ParityTech update for August 2024

Ecosystem
1

Hi everyone,

belated update for August.

Pierre

Educational content

Governance

Product Launches

Async Backing

  • Peaq has migrated to Async Backing, and has its parachain in 6s block times. Last targeted migration is OriginTrail (NeuroWeb) that currently has this enabled on their testnet. Would you like to move your parachain to async backing, ane enjoy 6s block times as well? see the async backing migration guide here.

Coretime

  • Distractive adopted our product launch template for the marketing launch
  • Some teams didn’t manage to renew their core on Kusama before someone bought them all, again. We are trying to help these teams renew.
  • Coretime chain is launched on Polkadot, referendum upgrading the relay chain is live.

stable2407 polkadot-sdk Release

See the release here, and the calendar of upcoming ones here.

Omni Node:

An update on the project was posted by Kian here, and a project board was created. Other than the binary, there’s now a library crate to create your parachain node, using which can be as simple as this :magic_wand:.

Reliability improvement

PVF compilation optimization
We merged and backported the PVF compilation optimization, which we expect will reduce the finality lag at session boundaries and when new parachain validators are added to the active set. It’s necessary to ensure that increasing the number of validators does not cause temporary finality lag on Polkadot.

Doppelganger
Continuous work on the new fork-off/Doppelganger tool and exploration of new ecosystem use cases, polishing the dx to onboard newcomers.

Transaction pool
The transaction pool rework is progressing. Reviews are coming into the PR. In addition, there is a new transaction sending tool in the works to easily and reliably test the new implementation: GitHub - michalkucharczyk/tx-test-tool

New Features

Bridge Fees

fellowship/runtime release 1.3 will contain two major bridge improvements:

Elastic Scaling

Security

Code Audit

  • Smart Contracts, DeFi Runtime and underlying FRAME templates developped by OpenZeppelin have been audited by SRLabs (See reports on the Security Hub).
  • Additional audit of the Bridge-hub codebase was finalised by OpenZeppelin, no critical or high findings, report under review will be published soon.
  • Fennel Labs parachain was audited as part of the Alpha Program

Security Disclosure

  • No security disclosure made during August to Parachains.
  • 25 disclosures made to Parachains during 2024 so far. They are being migrated to the Security Hub to facilitate access and interactions.

Security Bug Bounty

  • 2 Bug Bounty submission categorised Low and Info.

Security Hub
The Security Hub has been lauched for Decoded last month to compile resources to enhance security of the Polkadot Ecosystem including common security vulnerabilities (Top 10), security disclosure and threat models. First documents are being uploaded feel free to submit your inputs !

DevOps & releases

  • In progress: migrating mainnet RPC nodes to Scaleway for cost savings, Keeping some RPC nodes in GCP for availability and load-balancing between SCW and GCP.
  • Latest PJS releases published to stores
  • New release process brainstorming with Oliver TY: decision for a QA period of 1 month to 1.5 month every release will leave more time for audits to be completed. This also leaves us the time to introduce QA steps, eg. release and e2e tests on testnets.
  • Supporting the release team with automatic release pipeline (signing the release with AWS, Automated release https://github.com/paritytech/release-engineering/issues/217)
  • Dry-runtime nodes migrated to Scaleway
  • Small support on Versi
  • Zombienet transitioning to DevOps for cost-effective operations, leveraging Parity infrastructure

Bug Fixes & Improvements

  • Fixes to the Polkadot getting started script, added to the CI
  • We detected an issue with Faucet & TipBot that took a while to fix, related to Esbuild/PAPI.
  • MacOS runners: moving to a new strategy using ephemeral runners to enable downloading & running the Polkadot binary on Mac.
  • Polkadot.js has now complete Ledger support, both in Apps and the Extension as it was announced in a recent Polkadot forum post.
  • Support for PAPI: Generation of API docs based on metadata discussion ongoing polkadot-api/polkadot-api#585
  • The implementation has started to put the Parachain Bootnodes on the Relay chain DHT. The first step is to add support for providers to litep2p.
  • LiteP2P stabilization and bug hunting is progressing nicely, with lots of fixes landing. Fixed Issues
  • We worked on multiple stability fixes in the beefy node-side (#5129,#5197) and improvements to pov-reclaim (#5257, #5281)
  • Another improvement of parachain inherent weight is up for review.
  • Subsystem benchmarks and memory profiling uncovered yet another optimization of memory and CPU in approval distribution (#5411).
  • A node benchmark for minimum number of cores were added.
  • Approval voting rewrite is fully implemented with no stability issues found while testing on Versi, only 2 PRs left to review and merge (#4846, #4849).

Data

  • Public dashboards: a new version of the website is ready to go, the new URL will be shared soon.
  • Success measures for agile coretime: new dashboard is ready and waiting for Polkadot Coretime to go live.
  • Token Terminal:
    • the project is progressing very well, official listings announcement & custom dashboards are amongst the next steps.
    • :point_right: we have a possibility to suggest custom metrics for Polkadot to be featured on the terminal so feel free to give your suggestions on metrics that could accurately represent the strenghts of Polkadot
  • New chains added to DotLake: Xode, Curio, Litmus, Pioneer and People Westend.
  • Open-sourcing DotLake code project going well, coordinating with the Sidecar team.

Parity experimental products

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