Dot Leap 21
Dot Leap 21
Bounties on Kusama, Bugs on Polkadot, Gitcoin adds native support for DOT and KSM, ink! v3 is in release-candidate stage, new Polkadot UI theme (dark + robohash icons!) and more!
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Hello World! 👋
"Hello World! by Polkadot" is a series of challenges for users to earn KSM and DOT by learning and completing challenges on Gitcoin!
Polkadot (v 0.8.25.)
Due to recent staking algorithm changes, unfortunately most nominators staking less than 200 DOT are not receiving rewards. Developers are researching potential fixes.
Polkadot Governance
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Patract Labs' future development plan for RedSpot. Right now, besides Redspot, they have two more teams trying to work on Europa (like Ganache or BuidlerEVM in Ethereum) and Elara (like Infura in Ethereum). The treasury proposal to keep working on Europa has passed, and the proposal to fund Elara is under discussion.
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Referendum 7, scheduling an increase of validators slots by 1 every era, passed but could not be executed due to a wrong setup. A new motion has been proposed as a fix, passed, and fast tracked by Technical Committee as Referendum 9.
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The Council Motion 29 to upgrade the runtime to v25 has passed and was enacted as Referendum 8. To see changes and for release notes and hash, please check here.
Painless Two-node Local Testnet
A new script has been merged in which quickly spins up a two-node local testnet version of Polkadot from the current master code rather than relying on release. This is great for testing breaking changes while developing updates on Polkadot’s and Kusama’s binaries. This is a much more rudimentary version of Shawn’s Polkadot Launch tool.
Vote for a better tomorrow!
I’m running for Council Member on both Polkadot and Kusama! Read more about why and what I can bring to the table in this post or click the banner below - the post also explains how to vote in screenshots. Remember, voting costs nothing but a transaction fee - and can be done with locked and staked funds - but has the potential to change the landscape forever!
Kusama (v 0.8.25.)
With the recent runtime upgrade, Kusama now has bounties enabled in the Treasury!
Bounties are a special mechanism for recurring, curated work paid for by earmarked funds from the Treasury. A curator checks the work and approves the payout - this is ideal for content producer teams under an editor, open source contributors under an admin, events under a marketing director, and more. A discussion on how to apply them in the first wave is ongoing on Polkassembly.
As an experiment in dogfooding, I posted the proposal for the DotLeap editorial bounty to Subsocial! If you need Subsocial tokens to interact with the post, visit their faucet!
💥 Chaos
Early KSM council voters may have some KSM inaccessible. This bug is being investigated and will soon be fixed via governance.
🏛 Kusama Governance
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Passed Referendum 88 schedules an increase in the number of validators on Kusama by 1 every era, for 400 eras. The council should be able to stop the increase if metrics change on the network. Regarding validator increase/decrease automatic function: the work is being reviewed at the moment. As Council member, I voted against it.
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Jessica Angel and the Vancouver Biennale of Public Art opened the discussion on their proposal submission for the development of a high impact art installation: using custom designed adhesive vinyl and AR technologies, they aim to create Voxel Bridge: a physical space in the city of Vancouver to present a journey through the most prominent events in Kusama Network. Kusama events are identified by the artist as well as roadmap, timelines and budget. You can find the full proposal here.
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There is a new Kusama Treasury Proposal Discussion to use Kusama for academic robotics.
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Motion 224 pushed an upgrade to runtime v2025. Among other things, the runtime upgrade adjusted max nominators down to 128 (from 256) and introduced Bounties.
🔩 Core Stack
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Batch All support has been added, which means atomic support for batch transactions. In other words, if any of the transactions in the batch call failed, they will all revert. This is extremely useful for projects like RMRK which depend on good batch calls when trading NFTs!
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🚨 BREAKING CHANGE: This PR will break networking compatibility with all nodes below version 0.8.24., so all validators are encouraged to upgrade to at least that. It is not yet known when this will land, but preemptively upgrading will help you avoid any issues.
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The fix for the NPoS election size has landed, which means Polkadot’s NPoS will some time in the near future become DNPoS (delegated nominated proof of stake 🤯). More info on this as the number of nominators in the system continues to grow!
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The maximum number of nominators per validator before a validator is considered oversubscribed has been reduced from 256 to 128 and is subject to future change by governance. Reminder: nominators of an oversubscribed validator earn nothing if they find themselves below the top 128 in terms of nominator stake amount. To be effective, nominate less popular validators or stake more tokens!
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The log format has been changed. If you’re using log parsing tools to keep an eye on your node(s), check the linked PR to see the changes.
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Scheduled tasks can now be rescheduled by the Council. This arguably makes the Council even more powerful - a concern I’ve brought up in the last edition regarding the overnight inclusion of Referendum 6.
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.
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Moonbeam’s testnet, Moonbase Alpha, has been rebooted and re-released. This release includes new publish-subscribe support for the Web3 RPC, which was the last significant functional gap in creating an Ethereum-like environment within Moonbeam.
The team also added support for pre-compiles (including ecrecover, sha256, ripemd160, and the identity function) and GPLv3 licenses.
Alberto has created a couple of new tutorials to demonstrate how to use pub/sub and the pre-compiles:
Alberto's Blog: https://www.purestake.com/blog/new-in-moonbase-alpha-v2-contract-events-and-pub-sub-capabilities/
Release Notes: https://github.com/PureStake/moonbeam/releases/tag/v0.2.0
About Moonbase Alpha: https://docs.moonbeam.network/networks/testnet/
🛠 Tools
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Polkadot JS Apps UI (at version 0.62) now comes with an experimental dark theme and a new Robohash icon theme which shows account icons and randomly generated robots, Idena style.
Full list of changes in the release notes!
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Polkadot JS API is now at version 2.2 and the docs have been revamped, now hosted on Docusaurus.
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Substrate API Sidecar has entered the third release candidate stage.
🤝 Ecosystem
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The Kusama Tipping Button RFP already has a team and is being developed - barely a week after the RFP has been posted.
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Acuity Social, an upcoming Subsocial competitor that’s moving over from the MIX blockchain, is transitioning from Proof of Authority to Proof of Stake. They need validators and nominators to kickstart the network in a decentralized fashion, so if you’re interested, read the staking docs. Word of warning: the project is very early alpha and is essentially a clone of Kusama right now.
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Discussion on Phala’s IPO strategy for becoming a Kusama parachain. Chime in if you’re a PHA holder or potential investor.
Don’t forget to vote!
Your vote only costs a TX fee (a few cents) but it can change the protocol (both Kusama and Polkadot - depending where you vote for me!) for ever - good governance is responsible governance! Click the banner to learn about my candidacy!
Note: your tokens will be locked in democracy, but are still usable for staking, referendum voting, etc. If you want to transfer them, just cancel the vote and they’re free, no strings attached.
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 [email protected].
Founder at RMRK.app
A fortnightly-ish newsletter about all things Web 3.0 from the Polkadot side
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