Octopus Network Developer Updates, March 2022
Throughout the month of March, Octopus Network continued its journey towards a diverse multichain vision. While trustful bridges draw attention in the news, the development team continues to refine, improve, and strengthen our offerings and systems.
UI Improvements
Participants in Octopus Network saw an incredible UI refresh this month, including some enhancements implicitly requested by our communities. Dark mode, revamped chain status, plus shortcuts to the appchain, explorer, github, bridge and website are all updated with a newly polished aesthetic. Your staking history is now viewable in the top right corner of your delegate dashboard on each appchain.
Appchain Candidate Queue
The appchain candidate queue continues to grow, with DEIP to exit the booting phase soon. Fusotao and Atocha joined the testnet and their Githubs show regular updates. Atocha further refined their work by asking their community to collaborate in testing their puzzle economy on Octopus Network. Atocha made significant progress and is now admitted to the audit phase on mainnet as a result!
Smart Contracts
Updates to smart contracts include a bridge upgrade for all appchains. The parameter modified allows more of an appchain’s tokens to cross the bridge, while still remaining within significant limits for security purposes. These limits were expanded to allow a more flexible utilization of the bridge for appchains, especially during the booting phase.
A redeployment for bridge contracts and others were completed to support near-sdk v4.0, including improvements and new features. This is part of the progress required to support a smooth transfer of NFTs between NEAR Protocol and Octopus Network appchains. The bridge was improved with errors detailed more verbosely in both the UI and in off-chain logs.
This is effectively a new version of the bridge, a significant step forward, as higher capacity chains come online. Applying new scrutiny to mint/destroy events further increases bridge security and mitigates hacks that could otherwise go unnoticed.
Astar Shiden < > Cosmos IBC Bridge: Milestone 2 In Progress
In October 2021, Astar Network accepted a grant proposal from the Octopus Network core team to create a bridge connecting the Astar/ Shiden Network to all Cosmos based blockchains. The world’s first Substrate <-> IBC Bridge is now nearing its second milestone!
In the first milestone shown here, we established a channel and exchanged messages with both chains! We confirmed that, even though some patience and retransmits may be required, both the Cosmos/Tendermint chain and the Substrate chain were able to bring up an IBC channel.
This is a critical step in initializing IBC, similar to the initial handshake completed by a VPN. The deliverable itself, documents, test script, and other materials are well on their way. While there is still not an estimated time to completion of the grant today, we hope to announce a target date this quarter. Different tests are required before bringing the bridge to production and we look forward to feedback from Astar and their community upon delivery.
