DotLeap 43
Popularity can be bad. Karura is Kusama's first parachain. New staking limits imposed. 7% of all KSM in crowdloans, out of circulation for 1 year!
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Polkadot Updates
Polkadot’s nodes started running out of RAM again when executing the election optimization algorithm. The reason why this isn’t being detected on Kusama is the popularity of Polkadot - orders of magnitude more nominators in the game.
Emergency fix in runtime v9050 fixes a part of this by hardcoding staking limits, and a long term fix properly optimizing Polkadot is planned for later this month.
The limit is configurable by governance and is 20 DOT at first.
It is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED Validators upgrade their Polkadot nodes to v0.9.6.
Anyone upgrading to to 0.9.6 should remove the--execution=native flag.
🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain
Finality is currently running slightly behind the normal 2-3 blocks (around 50 blocks behind the latest BABE-produced block). Finality is continuing to progress at the same rate, it is just delayed in comparison to block production. This issue should be fixed with the 0.9.6 client upgrade:
As part of parachain validation the nodes must participate in the approval voting protocol, which guarantees that any parachain blocks committed on the relay chain are valid. GRANDPA voters must restrict their votes to relay chain blocks that only include parachain blocks that have already been approved, this guarantees that only valid parachain blocks get finalized. The client code of polkadot is shared among the multiple networks, i.e. Westend, Kusama and Polkadot, and this logic for restricting votes on finality is already enabled and working on both Westend and Kusama since these networks have already rolled out parachains support. Since parachains support on Polkadot has not been rolled out yet, this logic made it so that the node would not find any approved blocks (since the approval voting protocol is not running), which caused the voters to restrict their votes for finality.
This release should only affect Polkadot nodes, once more than 2/3 of the validators upgrade to v0.9.6, the finality lag should go back to the previous values (i.e. 2 or 3 blocks behind best).
🔴 🏛 Governance
Motion 86 has been approved. It was submitted by Premiurly aiming to cover maintenance and operational costs for Polkassembly: an integral part of Polkadot and Kusama governance. This submission covers costs for July, August and September 2021. Context, OKRs and budget can be found on the post.
Motion 87 has been approved. It was submitted by Subscan aiming to cover operational costs for the months of March, April and May 2021. Budget, current services and billing information can be found on the Polkassembly post.
A new Treasury Proposal, for writing a book about Polkadot aiming at blockchain beginners, has been proposed by Dot Leap contributor Gilbert Bassey.
Motion 88 has become a referendum and is passing! The motion proposes an upgrade of the Polkadot Runtime to v9050 - this release resolves the scaling issues we are seeing on Polkadot with staking, introducing hard limits on the number of nominators on chain: which is configurable with governance. Release notes, runtime changes and hash can be found HERE.
Polkadot Ecology Research Institute is asking for financial support from the treasury. (It has nothing to do with Ecology, lost in translation, they mean ecosystem :) )
Kusama Updates
🤯~ 7% of all existing KSM are now locked into crowdloans.
🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain
Version 0.9.6 of the client and v9050 of the runtime is out, containing critical updates needed to help ensure that the very first parachain team onbaords smoothly to Kusama.
🦅 🏛 Governance
Referendum 120, proposing a runtime upgrade on Kusama Network to v9050 has passed community vote and has been enacted on block #8,010,981.
The Jade Wallet team published a proposal on Polkassembly to integrate Kusama Network to their mobile application. Milestones, timelines and budget can be reviewed in the post.
SubQuery and Fearless have partnered to submit a proposal to treasury for an Open-source DApp API for common data and document and publish learning material and tutorials to use it. The proposal desired outcomes are: to provide more support to developers in the ecosystem, improve the interoperability of dApps and parachains and attract more developers to the Kusama ecosystem.
Motion 309 by MIDL.DEV for snapshots (social contract) is approved.
🦅 ⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others
Karura has won the first parachain auction and has on-boarded as Kusama's first non-common-good parachain. https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Fkusama.api.onfinality.io%2Fpublic-ws#/parachains
RMRK, Kusama’s and Polkadot’s NFT standard of choice, has released a writeup on what the Kanaria project will actually produce in terms of NFTs. If you’ve been interested in the tech and how it’ll make these birds possible, give it a read.
🔩 Core Stack
Council will now be able to use the Scheduler, for setting up delayed execution (e.g. start increasing validator count 50000 blocks from now).
New staking limits are about to be put in place to avoid out of memory issues on Polkadot that have been plaguing the chain lately. This will be a temporary solution until more optimizations are in place.
🛠 Tools
Polkadot JS API is at version 4.15.1. Upgrade priority: Medium. Recommended for all chains where Xcm is used (addition of new XcmOrigin).
👷♀️ Jobs in Web 3.0
Want your job ad here? Contact bruno@bitfalls.com!
RMRK is looking for Artist Advocates, a Community Manager, Ambassadors, Rust developers with FRAME experience, and Marketing colleagues to build out their art legos universe. Hit us on hello@rmrk.app!
Fractal Protocol is looking for a Rust engineer. Details here. Help us build privacy-preserving infra for radical data markets. Email julio@fractal.id
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.