Runtime release notification
Hello,
This is to advise you that the Polkadot community is currently voting to upgrade the Polkadot system to the v2.2.1 release.
This is a major runtime upgrade that enables Phase 0 of the launch of the Bulletin chain, a new system chain that provides content-addressed ephemeral storage for the Polkadot ecosystem.
The Bulletin chain will be primarily used to support Proof-of-Ink and Proof-of-Personhood flows on the People chain and to relay off-chain data between users via the Hand-off Protocol (HOP). It will underpin more general-purpose use cases such as dotNS apps, referenda preimages, dApp assets, and event-scoped content.
You can track all the proposed stages for the full deployment of the Bulletin chain in this GitHub issue.
Important note for Ecosystem builders:
This release contains a PR that reduces the configuration parameter DepositPerChildTrieItem of pallet-revive in Polkadot AssetHub and Kusama AssetHub by a factor of 10.
This change will ensure that the cost of storing a new value in the storage of a smart contract is aligned with equivalent gas costs in Ethereum and Ethereum-compatible chains.
Additional note for Ecosystem builders:
This release enables Elastic Scaling with a 2-second block time on the Polkadot People chain. This will be followed by a separate referendum to assign a total of 3 cores to the chain.
The projected enactment date for this runtime upgrade is around 27th April 2026.
Many thanks.