Following up on the call we had last Wednesday, here are the notes:
Foreign Assets Registration process
Parity will enhance the documentation on how to create and use of foreign assets, this will also be added to the XCM cookbook.
User stories
@joyce will be collecting use cases that are currently problematic (for users and/or for the parachains). All parachains should submit a detailed description of their use cases and the steps taken in this sheet until May, 17th. This will serve as the foundation to set up a project for: improving documentation, creating new guides and improving AH and its functionality.
The results of this use case investigation will be presented in the next Asset Hub Brainstorming Session. Going forward Joyce (PM) and @liamaharon (Dev) are the main POCs for all topics related to Asset Hub.
Velocity’s Token Questionnaire
The token economy survey is still open and waiting for responses, the results for this will also be shared at the upcoming Asset Hub Brainstorming Session. For now, this questionnaire is only geared towards Parachains in order to find quick wins in terms of their token implementations/standards and bridges. In another round we can think of extending this questionnaire further to wallets and other stakeholders.
Fee payments with generic assets
The asset conversion pallet is live on Polkadot and working, here’s a JavaScript script that Joe generated, it showcases how to create a pool, make a transaction, swapping assets in the pool in order to pay the fee and paying fees in that token.
We currently can’t pay XCM delivery fees with any assets other than DOT/KSM, but non-XCM transaction fee payment works fine - here is the issue to it.
Long term vision for the usage of the asset conversion pallet should be that users and parachains can use Asset Hub and pay their (transaction) fees with the parachain’s assets without having any DOTs, for that we also need to maintain the pools funded.
Existential deposits via Asset Conversion
RFC 11 (rejected) proposed using asset conversion to create new accounts/funding the existential deposit. When transferring assets to accounts without existential deposits, you could convert the asset to acquire the existential deposit by debiting it via the asset that you’re sending. Problem with that was that users would be confused if the amount of assets arriving would be less than the amount sent. Another problem is that currently parachains can’t tell if the account exists/has existential deposit on asset hub or not, ideally you could pull this information from an XCM call and tell the user, which can then decide if they want to proceed with the transaction or not.
General goal is to allow users to do balance transfers in any asset and cross-chain, the question is now where the complexity should reside. More discussion around this will follow on the forum.
Ramp network has an implementation of Parachain deposits using asset conversion ready, it will be rolled out after testing and if it works Parachains can integrate it as well.
Issue with DOT as a reserve on RC and AH (forum post discussion here)
Forum Post TL;DR: Migrate the DOT reserves of all parachains into Asset Hub and have Asset Hub as the main hub for the reserves of all assets, not only DOT. So you only have to have application specific channels and not asset specific channels in order to do transfers.
The migration should be done Parachain per Parachain and be individually adapted, so that everyone moves to the new logic - Parity is willing to support teams with technical questions to that. Still a generic migration would be desirable, for that the only solution currently proposed is to create a pallet that automatically handles your software accounts.
Having Asset Hub as the main reserve location could also open up the possibility of staking via Asset Hub.
Address format unification (forum discussion here)
Will be discussed with UX/UI teams (wallets, etc.)
XCM fees estimation
Parity has designed and proposed some runtime APIs that would make it easy to estimate complex multi-hop, multi-chain asset transfers. The proposal can be found here and they’re awaiting feedback.
Funds stuck when sending meme coins through Asset Hub
Some users faced an issue with transferring assets from HydraX to AssetHub. USDTs were trapped during the transfer due to a misconfiguration of the fee. The amount of USDT sent was too small to cover the processing fees on AssetHub, leaving the funds stuck and inaccessible, even though the amount of DED included in the transaction was big enough to cover all the fees. There is a mechanism allowing users to claim their assets, but it doesn’t help because the trapped amount is too small to pay the necessary fees. The current claim mechanism expects all fees to be covered by the claimed amount itself, even governance won’t help here since the amounts are too little. Parity wants to work on a better claiming mechanism.
Related issue by @xlc : https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/901
Transfers from Kusama’s treasury to a Parachain’s Polkadot account
The goal is to add KSMs to the Hydra DX Omnipool, which is on Polkadot. The plan is to transfer KSM from the Kusama treasury to Hydra using the Kusama<>Polkadot bridge. However, the existing reserve transfer process only allows hopping between asset hubs, preventing a direct transfer from the Kusama relay chain to HydraX.
Hydra is asking for a XCMs call to facilitate the transfer, which will include multiple hops from Kusama to Hydra. Parity already has a solution for that which will be included in XCMv5.
Action items
@nico_a and @joyce to present the results from the token economy survey and the use cases
@joepetrowski to open up the discussion on ED again
@acatangiu to share the XCM call for facilitating transfers from Kusama to Polkadot