Dot Leap 29: Frame v2, 16k DOT slash, Polkadot rebrand, and more!

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Polkadot in 2020

The year is done. That means paradise in 2021, right?

Regardless, here’s a recap of the awesome year Polkadot has had, despite all other circumstances!

Database Snapshots

This will now be a regular (once every two weeks) thing. The infrastructure is in place. The compression approach needs a bit of fine tuning, though, will work on that next.

There is also a proposal and corresponding motion by another party to maintain these snapshots and be funded for doing so.

Polkadot (v0.8.26-1)

👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇

On 4 Jan it was announced that the Rococo V1 parachain registration opening will occur on 11 Jan 2021. Follow the #rococo:matrix.parity.io channel on Matrix for up-to-date information.

News

• Big slash against “LLC” in era 215 - 16000 DOT on the line! Looks like a faulty backup process!

Polkadot Governance

• A lawyer from Toronto wants to set up an on-chain registrar for identity verification via actual ID documents and a phone call. Discussion on Polkassembly. It is currently quite expensive to second the proposal - 100 DOT - which explains the low number of seconds

• A multi-sig curator has been selected for the Polkadot rebranding bounty. The multi-sig consists of several members from the Polkadot community

• Oneblock submitted a proposal to organise a hackathon event for Substrate developers in Q1 of 2021. Motion 52 tries to solve a problem from the existing Substrate technical courses: In each course, OneBlock has nearly 100 dev students who have completed the Substrate development technology course, but they cannot effectively transform the theoretical knowledge learned through the 1-month online course into a practical project that can be implemented. Through feedback from some graduate students, OneBlock hopes to increase the practical competition after the course and encourage the students to form teams for practical projects. This hackathon is open to individuals and teams and is divided into three main categories. You can find all the info, including categories, prizes and budget in the proposal

• OnFinality submitted a treasury proposal to cover the maintenance cost of their RPC public nodes (listed on polkadot.js Apps)

• The proposer of referendum 14 aims to move a DOT claim from one address to another, allegedly due to a theft. Information can be found here.

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 (v0.8.26-1)

⚠ Updates

• The Kusama Validator Selection optimizer has been updated. The team needs feedback, so please test and report back! Original proposal is here

🏛 Kusama Governance

My latest Kusama Council Participation transparency report is published.

• Kusama Referendum 97 appears to be simply a test of someone seeing how Kusama and Polkassembly interact

• Kusama Referendum 96 has failed. There was no discussion on Polkassembly on what it was trying to do

• A Treasury proposal has been passed to council for Polkashots.io to support Kusama database snapshots as well as Polkadot ones

• A Treasury proposal has been motioned to Council to sponsor "Virtual Niche" - The World's First Crypto Art Exhibition with Kusama Network". It passed

• The Voxel Bridge Art Project published a report of their first milestone

🔩 Core Stack

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)

FRAME v2 includes the `#[pallet]` attribute macro, as a replacement on `decl_*!` macros that you know. Syntax should be more straightforward and also macro code more easy to enhance.

The full doc can be found here, example here. The macro is still under development and might change before next substrate release. The team does not recommend that you use it for production pallets, but it seems to be in a solid shape.

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)

• The SS58 prefix of a chain will now be available in the runtime as well under system.ss58Prefix, not just via RPC. It has become a citizen of the chain, not just the host node running the runtime

• Chain extensions have been merged in, allowing smart contracts to communicate with the chain’s pallets

• Libp2p has been upgraded to v0.33.0

• The Participation Lottery has been merged into Substrate, meaning we can now reward certain actions on-chain with a lottery ticket and give winnings to a select few winners after a draw period. The initial idea is to encourage regular Council votes, regular nomination updates, and regular governance votes from the community

• Four additional bootnodes have been added to the Polkadot and Kusama chain specs

• Subkey has been made much lighter, with chain-specific feature implementation being delegated to specific chains which need them

• A warp sync improvement has landed, adding a new runtime API to query BABE information for the next block (which is known a block in advance).

• 🐛 There was a bug in the parachain consensus that when importing a relay
  chain block that sets a new best parachain block, but the required
  parachain block was not yet imported. This pr fixes this by waiting for
  the block to be imported

• 🐛 Dead accounts are now handled better in balances (i.e. not handled at all)

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.

• Moonbeam’s 2020 recap with 2021 plans

• Moonbeam has a grants program now

🛠 Tools

• Looking for Substrate resources? Awesome Substrate can help

• A new VueJS Polkadot API starter kit from Colm3na

• PolkadotJS API is at version 3.3 bringing along some performance improvements on the initialization layer (the connection will start up faster)

• Polkadot Apps UI are on 0.74 now, warning you about the amount you’ll lock up when seconding a proposal and other minor fixes

• The Polkadot JS Extension is at version 0.36, with updates such as Ethereum account support, splitting up derivation and creation of accounts for a clearer UI, additional phishing detection, ecdsa account support and more. Release post here

• Subscan offers a tool to fetch historical prices of DOT and KSM. Here is a sample call for the price in USD of 42 DOTS on the 01.01.2021 at 0:13: https://polkadot.subscan.io/tools/price_converter?value=42&type=time&from=DOT&to=USD&time=1609456380

• Substrate Sidecar API is at version 2.1.0. Minor update, no breaking changes

• A dead simple tool to scrape the default block endpoint of substrate-api-sidecar for the entire chain and allow queries on top of it. Currently only supports MongoDB

• Some validator stats scripts by University of Pittsburgh students - these can help with calculating the minimum bond for effective nomination and other things

👨‍🎓 Education

• Bill Laboon's 20-lecture "Blockchain Fundamentals" course has moved to Youtube

🤝 Ecosystem

• Polkaswap testnet V2 is out!

• Bill Laboon’s conversation with Zoe Meckbach about Polkadot governance

• The Ellipal hardware wallet now supports DOT

• AirGap’s offering of multi-OS wallet apps has grown

• Decrypt has a good summary of the Polkadot rebrand proposal

• Why not reduce the Polkadon unbonding period?

• Bancor is going cross-chain with Polkadot

• Crust Network and Litentry Collaborates For Decentralized Storage and Data Security

• A good discussion about parachain economics on Reddit

• Details about Karura’s crowdloan (Karura is Acala’s Kusama parachain)

• Phala’s Vendetta Incentive Program Roundup

• Check out these neat Polkadot animations done by a community member! 

📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars

• Jan 13th - Bruno Škvorc: NFT Crash Course: Enter the Metaverse - an overview of how NFTs work, what’s out there right now, and where it’s going, with am emphasis on what we’re doing at W3F to get things moving

• The call for proposals for Polkadot Decoded 2021 has begun! If you are interested in giving a talk, please see here

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].