Web3 Foundation nurtures and stewards technologies and applications in the field of decentralized web software protocols. One way the foundation does this is through its Research and Technical teams. We’ve collected the most recent updates from all members of the teams so you can know what we’ve been up to!

Bruno Škvorc here — technical educator at W3F and this month’s town crier! I’m chiming in from sunny Croatia to let you know it’s not all about fun, games, and devil worship

This month we’ve unleashed the collective tentacles of the research, tech ed and devops teams far and wide, Cthulhuing Web 3.0 knowledge into at least one soul on almost every continent.

The new platform for screencasts and webinars we’ve been trying out — Crowdcast — has been a major success, driving an incredibly diverse and curious audience to every session so we absolutely intend to keep that up, but we’re open to experimenting with some less conventional platforms too.

Two other major events marked this month — Kusama went CC3, and a Parity coding retreat + mega brainstorming session happened near Paris. With both implementers and researchers in the same place, problems could be tackled more head-on, and the results of these brainstorms will be published in the weeks to come.

See below for a quick summary of everything we’ve been up to!

If you’d like to get in touch with me my doors are always open on Twitter or via email: bruno@web3.foundation — please share your feedback about this update post, about updates I’ve missed, interesting projects from the community, or anything else you think is worth calling out in the next edition!

Research

Spec on Availability and Validity is in final stage.

Draft of the Polkadot overview paper is nearly finished.

Nested relay chain meeting held and some initial ideas were discussed. If you don’t know what this means, it’s related to being able to run relay chains inside of parachain slots, so that a relay chain could have several levels, thereby allowing for more parachain slots in the system.

The audit report by NCC on Schnorrkel has been released.

We released the audit report by NCC on Schnorrkel

Alistair Stewart presented a poster session about the Grandpa finality gadget at the Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CSS) in London.

presented a poster session about the Grandpa finality gadget at the Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CSS) in London. Alfonso Cevallos and Syed Hosseini hosted a 3 hour think-tank session about Polkadot in Paris, organized by LaBChain and hosted by Caisse des Dépôts.

and hosted a 3 hour think-tank session about Polkadot in Paris, organized by LaBChain and hosted by Caisse des Dépôts. At the Parity Technologies Coding Retreat: Dr. Jeff Burdges presented a crypto overview session, and Ximin Luo lead a networking overview session. Alistair held a session on ICMP implementation, while Handan Kılınç Alper and Syed lead a session on parachain strategy.

presented a crypto overview session, and lead a networking overview session. held a session on ICMP implementation, while lead a session on parachain strategy. Some members of the research and HR teams presented a recruitment talk for masters and PhD students at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland

Technical Education