Hello,
As promised, here are our updates for March.
Sub0 went well and here are links to presentations made by Parity’s people:
- Gav’s presentation at Sub0 was one not to be missed, where he introduced his vision of JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine), a potential successor of the Polkadot Relay Chain.
- Pierre’s update for February provided all the latest details on Chains, Runtimes, and Infrastructure.
- Getting Started with Coretime by Donal Murray.
- Polkadot and Substrate Top 10 Security Risk by Serhan Bahar and Giovanny Gongora.
- Gavin Wood and samczsun discussing SEAL
I would like to highlight 3 topics for this month:
- Agile Coretime got a great, in-depth FAQ and Joyce’s post on Agile Coretime coming to Kusama was the most popular post in March with well over 1,000 views - and is an ideal one-stop shop for this important upgrade with lots of hyperlinks to other pages.
- Fatemeh wrote an introduction to Elastic Scaling which is worth a read.
- Oliver wants to stabilize Polkadot and I support the goal fully. Stability is critical especially for an infrastructure platform and that we are not yet there. Note that Parity alone can not do it and we need your input and collaboration to be more reliable.
And now, a team-by-team update.
- Chains
- Elastic Scaling MVP: PoC running on Zombienet, Runtime dependency tracking done.
- Asynchronous backing: All remaining bugs identified and either fixed or in progress. Performance measurement: Together with “Clawback” we exceed expectations! We measured roughly 10x throughput!
- Agile Coretime: Remaining missing minor features in the works.
- Runtime release 1.2, one blocker remaining: Once enacted, we are ready to fully enable asynchronous backing on Kusama and soon after on Polkadot. Coretime will go live on Kusama with this release.
- Runtimes
- Polkadot / Kusama Runtimes
- Proudly helped with the runtime side of Kusama’s coretime launch. Also see Donal Murray’s Agile Coretime talk from Sub0
- Polkadot’s Asset Hub now has native asset conversion. Crucially, XCM fees can be paid in other assets
- Kusama’s “People chain” is merged and ready for launch.
- Helped with the addition of Snowbridge to Polkadot and Kusama Bridge Hubs
- Added the first zombienet test to polkadot-fellows/runtimes for testing P<>K asset transfers
- FRAME Core
- Multi-block migrations
- A new construct runtime v2 syntax
- Shoutout to @Goncalo_Pestana and @Ankan_Anurag for rapidly preparing a hotfix for a staking bug, leading to the 1.1.3 release.
- A number of additions to
[polkadot-sdk-docs](https://paritytech.github.io/polkadot-sdk/master/polkadot_sdk_docs/index.html). - A prototype of an omni-node that will work with all parachains.
- Bridges and XCM
- Polkadot and Kusama governance bodies executed the P<>K bridge initialization.
- Referenda for initial funding of Polkadot Bridge Hub and Kusama Bridge Hub bridge accounts are under way, once these are done, DOT & KSM can freely flow between Polkadot and Kusama.
- Developing new pallet-xcm extrinsic for transferring assets using custom reserve locations. Will be very useful for Foreign Assets and bridged assets.
- Added HRMP notification handlers to the xcm-executor.
- Added claim_assets extrinsic to pallet-xcm.
- Improved benchmarking and lowered fees for pallet-xcm extrinsics.
- Added an Xcm payment Runtime API.
- Added ability to pay delivery fees from the assets available during execution.
- Polkadot / Kusama Runtimes
- Infra & Data
- Parity data x Token Terminal proposal converted into referendum. Responding to the community’s questions as well as presenting at AAG 114.
- Parity data social media account reached 250+ followers, new posts prepared frequently
- Launch of the new and refreshed parity.io website, in partnership with O/S
- Deployment of a Polkadot <> Kusama relayer
- Deployment of faucet.polkadot.io in collaboration with Success
- Housekeeping and setting a date for Rococo testnet decommission
- Data support for nomination pools
- DotLake data @ ETHDenver: We supported FiDi tech with an extract of data for their dashboards, presented at ETHDenver
- Support for Messari’s proposal: continuation of data coverage: Continuation of work through Messari Protocol Services | Polkassembly
- New data team dashboards website released and shared on Twitter
- New version of https://dashboards.data.paritytech.io/
- Posted by main account: https://twitter.com/paritytech/status/1765376514344857689 and retweeted by many others
- Twitter account “launched” too: https://twitter.com/dotlake_xyz
- Exciting new Rust caching solution with focus on ability to be used by ecosystem teams, being prepared for open sourcing - forum posts soon
- Product Engineering
- Work underway on scale-info-legacy which will be the container for the legacy type mappings that will drive the decoding of historic blocks.
- The PRs to stabilise the rest of the JSON-RPC spec are out and under review.
- Subxt
- light client interface revamped to be easier to use.
- subxt-core crate to provide soon some no-std support for Subxt actions.
- Maintenance of Polkadot-JS
- Maintenance has been catching up speed since we took over and releases have been steadily coming out
- Added compatibility for future staking breaking changes in the API derives.
- Fixed the API to be able to work with async backing enabled chains.
- Substrate Connect
- Added password encryption and other related account management improvements.
- Added new features to the UI like routes to onboard the user and to manage accounts.
- API Sidecar
- The latest v18.0.0 release allows to decode any kind of XCM message when querying blocks of any chain.
- Asset Transfer API
- The latest release adds support to the new transfer_assets call from XCM pallet and other features towards supporting bridged token transfers in the ecosystem
- txwrapper-core:
- Added support for foreign assets and dev examples around it.
- Polkadot Common Ledger App:
- RFC 78 passed, allowing for the common ledger app to exist. Next release should incorporate these changes and allow the app to be released.
- Documentation and Guides::
- Created new documentation and integration guides for foreign assets in Asset Hub (soon to be published).
- Kicked off the work to create a more consolidated and developer-friendly site to provide comprehensive and accessible resources (e.g. documentations, tutorials, references, examples, and best practices) to enable builders to start quickly and effectively. More to be shared in Q2.
- Ecosystem Engagement:
- The 2024 Polkadot Summit took place on the 11th March in Thailand. Filled with some of the brightest minds in the Web3 space, this year’s summit attracted over 100 CTOs, CEOs and Core Developers. During the day of the summit, Dr. Gavin Wood and Pierre Aubert, VP Engineering at Parity, gave a presentation discussing the future of Polkadot and Parity. We also had 12 productive sessions across developer experience, Open Gov, Agile Coretime, Identity and more. Please find more information here:Polkadot Summit ASIA - 2024 and previous Polkadot Summits here:Topics tagged polkadot-summit
- The new Polkadot Alpha Program, designed to help Parachain teams, Infra providers and dApp teams to build better in Polkadot, was launched on March 4th. In a month’s time, we already had 25 teams joining and two bi-weekly builders calls were held.
- Post-mortem
- None
- None
- Security
- WARGAME - PARATHREAT: This game objective is to help people to identify and fix security vulnerabilities in parachains, pallets, and nodes within the Polkadot SDK. During that journey you will play the Red and then the Blue team.
- Polkadot SDK Version Manager (PSVM): As managing different versions of crates from different repos during development can be very easily a pain. This tool has been created to support you on that journey. Please give PSVM a try !
- POLKADOT <> KUSAMA BRIDGE BugBounty: To support the launch of the bridge between Polkadot and Kusama, a dedicated Security Bug Bounty has been created to support security researchers, whitehat who are helping us to identify vulnerabilities and to have them fixed. More details on the referenda.