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We cover Polkadot, Kusama, Substrate, and all related and unrelated Web 3.0 projects!

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The content in this newsletter is the author’s own opinion and not in any way endorsed by the Web3 Foundation. This is an independent and unaffiliated effort.



This newsletter is quite comprehensive so feel free to jump ahead to the section that interests you. Note that it's still worth going through everything, just to get a feel of the ecosystem.

Polkadot



👇👇👇 The Claims Page is live! 👇👇👇



Polkadot's launch approaches, so the claims page is live. Go claim your dots so you're ready for genesis! Note: this does not mean Polkadot launched! Launch is still a month or so out! This just lets you indicate your desire to validate on day 1, but nothing else! So far, 900 people have claimed their dots 🤑

⚠ Careful not to fall for the fake claims process! ⚠

Gossamer, an implementation of Polkadot Host in Go by ChainSafe, is planning for an initial release this quarter. Blog post with more information here.

Kusama

s̴̀̚ͅu̷̩̎́m̴̜̖̀m̶̢̛o̸͉̲͑n̶̫̤̂i̴̪̋t̴̫̱̃͋o̴̪̔̑r̷̤̽ĕ̵̞͐s̷̛̝̔ ̸̟͍̄́c̴̡̙̉ḣ̷̙͂å̸̖̝ǫ̴̥̏̋

February started with finality getting stuck due to a mismatch in code - native-only optimizations weren't compatible with what was in the on-chain wasm blob, so finality stalled. The issue was quickly resolved with a flag first, and a runtime upgrade next. This steamrolled people's CPUs because of all the bad forks floating around (lack of finality will do that) so a patch was issued with version 0.7.20. of Kusama.

s̶̮̦̱͐̇̐e̷̜̓̇͂͝m̷̪͊͗͗p̵̡̰̙̟̥̱͉͍͂̉̃͊̒̈́͠ë̴̛̗̲̱́͐̏ŗ̴̛̲̰̪̣̹̌̊̚ ̶̹̥̘͙̳̆ç̷̱̥̰̞͋̋̀h̸͖̠̺̲̗̪͎͆̑͗̈́̋̈́̚a̷̡̨͕̪͖̞̲̭̔̅͊́̈͌o̶͍̗̼̮͉̐̄͂͂̓͗͂̕

Some people running Kusama nodes (as validators or otherise) have experienced huge memory growth and crashes. The problem is being worked on, but a workaround is to use the --restart=always and --memory flags to auto-restart when mem limit is hit.

n̷̨̲͒̐u̵̹͉̍l̴̫̤̆͌l̴̯̀̔a̸̭̱̽ ̵̭͒̋c̷̣̜̈́̊ḣ̴̬̭a̸̹̎͊ọ̴̎̓

The 1000 Validators program has kicked off! This program will allow people who want to run nominators but lack the stake to get in the active validator set. They will be nominated by W3F-staked nominators, then receive points if they act competently, or lose points if they are incompetent or malicious. The goal is to get more people ready and willing to be validators as well as give them a chance to prove their competence to the network as a whole.

If anyone asks you why they should care about a testnet when you tell them about Kusama, I made a short explainer.

🎉 Kusama passed 1 million blocks on Feb 11th!

Kusama Governance

The proposal to add an application-specific registrar to Kusama’s identity subsystem has passed after being seconded by the community and is now referendum #28, up for a vote. Initial votes seem to be strongly leaning towards “Aye”.

Referendum #27 to kill some storage items has passed and will be enacted at block 1,224,000. To quote Gav: “two council proposals containing runtimes that somehow never got cleaned up and one democracy proposal also containing a runtime that never got cleaned up. “ These storage slots use up a lot of space, so cleaning them up keeps the chain lean. Community driven pruning! 🤘

Council member CLOUDWALK added a proposal to increase the validator count to 180 from the current 160. Right now it looks like it’s passing and will turn into a referendum in about 6 days.

Three separate treasury proposals are active - a 100 KSM grant to yours truly for the purpose of demonstrating the treasury, a 1000 KSM grant for Kusama’s Kappa Sigma Mu society - an on-chain group of eccentrics who prove membership by getting tattoos, and an 888 KSM grant to “MD” who decided they deserve the money for no apparent reason. The former two are passing with 4 out of 7 required votes, and the latter is being rejected by 4 out of 7 required council members.

Core Stack

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧) Substrate runs on a Raspberry Pi 🎉 - lots of experimenting by Dan Forbes bore fruit! ( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)



Substrate has feature-frozen on February 21st, and lots of dead code and deprecated features are being removed in preparation for the 2.0 release. More info in issue 4961 and issue 4935.

Tools

Education

Ecosystem

Mandala, Acala's testnet, launched on Feb 17th. Acala is a project aiming to create a decentralized finance (DeFi) chain that'll connect to Kusama and Polkadot. The chain will have two different versions, following Kusama's and Polkadot's vision respectively.

Edgeware, the smart contract Substrate chain which made headlines with its unique distribution mechanism - the lockdrop - also launched on February 17th. A getting started guide was promptly made available, but stay tuned for a hands-on tutorial from yours truly!

Paradigm Fund composed a biweekly update frighteningly similar to this one, though much more verbose. They absolutely deserve a shoutout for a job well done!

A new address type / network prefix for Darwinia, 18, was approved. https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/5026/files

Enterprise

Coinbase and Web3 Foundation partnered up to offer a safe place to store dots to VCs, institutional investors, and those looking to delegate the safe-keeping of their claims.

OAX Foundation will be developing a DeFi parachain with support from Web3 Foundation.

Web3 Foundation Grants

The Encointer Foundation has been funded for Encointer

SCS has been funded for further work on SubstraTEE, which provides the ability to run custom state transition functions in an SGX enclave.

FlexDapps has been accepted for a grant to develop Gantree, a full-service node infrastructure toolkit for Substrate-based blockchains.

Matter Labs got a grant to develop the Zinc/Redshift ZK programming framework.

Second State got a grant for Bridging Ethereum Tools and Smart Contracts into the Substrate Ecosystem

Reminder - you can always see the latest grants here.

Upcoming Events and Webinars

That's it for this fortnight - I hope this was as useful for you to read as it was for me to write! Special thanks to Bill and David for feeding me a lot of this content, would have been very hard without them!



The Dot Leap is put together by Bruno Škvorc. Got any links for me for the next edition? Find me on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at bruno@bitfalls.com.