ParityTech update for June 2024

Ecosystem
1

Hello,

June saw a lot of bug fixes all over the SDK and client libraries (long list below). Some highlights:

A lot of Parity people me included will be next week in Brussels for Decoded. Please let me know if you want to meet.

Pierre

Runtime

FRAME

XCM

Bridges

System Parachains

  • Several Fellowship releases (1.2.{5, 6, 7})
  • Muharem made some improvements on some transaction payment cases using asset conversion
  • Preparation for the launch of People Chain on Polkadot
  • Kusama has entered its third sale period, the next batch of chains are renewing and this will be the first sale using the new price adapter, giving a much bigger range of prices within one sale period. Dónal is focusing on e2e testing and preparing for the launch on Polkadot.
  • Branislav added permissionless way for parachains to open HRMP channels between themselves and system parachains

Chains

Coretime

  • The implementation of the interfaces request_revenue and notify_revenue (part of RFC 5) are mostly done and currently under review.
  • We’re now running a new price model on Kusama since the 1.2.5 fellowship release. If you wanna know more about it, read this post by @eskimor .
  • On-demand core sharing were fixed, which brings us one step closer to optimize the on-demand asynchronous operations within the network and support more complex scheduling scenarios.
  • The on_demand_assigner events were improved: With OnDemandOrderPlaced now providing para_id, spot_price and account of the orderer. SpotPriceSet was integrated and exposes if the price was changed without an order placed.

Parachain validator set size increase

  • With the enactment of Referendum 392 on Kusama, we’re running an improved approval voting protocol with reduced usage of network bandwidth and CPU.
  • Referendum 405 was enacted and we’ve succesfully increased the Kusama parachain validator count from 300 to 400.:rocket: 500 is next :rocket:

Disabling

  • Validator disabling progressed to implementation stage 3: the Node-side preparation for stage 3 is merged and was released in 1.13.
  • New documentation out: Offences & Slashes is live on the Polkadot wiki

Elastic scaling MVP

Offchain XCMP

  • Design worked has kicked off

Scaling and Stability

  • The Fork-aware transaction pool is continuously progressing. Preparation pull requests are under review, with a WIP version of the pool also out for inspection and testing. It is included in a custom node binary currently being tested by mythical, showing promising results.
  • We made efforts (#4571, #4326) to harden the storage proof weight handling in the runtime to remove the conservative 2.5mb PoV size limit currently in place in the node binary.
  • The slot-based collator has seen multiple iterations and improvements and is being merged soon.
  • The networking team has worked on outlining a path to stabilization for litep2p. Work to tackle the outlined items has already started.
  • A lot of work has gone into upgrading libp2p to 52.4 as an intermediary step before 53.0, which promises more API stability. This is an important step to ease the upgrade burden and focus fully on litep2p in the coming months.

Zombienet

  • The Zombienet team is continuously working on the migration path of our CI to the new version (SDK), also in adding new features like local grafana/prometheus and support custom parachains (through decorators like v1).
  • We are also working in conjuction with automation team in a fork-off/Doppelganger new tool.

Infra & Data

Automation Ops

Stabilizing Polkadot

  • e2e testing tooling is beginning to kick off
  • The code coverage effort is going forward

GitHub Actions Migration

  • Great progress on the GHA migration, last infrastructure bits are being sorted out then will be ready to start migrating jobs.

Misc

  • Usability upgrades for the faucet; Paseo is now default
  • Command bot has been migrated to GHA :rocket: with a forum post to go with it
  • Forklift being improved for secure GHA use and issues on first test jobs being ironed out

DevOps

Infrastructure updates

  • Polkadot<>Kusama bridge: continued operation of our relayer adapting to changes in relayer deployment
  • Rococo Scale down scheduled
  • LiteP2P enabled on Rococo validators and on some Kusama nodes

Guides, tools & resources

Releases

  • Polkadot-sdk 1.13 version released
  • New frame-omni-bencher and chain-spec-builder binaries added to released artifacts
  • Latest Polkadot.JS extension upgrade released to the Firefox and Chrome stores. This was not done for several years, the Firefox extension is pending review. Watch this space, as we have a few more updates in preparation.

Data

Token Terminal project - Integration phase

  • Strategy decided and research phase concluded
  • Infrastructure integrated and set up; Polkadot relay chain and six parachains running in test leveraging embedded relay chain snapshot templates
  • Implemented scraping code for data ingestion
  • Scaling - adding more parachains
  • Initial data exploration and modeling; benchmarking against DotLake
  • More engineers onboarded; finalizing ingestion and benchmarking in the next few weeks
  • Overall Status: ahead of schedule for the Integration phase

Making Polkadot visible

Supporting development and research in Polkadot

DotLake

More parachains and solo chains added to ingest:

  • Mythical
  • Kusama People Chain
  • Kusama Coretime
  • Subsocial
  • Bittensor
  • Ternoa
  • Chainflip
  • Sora
  • Joystream
  • Vara

Parity Data Public Dashboards

  • Added to Polkadot Wiki
  • Ready to push the new version by end of month with new charts and insights, stay tuned :slight_smile:

Security

Polkadot Vault

  • The integration of Bananasplit functionality for Polkadot Vault in order to improve user experience and level of security to backup and recover seed has been implemented and audited. It is going through final tests before being released.
  • As part of the work finalising the migration of Vault from Parity to Novasama, the security team implemented a Proof of Concept for Reproducible Builds for Polkadot Vault. People can build binaries from sources which have been also audited and compare it with released packages. Any changes on the source will result differance on the packages, with this way, people can identify unauthorised and/or unaudited changes. To get more information about Reproducible Builds for Mobile Applications, you can reach from here.

Decoded

Security Bug Bounty

  • 4 submissions have been received, 1 of them was Low severity, related to the jsonrpsee library

Vulnerability Disclosure

  • Polkadot Security Hub done by Giovanny and Patricio will be presented at Decoded to help people navigate the different disclosure done and associated status and remediation guidance.
  • 8 Code Vulnerabilities disclosed to Parachains during May-June.

Code Audit

  • Generic Runtime Template for Polkadot Parachains was released by OpenZeppelin, the audit of which was managed by Parity Security with SRLabs. See release
  • Bridge-hub security review by OpenZeppelin has been initiated and is expected to be completed during Q3
  • Logion and Agrotoken parachains were audited as part of the Alpha Program effort during May-June.
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