In the two months before the Gregorian New Year, Polkadot will usher in a period of concentrated outbreak of milestone progress.
At the Polka World, Parity, and Web3 Foundation’s recent Polkadot China Tour event, Gavin Wood revealed through a video connection that Polkadot will be online in the near future.
One of the most important points is cross-chain. For Polkadot, cross-chain is a point of its global activation. It can be said that if there is no cross-chain, even if Polkadot has more parachains, it cannot form the most basic ecology . Cross-chain can make it loosely isolated and chaotic. The chain market has evolved into an interactive ecosystem, and a single Polkadot relay chain has no value. This accounts for almost all of Gavin Wood’s recent energy.
The core of the core: XCMP design, delivery and progress
XCMP is one of the cores of Polkadot ‘s cross-chain design, allowing messages to be transmitted between Polkadot’s parachains . Its function and significance are equivalent to the TCP/IP protocol in the Internet world.
The parallel link diagram published by Polkadot before this is divided into three stages, namely stage 0/1/2. In the initial stage, there is no information cross-chain between parachains. Phase 1 focuses on testing the security of parachains and making improvements. This phase will also include the basic implementation of XCMP, similar to the use of initial protocols such as HRMP to test the most basic cross-chain information transfer.
Phase 2, which is the final phase, can be said to be the final stage. The only task in this phase is the realization of XCMP. After the three stages are completed, all functions can be realized between parachains, such as asset cross-chain, information cross-chain, cross-chain interaction, and so on. Only then can we say: “Let the loosely isolated and chaotic multi-chain market evolve into an interactive ecosystem . “ Polkadot is ushering in such a moment.
According to Gavin Wood himself, the team’s current focus is on the realization of the core technology of XCMP. This is very different from the HRMP protocol currently temporarily on Rococo. The full version of XCMP can give more functions and connotations to the cross-chain, not just the pure asset cross-chain now. If it goes well, the preliminary XCMP will be delivered in the second half of this year or early next year.
Here we will talk about the other two layers of Polkadot cross-chain hiding. The first is the connotation of cross-chain information. The attributes of each cross-chain information are determined by the chain that issued it, such as the chain of identity information and the processing of asset pledges. The demand for cross-chain information on the chain of the chain is definitely different. This will lead to a problem. Based on a large number of different types of cross-chain information generated by a large number of different parachains, a certain standard compatibility is required. This standard and compatibility are similar to Ethereum’s ERC20, which is XCM on Polkadot.
At the second level, Polkadot’s cross-chain is not just the interaction between the chain and the chain, it should also include the interaction between the components on the chain , such as the interaction between the smart contract and the chain, which means that a smart contract can be simultaneously Exist in multiple scenes. This also needs to be implemented based on XCM. The initial version has been implemented.
In addition, another pioneering design of XCM is to support adapter access. Simply put, if one chain wants to receive information from another chain and complete some specific interactions with it, then a decoder is needed to decode that chain. Information, such a decoder module is also connected to XCM. This design means that developers can implement more cross-chain interaction functions, such as staking, voting, transactions, identity, and so on.
We noticed that Gavin Wood mentioned a very interesting design, which is about the on-chain fee issue that people are currently discussing. Build a charging system based on XCM and combine the Weight system to evaluate the energy consumption of a certain cross-chain information, and then determine the amount of the handling fee.
The first parallel link is not obtained by auction
Regarding the basic unit of Polkadot’s ecology, the parachain itself, Gavin Wood revealed that the parachain testnet Rococo itself will usher in a major update. This update will be an update to make parachains sufficiently safe, usable and effective. This will be presented in two weeks.
Major updates with Rococo include: iteration of XCMP version and integration of XCM standard. And if it goes well, Polkadot may start deploying an initial parachain on its test network Kusama in December.
Regarding the parachain slot auction issue that the outside world is most concerned about. One thing to note is that the first batch of parachains connected are not the expected bidding parachains but the system parachains. That is, it serves the entire system and assumes the basic needs and specific functional parallel chains. What is interesting is that these system-level parachains will each share some of the tasks of the Polkadot relay chain, reducing the pressure on the relay chain. For example, the governance function is separated to the parachain that is specifically responsible for governance. The standard for such system-level parachains is that they must be the basic services required by the community. The official purpose of Polkadot is also to allow the outside world to fully understand the start-up operation and use of parachains. Of course, the parachains with new development teams can also supplement and optimize this field.
And before the official auction of the parachain slot, the development team will also focus on phased testing of the operation of the relay link into the parachain to ensure safety and stability. It does not mean that there will be a large number of parallel links in a short time. In the eyes of the outside world, will this be too cautious and careful. But there are reasons for this paragraph to reflect carefully behind: “I recently realized that either community or ecological Boca Kusama behind are growing, Boca to do for their success and growth to prepare in advance, we spend A lot of time to ensure that this time will not be destructive. “
In short, in the next one or two months, Polkadot will usher in a period of major updates.
The capital of the Polkadot developer community: PDK
This time Gavin Wood also mentioned the test of Cumulus, PDK, in Rococo. The PDK here refers to the parachain development kit, which is a tool for developers to create parachains.
Currently, the only two PDKs are Substrate and Cumulus. Substrate is a blockchain framework that provides the basic building blocks of the blockchain (such as network layer, consensus, Wasm interpreter, etc.). The purpose of Substrate is to simplify the process of creating a new chain, but it does not directly provide Polkadot compatibility support. Cumulus is to make the existing parachains compatible with Polkadot.
The design of PDK is extremely important. From an ecological point of view, the largest capital and plan for Polkadot to benchmark Ethereum and other mature ecosystems is its developer community. PDK is an important measure for Polkadot to cultivate its own developer ecosystem.
The most significant recent upgrade of Polkadot is the arrival of Substrate 2.0. Two years ago, Gavin Wood showed the outside world how to use the Substrate framework to quickly build a blockchain of his own. Now this process is easier. Continuing the modular design principle, developers can combine and replace the components at will. Substrate 2.0 comes with more than 70 pallet components. It includes the ability to replicate the Ethereum virtual machine, so that EVM applications can be quickly ported to the Substrate chain. This is crucial for the future transfer of Ethereum ecological resources to Polkadot. In addition, pallet components like Recovery introduce a recovery mechanism for on-chain assets, which is especially useful for recovering lost keys in a user-friendly manner.
The most noteworthy feature of Substrate is the introduction of off-chain workers. We know that off-chain data is usually difficult to enter the on-chain state, and this part of the function needs to be “feed” with an oracle. But the oracle is limited by the problem of data sources, and it still has some shortcomings in terms of security, scalability, and infrastructure efficiency.
The off-chain worker subsystem of Substrate 2.0 allows the execution of long-running and possibly non-deterministic tasks (such as web requests, data encryption and decryption and signature, random number generation, CPU-intensive calculations, enumeration/aggregation of on-chain data) Etc.), and have the authority to intervene in the environment on the chain. These tasks may take longer than the execution time of the block, but the off-chain working machine does not occupy the blockchain network resources.
In fact, you can find that Gavin Wood and his Polkadot team have this distinctive color of traditional Internet engineering. Although Polkadot’s attitude of being too cautious by the outside world has been questioned, the official has always been about its own development. Maintaining a clear and firm attitude is extremely rare in the current blockchain industry, and to a certain extent this is also Polkadot’s competitiveness.
