The year-end holiday is a good opportunity to review and evaluate the progress made. When you are in it, you may only feel a small improvement, but only when you look back will you realize how far you have gone. In my opinion, looking back at 2020, what a wonderful year the Substrate ecosystem has experienced!
Two networks are online, with hundreds of validators, and the mortgage value is the highest among all equity proof networks. These are just the tip of the iceberg. With the increase of potential energy, is preparing parallel chains in 2021 on the line, Substrate tools more powerful, although the community is nascent but high participation, this year Polkadot, Kusama and broader ecosystem really brilliant stars.
overall
- : A great overview of 2020! Obviously, Polkadot’s ecosystem is accelerating. A simplified version of Polkadot 2020 data summary can look at this.
- Looking ahead, continuous work on cross-chain interoperability is the main focus in 2021, and Substrate 3.0 is expected to come out in the first half of 2021. Ethereum compatibility is just around the corner!
- At the beginning of December 2020, the “1000 validators [2] ” plan was launched, and the maximum number of active validator sets increased from 44 per era to a maximum of 298. There are currently 282 validators in the active set [3] and 334 in the waiting queue.
- Polkadot’s pre-launch audit results are published in the form of a series of blog posts [4] . The first research by partner Atreidis detailed a key logical problem found on Substrate, which allows zero-cost transactions, which will open the network to various DoS attack vectors.
Technical Update
- Parity released the Rococo-V1 [5] parachain testnet. Rococo supports Polkadot’s cross-chain messaging protocol XCMP-lite, which uses the relay chain as the transmission mechanism. This is a big step towards a true parachain!
- Speaking of cross-chain messaging, the Basic XCM code has been merged [6] , allowing the relay chain to pass messages down to the parachain.
- The FRAME v2 code has been merged [7] into the main Substrate branch on GitHub. This will make it easier for builders to create their own Pallet.
- The new live Bounties [8] (active bounties) page is now live polkadot.js.
- The staking reward calculator [9] developed by W3F is constantly rolling out new versions, and v2.1 has now been released on GitHub.
- The validator ranking page can be viewed on validators.kusama.network [10] , which was created by the community and funded by the on-chain treasury.
Governance
To review how to implement governance in Polkadot, please refer to this article.
A survey on the topic of on-chain governance [11] is ongoing; some Substrate chains are seeking feedback on how the process of working for the community is. Polkadot governance has come a long way, but there is still much room for improvement. If you care about governance, please take a moment to fill it out!
Polkadot
- The first Polkadot Treasury Bounty Program-the rebranding plan proposed by Studio Koto has been approved! The bounty manager will be a multi-signature composed of four community members, and they will not receive any rewards for planning the bounty. Motion#51 has more detailed related information in [12] .
- The 13th referendum [13] , which proposed compensation for erroneously slashed validators before and after runtime v26 went live, was passed with nearly unanimous votes (although the DOT vote rate was 0.01%).
- Proposal No. 231 [14] revolves around funding the development of Elara v0.3, which is an Infura-like service for Polkadot. Elara will operate as a non-profit project, and it is expected that the Treasury will continue to provide support. The current voting period will end this weekend.
- Acala proposed a six-week scholarship proposal for the Substrate Developers Academy initiated by them [15] . The goal is to provide 6 scholarships for talented developers who cannot afford the program.
- Polkaworld (a Polkadot community in China) released the first treasury report of and. According to the report: “Polkadot Treasury has received 25 proposals and passed 18 of them. 104,054 DOTs were issued. Each Treasury proposal received an average of 5780 DOT grants (worth approximately US$29,000). There are approximately 9.6 million in the Treasury. DOT, only 1% is currently used.”
Kusama
- The No. 93 referendum [18] proposed to increase the validator slots in the active set by 1 (for 200 eras) per era has passed. There are 812 validators in the current active set.
- There have been several referendums with no clear purpose or description. Later I learned that these referendums were all functional “test data”.
Slashing punishment situation
In the 212 and 215 eras, Slash [19] 5 LLC validators and 6 nominators, [20] a total of about 16300 DOT! Most of them are salsh from the nominee.
Construction of transit bridge
- Coumpound (to put it simply, the leading DeFi currency market on Ethereum) is building a Compound Chain on Substrate [21] ! Before the official announcement [22] , the shop began to spread this small, because some sharp-eyed people noticed that Compound [23] engineers had forked the Substrate code base [24] . The purpose of Compound Chain is not only to open up new areas of potential collateral on Polkadot (and other chains) to the currency market, but also to introduce new features and overcome the barriers of Ethereum’s high fees – and this barrier is likely to persist. This marks the beginning of blurring the boundaries between Ethereum Layer 2 and the parachain ecosystem. If we want to see the future of interoperable blockchains, then this is probably the beginning of everything. Quite excited to think about it!
- Frontier (the Ethereum compatibility layer of Parity on Substrate) is the focus of Polkadot’s summary in 2020 [25] , because it reached the “preliminary level of functional integrity” at the end of the year [26] . The fully functional Frontier means that all Substrate chains (and Polkadot or Kusama parachains) will be able to provide full Ethereum compatibility for their developer population!
- Moonbeam (a bridge from Substrate to Ethereum) announced an upgrade to its testnet to support various types of nodes and improve error message delivery.
- The PolkaBTC alpha testnet [27] is now live!
- Acala [28] is about to start repricing currency Ampleforth.
Fundraising and Grant events
The ninth batch of Grant 3 [29] of the Web3 Foundation has begun!
- The Cere Network supported by Binance raised another 1.5 million US dollars [30] to achieve the mission of putting distributed CRM tools into reality. The project is based on Substrate.
- Another insurance startup, Tidal Finance, raised US$1.95 million [31] to bring smart contract insurance products to Polkadot.
- Some of the largest exchanges in the industry have begun to recognize the strategic importance of the emerging Substrate ecosystem. Huobi announced an investment of US$5 million [32] to establish a Polkadot Ecosystem Support Fund, and Binance is setting up a US$10 million fund, [33] specifically to support projects established on Substrate.
Original: https://bisontrails.co/substrate/004/
Translation: PolkaWorld Community
