Hi all,
Our updates for May include a lot of fixes as we committed to. You will see a focus on fixing what matters to users.
We changed our strategy on Smart Contract: this month both ink! and Wasmi were transferred to the community. The freed up resources allow us to continue to focus on providing PolkaVM enabled contracts. We removed the latest big blocker by rewriting our benchmark suite from WebAssembly to Rust so that it will continue to work when switching to PolkaVM. You will see an openGov proposal very soon to deploy EVM on top of Asset Hub.
The DevRel team moved out of Parity and has been granted funding by Decentralized Futures: welcome to Accelerate Polkadot that will join a set of fresh teams like Papermoon to build an amazing experience for our builders.
Pierre
- Product Engineering
- The new JSON RPC spec has been implemented in Polkadot-SDK.
- The new version of subxt has been released with important changes like full support for the reconnecting RPC client and adding the new subxt-core crate for no-std compatibility.
- The new release for the Polkadot.js API added full support for the new staking interfaces while several improvements and fixes were added to Apps.
- Several improvements and features have been added to the Substrate Connect wallet template.
- Several fixes have been added to API Sidecar to ensure full support of old staking pallet versions in early Kusama runtimes
- The new release for Asset Transfer API adds support for bridged tokens transfers on Asset Hub and other features.
- The Polkadot Common Ledger App has been audited and getting ready for release.
- FYI: OpenZeppelin formally released the first Polkadot Parachain Runtime with a completed audit. They updated the community and the W3F is using it to build the EduChain!
- We are keeping teams updated with their coretime renewal needs. Also the Coretime Renewal Bot specification has been successfully built with subxt (github).
- A new working group for parachains to upgrade to Async Backing has been formed with Unique Network, Moonbeam, Ajuna Network, and NeuroWeb.
- The new Ecosystem Insights monthly blogpost is out.
- Chains
- Michal presented the current TxPool protocol, Davide gave an introduction to Safrole, Javier presented the future of the Zombienet SDK and it’s migration.
- Runtime
- This month we helped with the release of Polkadot v1.2.4 from the Fellowship and the launch of the People Chain on Kusama. Coretime is also going through its first full cycles there so we are preparing the plan for when to launch on Polkadot. The Polkadot<>Kusama bridge also was updated to fix the first bug we discovered and is operational again. There were also a number of UX/Dev-Ex improvements, like the release of the polkadot-sdk umbrella crate, a new XCM dry run API, an XCM cookbook, and more input from the community about what improvements they want to see. See the forum post for more details.
- Infra & Data
- Official start of the TokenTerminal project after a successful proposal execution
- New data team capabilities: visualization for the Chainalysis referenda
- Making Polkadot visible - public website charts used by and custom requests delivered to Distractive for Polkadot ATH activity tweet and Polkadot Genesis Day, W3F for May Investor Call, Kusamarian, OpenGov analysis of Ref#684, DV participation analysis, etc.
- Implemented additional QA checks and automatic alerts for https://dashboards.data.paritytech.io/ on which the team will publish a separate post with details
- Stabilizing Polkadot initiative started with Oliver TY & Kian
- Forum post shared around a new service to monitor Polkadot, dubbed DotSentry and destined to provide real-time monitoring on the complete ecosystem.
- In the same vein, we shared a forum post about Getting started using Rust & Subxt for data extraction.
- Forklift bugs found & fixed - forum post reviewed and getting ready to be published
- External Log Access (Blockdeep, Paseo) through adding multi-tenancy to Loki and setting up an authenticated datasource
- External Metrics access through adding multi-tenancy to Thanos
- Supported preliminary JAM testing on 50 bare metal machines through Scaleway elastic metal
- Supported Mythical with their migration dry-runs on the Westend parachain testnet we host for them
- Deployed People Chain collators on Kusama
- Updated Rococo<>Westend bridge relayer deployment to the new architecture with a switch from 1 to 6 relayer processes
- Added medians to Metrics for polkadot-fellows/runtimes
- Now polkadot-sdk and polkadot-fellows/runtime are automatically protected from last-minute unreviewed pushes
- https://faucet.polkadot.io/ was migrated from PJS to PAPI
, and we’ve removed Trappist from faucets list - Every polkadot-sdk release will come with automatically refreshed templates for developers
ink! will continue to be a part of the Polkadot ecosystem.