkadotters
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 and Gilbert Bassey. Got any links for Bruno for the next edition? Find me on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at bruno@bitfalls.com.