Dot Leap 30

New version of Substrate, Polkadot, and Kusama released, big parachain upgrades merged into Polkadot and Kusama, the launch of NFTs via RMRK's tools and a new UI, a new treasury explorer, and more!

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Polkadot (v0.8.27)

• Cumulus README has been updated with local setup instructions.

• HRMP is progressing nicely with channel deposits merged into Polkadot.

• The propose parachain pallet has been merged in.

• The crowdloan pallet has been merged in.

• Parachain related functionality and UI elements have been added to Polkadot JS Apps.

• 19 parachains proposing to join Rococo, the demand is real!

Polkadot Governance

• Motion 53 by OnFinality, has been approved by Council. The motion approves a recurring treasury spend funding the SaaS costs of the service for providing free public RPC node access.

• Patract’s new detailed report on Europa v0.2 is out. Reminder: Europa is a sandbox environment that runs FRAME Contracts pallet, and it is also a framework that provides a sandbox environment for Substrate Runtime. Therefore, developers can use the executable files compiled by Europa to debug their ink! contract, and they can also use the library provided by Europa as a framework to implement a sandbox environment for the Runtime in their Substrate project.

• There is an interesting discussion about pivoting the Polkadot Relay Chain to Proof of Work from Proof of Stake.

• Hexplay is asking the Treasury for funding to develop their game-oriented chain.

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 (v0.8.27)

🏛 Kusama Governance

• The motion to fund regular Kusama and Polkadot database snapshots has failed. This might have been caused by inadequate decentralization (only direct links, no IPFS, no torrents) and the availability of a free alternative.

• Polkascan published a progress report on their PolkADAPT suite or libraries to extend the Polkadot dev ecosystem.

• Motion 252 (parallel of 53 on Polkadot) aimed to fund OnFinality’s infrastructure - they provide free public RPC nodes and an Infura-like infra for the developer ecosystem. It passed and will be a recurring proposal. OnFinality also published a comprehensive proposal for review covering the first milestone of their plan for high performance public infrastructure on Kusama. This information can be found here.

• Motion 253 upgrading Kusama Runtime to v2027 became a referendum and is up for vote. Release notes here.

• A Treasury Proposal for milestone 2 of Voxel Bridge, an AR exhibit in Vancouver featuring Kusama, has passed.

• A Treasury Proposal to develop Ask!, an AssemblyScript-based smart contract DSL similar to ink!, was approved by Council.

• DotTreasury has launched. It’s a treasury explorer by OpenSquare. Their development report is available here.

• A Treasury Proposal for an NFT Explorer by Kodadot has passed in record time. 

• HashQuark published a proposal to build a Parachain Lease Offering Dashboard to follow up the status of the parachain slot and auction situation, so that the community can all easily get this information at any time, anywhere. The proposal includes two milestones and is now open for feedback.

🔩 Core Stack

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0.8.27 is out - full list of changes along with what’s coming in terms of RUNTIME changes is available here. Substrate 2.0.1 is out too, finally fixing builds with the latest Rust nightly!

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)

• UniArts reserved SS58 prefix 38.

• Existing pallets are being migrated to use the pallet! macro from FRAME V2.

• Initial work for directly supporting data storage chains in Substrate has been merged.

• [Substrate now uses libp2p 0.34.](https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/7888\)

• Substrate Grafana dashboards have been updated.

• A new RPC endpoint to return final fee details, payment_queryFeeDetails, has been added to Substrate.

• Prefix 29 was claimed by CORD.

• Prefixes 26 and 27 were claimed by Patract.

🛠 Tools

• srtool has been updated and is now easier to use - all instructions in the README

• Dotreasury is a Treasury Explorer for Kusama by OpenSquare:

  

• nmonpolkadot - a complete log file based Polkadot validator uptime monitoring solution for Zabbix.

• Subscan now supports block exploration of Rococo.

• Polkadot JS Apps is at version 0.75. Among other things, this new version adds new types and endpoints, improves the bounty UI, and has a basic parachain UI.

• Polkadot JS 3.4 is out with a breaking change: the derive.chain.{getBlock, subscribeNewBlocks} now return SignedBlockExtended, all with the actual extrinsics and events mapped. Users of the latter interface should take note.

• A Github Search app for Polkadot-related projects.

👨‍🎓 Education

• A very good article into securely setting up your systemd configuration for Polkadot and Kusama nodes.

• An NFT crash course - Bruno Škvorc explaining NFTs, and what their status is in the Kusama / Polkadot Web3 ecosystem.

  

• For convenience, the wiki now lists all the common errors you can encounter with their in-code docs. Manual descriptions on how to resolve them will also be added.

🤝 Ecosystem

• A ZBayChain and Subsocial inspired marketplace chain on Substrate.

• A community member’s tutorial for monitoring your Substrate nodes with Prometheus and Grafana, arguably a bit of a better setup than in the wiki.

• Using Band protocol’s oracles on Moonbeam

• Web3 Foundation's grants program has now issued 200 grants - and 100 of those are since May 2020.

• Moonstake wallet supports DOT now.

• The W3F Polkadot and Kusama RPC endpoints have been taken down for an indefinite period of time. The DNS has been updated to point to Parity's endpoint.

• Fearless Wallet 1.2 has been just released in both AppStore and Google Play with direct KSM token purchases, UI improvements, bug fixes, etc.!

• A new RFP has been merged into Web3 Foundation’s General Grants repository: a request to build an identity directory client-side app which would allow per-account detail analysis and shareable layouts for Substrate-based chains.

• OnFinality released Rococo endpoints for developers to connect to for free.

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].