Dot Leap 22

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Polkadot (v0.8.26.)

👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇

• There’s a bug in the validator election process which prevents nominators with less than ~30 DOT from being effective. For more information read the explanation post!

• There is now a W3F Registrar which lets you validate your identity for only 1 DOT.

Polkadot Governance

As Council member, I wrote up my activity report for transparency here.

• Referendum 10 seeks to steal back some money from scammers and is currently failing.

• Treasury Proposal 11 (for ALEXPROMOTEAM) has moved to Council as Council Motion #23.

• Patract Labs’ treasury report post-delivery of Elara 0.1.

Kusama (v0.8.26.)

⚠ Updates

• A user suggested the redenomination of KSM in a 1:100 ratio just like what happened with Polkadot. This is going to be a tricky sell given that Kusama is its own network and has been in production for a while, so this would cause some confusion across the ecosystem.

  It’s even trickier because the proposal is non-binding - it’s just a system remark which doesn’t really do anything per se, only measures KSM holder sentiment towards the idea, so the maintainers would be the ones who would have to implement this. We’ll see how it plays out. As a councilor, I am against the idea purely due to the confusion it would cause.

🏛 Kusama Governance

As Council member, I publish all my decisions in regular posts whenever I act in this official capacity. Here’s the post from October 14th, one from October 20th, and another from October 27th.

• I turned Treasury proposal 51 into Motion 226 to support further development of the NFC wallet project.

• Motion 227 created the first Kusama bounty - a request for creating a Bounty UI for Kusama. I voted Aye to support the creation of the bounty.

• Motion 228 proposed Jaco, the author of Polkadot JS Apps as the curator for a bounty focusing on the development of a Bounty UI addon for Polkadot JS Apps (see above). I agree with the general consensus that Jaco is the most qualified to curate this work, so I voted Aye. The motion ultimately passed but failed to execute because the bounty was not yet funded. It has been subsequently passed as Motion 231.

• Motion 229 is a replacement for a motion from a while back which sought to increase the number of validators by 1 every era until 400 new validators have been added in (only this referendum caps this at 100 new validators). The previous referendum passed, but due to an invalid parameter in the scheduler's command wasn't executable, so it ultimately failed. I voted against the previous referendum, something I explained in my report from October 8th. The reason why this is a motion and not a public referendum again is because unclear instructions caused the previous referendum's failure, even though the referendum itself passed. The motion is a correction of that "bug". As such, despite me disagreeing with the ultimate aim of the referendum that will be the result of this motion, I must vote Aye because the referendum already passed previously.

🔩 Core Stack

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)

• Ink! v3 RC2 is out

• A new MultiAddress format for Account addresses is coming. This MultiAddress type is a wrapper for different formats that resolve to the same AccountId, so you can use it to target an address by index, raw bytes, hashes of different lengths or, later, human readable names in an ENS-like system.

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)

• Where clauses are now supported in decl_error!

• The import queue now prioritizes finalizing over block import.

• The ability to inspect hex-encoded pubkeys has been added to subkey.

• The queryStorage and storagePairs RPC calls are now considered unsafe.

• wasm-builder now prints out the version of Rust being used to compile the project. This is useful as Substrate cannot be compiled on certain versions of rustc.

• Pallet versioning has been implemented.

• Transaction tips now go 100% to the author of the block containing the transaction, as originally spelled out in the research paper.

• A nix shell definition has been added to Substrate, to build Substrate with nix.

• Keccak 512 has been added to Substrate’s hashing functions.

• GRANDPA equivocations should no longer happen with honest nodes that are trying to come back from a failure and aren’t fully in sync with their own past signatures yet. This caused the first Polkadot slash way back in the day and shouldn’t happen again. A slashing reform is also planned which should prevent slashing of benign nodes across the board.

• Here’s an ongoing discussion about code rent - currently, uploading an ink! contract needs no rent. Instances of that code pay rent, but the source does not. This new proposal would add code rent.

• ink!’s ERC20 example has been revamped to use traits and other best practices!

• Going from Council Member to runner-up will no longer cause a slash of your bond. (ouch)

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.

• Frontier now supports instant-sealing. This means a block is produced as soon as a transaction is in the pool, allowing for fast testing during local development.

🛠 Tools

• 🌟Substrate Sidecar API is at v1! This means old v0 endpoints are no longer supported! 🌟

• The Web3 Foundation has released an open source implementation of the W3F Registrar service. You can now also run a registrar to validate on-chain identities using these repos: https://github.com/w3f/polkadot-registrar-challenger and https://github.com/w3f/polkadot-registrar-watcher

• Polkadot API Server by SimplyVC is at version 1.25.1.

• offchain-ipfs-manual: A native-level merger of IPFS and Substrate using off-chain workers. Need a blockchain that deals with data storage? This is a good starting point!

• The package @polkadot/networks has been published, which is periodically synced with the SS58 registry from Substrate. This makes it easier to include all supported SS58 prefixes in your JavaScript or TypeScript app.

• Polkadot JS Apps is now at version 0.64 and Polkadot JS API is at 2.4.

• Polkadot JS API now has the ability to query all entries at a specific block with keysAt and entriesAt. Ever wanted to know all accounts and their balances at a specific block? Now you can.

• Upset about the compile times of Substrate? Use a remote compiling SaaS like SubBox.

• Soramitsu’s open source Fearless wallet is shaping up for a nice beta test. You can find the source on their organization’s Github:
  https://github.com/soramitsu/fearless-Android
  https://github.com/soramitsu/fearless-iOS
  https://github.com/soramitsu/fearless-utils-Android
  https://github.com/soramitsu/fearless-utils-iOS

  And link to the apps themselves (early access to beta versions): Android v0.4, iOS v0.4

• The Polkadot JS Extension will now auto-extend the “remember password for 15 minutes” window with every new interaction with a chain, as requested by Subsocial’s community. It only makes sense, considering how many interactions one has with Subsocial when using it!

• StakingWizard.com is a new dead-simple Staking UI for Polkadot by stakingfacilities.com

  

👨‍🎓 Education

• Bill Laboon gave an overview of proof of stake and engaged in a roundtable discussion with reps from Ethereum 2.0, Tezos, Cardano and Concordeum at CV Labs' "2020 - The Year of Proof of Stake" discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maJYnqsuhms

• All Sub0 recordings are available on Crowdcast.

• Bruno Škvorc presented Substrate and Polkadot at a conference in Osijek, Croatia. Video of Day 1, video of Day 2. The content is in Croatian, share with your Croatian friends!

🤝 Ecosystem

• Phala Weekly update: challenges added to Gitcoin’s Hello World

• Phala announces roadmap to mainnet

• Sora Network’s plan for a parachain lease offering (lock up your DOT / KSM for them to earn their token).

• I spoke to Trips Community about Web3, censorship, and Polkadot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plyu6oZxgXM

📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars

• Oct 28th: Blockhack.ca, Bruno Škvorc will show you how to build custom UIs for Substrate.

• Nov 2nd: Blockhack.ca, Bruno Škvorc will show you how to query past data of a Substrate chain.

• Nov 3rd: [Crowdcast] Adding Pallets to Substrate Node Template: Bruno Škvorc explains how to install new pallets into the node template to build your own fully custom chain.

• Nov 4th: [Crowdcast webinar]: Bruno Škvorc: Uvod u Substrate (Croatian language intro to Substrate)

• Nov 6th: TruffleCon: Bruno Škvorc: Using Truffle with Substrate-based Ethereum - Moonbeam

• Dec 3rd: Polkadot Decoded, the event for the Polkadot community.

👷‍♂️ Jobs

• Web3 Foundation is looking for a technical grants evaluator

• Web3 Foundation is looking for a technical education intern and junior

• Acala is looking for everyone from tech educators to devops

• Purestake still need a business development lead, and a blockchain engineer

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!

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].