Latest Parachain Upgrade: What’s next

Published in

Nodle

3 min readAug 31, 2023

This post follows up on the recent Parachain Upgrade, governance proposal, and Polkadot forum post. In the current, the timeline towards resuming block production on the Nodle Parachain is being outlined along with informations about to expect as a Nodle user.

Background

The latest Parachain upgrade led to a stall in block production as its migration required too much computation time to be approved by the Polkadot nodes. A governance proposal was opened on the Polkadot relay chain after to resume block production.

State of Governance

At the time of writing, the governance proposal is set to pass within about 15 to 16 days as determined by Polkadot’s governance rules. The support from all of you has been truly astonishing.

A Parachain node upgrade will be necessary

Our testing shows the proposal will be sufficient in restarting block production and bringing the chain back online. A new release for the Nodle Parachain node was issued to make it easy for node runners to keep syncing the chain after the block production restarts.

Upgrading to the latest release is critical if you want to keep syncing the Nodle Parachain. This does not affect Nodle App users as they use nodes provided by the core team. However, exchanges and public RPC providers must update to ensure syncing.

For the technically minded, the upgrade leverages a feature of substrate called a codeSubstitute to ensure the correct runtime is used once the proposal passes. You can easily identify the changes via the tools provided by GitHub.

Rewards will be resumed

Once the block production resumes, the first order of priority will be to allocate previously missed rewards to Nodle nodes. The core team estimates this will take less than 7 days to fully allocate previously missed rewards. Further updates will be shared on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Once this is done, rewards will continue being allocated as usual, with no changes foreseen.

Every other feature such as transfers and NFT minting will be fully resumed from day 0

You will be able to move coins between your wallets, claim hotspot rewards or resume NFT minting as usual on all platforms, wallets, and interfaces.

The situation will be monitored closely to ensure no issues arise. In case of any problems, please join the Nodle Discord or Telegram.

Intrinsic NFTs and other features will be released later

The Intrinsic NFT feature was taken out of the runtime to avoid running into issues again. It will be released in a future Parachain upgrade after more testing and adjustments.

Additionally, new features are being prepared. Look forward to more communications on this topic.

A note on tooling

As planned, more tooling has been developed both by the ecosystem and the Nodle core team.

try-runtime now supports logging for things like Proof of Validity size and migration time, which will be extremely handy in avoiding the issue the Parachain ran into in the future.
A GitHub Action has been created by the Nodle team to make it easier on every Polkadot builder to use try-runtime as part of the software development lifecycle. In fact, it is already adopted by Nodle.

Additionally, the team remains set on exploring ways Polkadot can further by hardened to better handle failed Parachain runtime upgrades. The community has been very helpful in sharing their notes and feedback. Feel free to join the discussion on the Polkadot Forum.

About Nodle

Nodle connects the physical world to Web3 by using smartphones as edge nodes. The edge nodes read devices and sensors in the physical world using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and connect that information to the blockchain. Creating a geolocation-based layer one that can be used by many unique applications built for the hyper-connected, mobile-oriented world we live in. Nodle creates an economic model that is secure, private, and scalable. Anyone with a smartphone can join the network and earn NODL, Nodle’s native token. To join, download the Nodle app for iOS or Android.