Welcome to a new series of biweekly updates on Polkadot, a scalable heterogeneous multi-chain blockchain and the first protocol that provides a secure environment for cross-chain composability across multiple shards.
Another major focus of this report is Kusama, an early, unaudited, and unrefined release of Polkadot. Kusama will serve as a proving ground, allowing teams and developers to build and deploy a parachain or try out Polkadot’s governance, staking, nomination, and validation functionality in a real environment.
Polkadot has seen substantial developer activity growth since the mainnet launched at the end of May 2020.
Polkadot is cuttently operating as a Proof of Authority (PoA) chain that is maintained by six validators belonging to Web3 Foundation. The chain only allows users to claim DOT tokens or submit their intention to validate or nominate. DOT tokens do not exist yet. What’s more, allocations of Polkadot’s native DOT token are technically and legally non-transferable.
Once Web3 Foundation is confident in the stability of the network, Web3 Foundation will use Sudo — a superuser account with access to governance functions — to initiate the first validator election. This election will transition the network from PoA into its second phase, Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS), where the network is secured by the economic stake that is bonded to the validators by the nominators.
The team encourage people to signal their intent to nominate in the PoA phase to back validators so they can get in the active set in the NPoS phase. Validator elections and rewards will be activated during this stage.
Polkadot has a sophisticated system of governance in which all DOTholders have a say. Proposals can be suggested either by a DOT holder or by the Council. Both need to be agreed by a stake-weighted referendum. Once a Council and governance tools are in place, the public has the avenues to effect changes in the system.
The collaborative and high-performing W3F team has collected and revealed the most recent updates from all members of the Technical and Research teams.
Among the milestones are:
- The Polkadot overview paper and the first draft of the NPoS paper are ready
- The specification document for the sub-protocols Availability & Validity and XCMP is nearly finished
- The research team started a research collaboration partnership with the University of Zurich to tackle cryptoeconomic research questions together.
- The Technical Education team has been expanding, updating, and refining the Polkadot Wiki
- The Thousand Validator Programme for onboarding validators to the Kusama Network now has over 60 active validators participating.
- Bill Laboon’s MOOC is now on week 9
Furthermore, A Polkadot decentralized finance (DeFi) community conference hosted by Acala and Polkadot will be held virtually on June 18 2020. PolkaDeFi Day is focused on showcasing teams building and collaborating on decentralized cross-chain finance applications, protocols and infrastructures.
Additionally, Lunie, a non-custodial staking and governance platform, is integrating Kusama Network. This integration is part of the Lunie team’s first milestone associated with a grant received from Web3 Foundation to build out a staking interface for both Kusama and Polkadot.
Last but not least, LocalCoinSwap, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange, are working with the community-led Kusama Treasury DAO to implement LocalCoinSwap’s non-custodial trading technology on Kusama.
Read on for more details and keep an eye on the recent news from the Polkadot universe posted by the core team on the official channels.
Development
Github metrics:
Polkadot Implementations
There are Polkadot implementations developed in Rust, C++, Go, and JavaScript.
Parity Polkadot — The Rust client is developed by Parity Technologies in concert with their work on Substrate.
Kagome — C++ implementation of the Polkadot Host being built by Soramitsu, a Japanese digital identity company that previously developed Hyperledger Iroha. They were awarded a grant from the Web3 Foundation and plan to release Kagome by November 2019. As part of the process they are developing a libp2p networking layer in C++.
Gossamer — A Go implementation being built by ChainSafe Systems, a 23-person development team in Toronto that is also building an Eth2.0 Serenity client. Grant announcement.
Polkadot-JS — A JavaScript client and tool set developed by Polkadot JS.
W3F Initiates Launch: Polkadot is Live
Web3 Foundation has launched the initial version of Polkadot, a sharded protocol that allows decentralized blockchain networks to operate together, seamlessly and at scale.
Polkadot gives peer-to-peer applications, organizations, businesses, economies — entire digital societies — the agency required to form, grow, govern themselves, and interact without the need for the centralized institutions.
View Launch Roadmap Webpage here
Gavin Wood, Polkadot cofounder, Ethereum cofounder and CTO, discusses the idea for Polkadot and his vision for what he hopes it can accomplish.
According to an in-depth “Blockchain Developer Report Q2 2020” published by Outlier Ventures, “Polkadot (+44%) saw substantial developer activity growth.Polkadot launched its mainnet at the end of May 2020, garnering increased interest from external developers.”
Research
- The Polkadot overview paper is ready and has been promoted by a medium blog post.
- Alfonso Cevallos and Alistair Stewart prepared the first draft of the NPoS paper.
- Alistair, Handan Kılınç Alper, Florian Franzen, and Syed Hosseini have cross-checked the code with the designs of GRANDPA and BABE, where only small discrepancies were found that are being addressed now. Alfonso is cross-checking the implementation of NPoS currently.
- The specification document for the sub-protocols Availability & Validity and XCMP is nearly finished.
- The research team started a research collaboration partnership with the University of Zurich to tackle cryptoeconomic research questions together.
- Aleixo, Master student from ETH University, will start his Master thesis at W3F designing a private interoperability protocol between Polkadot and zCash
- Fatemeh Shiraziwas invited to the program committee of Usenix Security 2021 (Summer 2020 and Winter 2020/2021 submissions).
Technical Education
- The Technical Education team has been expanding, updating, and refining the Polkadot Wiki. Some notable additions over the past month are updated guides for validators and nominators of Polkadot, a page that explains the Polkadot launch procedure, a re-do of Phragmen optimization page, and more!
- The Thousand Validator Programme for onboarding validators to the Kusama Network now has over 60 active validators participating. Applications are still open for the programme and if accepted you will get nominations from Web3 Foundation’s stash at regular intervals.
- Bill Laboon’s MOOC is now on week 9 and it’s never too late to sign up and get started.
- Polkadot’s subreddit, r/dot, is being monitored and an effort to revive it as an active place for the community to gather and ask questions is underway.
- The chainspec generator for generating the Polkadot genesis state from the Ethereum smart contract was finalized for Polkadot’s launch and augmented with a more comprehensive state-checking script.
DevOps
- The team have focused on development of Polkadot Lab, a framework for running generalized tests on substrate-based networks.
- The dev team have started using the Prometheus metrics exposed by substrate-based nodes for an improved monitoring and alerting of Polkadot and Kusama nodes.
- Cloudflare client: during this month we developed a typescript client that wraps the official cloudflare client and makes it easier to interact with it for common tasks, like keeping DNS zones clean or updating DNS records. This will be helpful for publishing data to IPFS and managing access to it using DNSLink.
Governance
In Polkadot’s governance system all DOT holders have a say. Proposals can be suggested either by a DOT holder or by the Council. Both need to be agreed by a stake-weighted referendum.
Council
All DOT holders can register to be considered for the Council. The Council consists of 23 members, with a fixed term of one month. Its role is simply to represent passive stakeholders, submit important proposals and, in exceptional circumstances, cancel uncontroversially dangerous or malicious proposals.
Council proposals have the benefit of requiring a lower number of ayes to pass in a referendum compared to a public proposal. Council proposals need to be supported by a strict majority of Council members, with no veto. Dangerous or malicious proposals may only be cancelled with a unanimous vote.
A councillor can propose to send a proposal to the governance system. In this example, a councillor proposed a new validator count. If enough councillors vote to approve it, then it will eventually have a public referendum.
the Council also has access to Polkadot’s Treasury. The Treasury is an account that accumulates funds by inflation as well as by taking a portion of transaction fees and slashes. The Council can make and pass proposals to spend these funds for developers, community engagement, or more complex activities like using bridges and decentralized exchanges to trade its own DOTs for other tokens.
When the Council votes on its own proposals, votes are counted by member, not by stake. This makes it difficult for large holders to exercise undue power in Polkadot’s governance; they may be able to get themselves on the Council, but they can’t swing a low-turnout referendum.
The Technical Committee
A Technical Committee (consisting of teams that implemented or formally specified the protocol in Polkadot) exists with the sole purpose of detecting issues such as bugs in the code and to fast-track emergency upgrades or changes to the chain. Teams may be added or removed by a majority vote from the Council.
The use of Treasury funds is ultimately controlled by all DOT holders via referendum. The Treasury raises funds by channeling some of the validator rewards (from minting) and by channeling a fraction of the transaction fees and slashings (the fine paid by a validator who acts maliciously or incompetently). These funds are used to pay for the smooth running of the system and the wider ecosystem (marketing, community events and outreach).
Nominated Proof of Stake
Nominated proof of stake (NPoS) is an adaptation of proof of stake (PoS) in which an unlimited number of token holders can back a large but limited number of validators (expected to be in the order of hundreds at genesis). The elected validators are responsible for running the relay chain.
This allows for a massive amount of stake to back validators, much higher than any single user’s holding. As the nominators share possible slashings as well as economic rewards with the validators they back, they are economically incentivized to choose validators with a strong record of performance and security practices.
Using a system of proportional representation, every minority in the nominator set gets to elect a number of validators in proportion to their stake, with no minority underrepresented.
NPoS is more secure and decentralized than PoS schemes without stake delegation, where only a few whales (owners of a large amount of tokens) can ever become validators.
For a more detailed description of NPoS in Polkadot see the Medium post How Nominated Proof-of-Stake will work in Polkadot.
Block Production and Consensus
The validators elected using NPoS are responsible for receiving, validating and republishing blocks on the relay chain using a hybrid consensus protocol that splits the finality gadget (GRANDPA) from the block production mechanism (BABE).
This combination allows 1) probabilistic finality by BABE due to its chain selection rule, where after a certain time the block will be finalized with a probability close to one and 2) provable and deterministic finality by GRANDPA, where finalized blocks stay final forever.
Combining the mechanisms avoids the chance of unknowingly following the wrong fork (a hazard of probabilistic finality) and allows the rapid finalization of blocks, as the slower finality mechanism finalizes blocks separately without risking slower transaction processing or stalling.
Validity and Availability
In brief, parachain collators produce a proof of validity (PoV) block and send it to the parachain validators, who sign its header as valid. A header with enough signatures is added to the relay chain block.
Once a parachain block is created the parachain blob (PoV block and set of outgoing messages) needs to be available for a while to make sure that its validity can be checked by non-adversarial validators. To enable the validators to collectively guarantee the availability, an erasure coding system is used. This distributes the PoV block to all the validators.
Polkadot has a three-level validity check.
First, when the PoV block is verified by the parachain validators they sign and distribute the erasure codes of the parachain blob to each validator.
Second, it is expected that nodes acting as fishermen (which could primarily be functioning as collators) would report invalidity.
Third, a few randomly assigned validators check validity. If a major problem occurs and the block is not made available to them they can reconstruct the PoV block with a sufficient number of the erasure code pieces that were distributed in the first level.
If validators see invalidity reports given by other validators, the blob can be reconstructed from the distributed erasure code pieces. If there are a certain number of invalidity reports and reports that validators do not have the erasure code piece of the parachain block header in the relay chain block, the relay chain block will not be finalized.
If any invalid parachain block is found on the relay chain its validators are slashed. The expected cost of getting an invalid block into Polkadot is higher than the amount of stake backing a single parachain, acting as a deterrent.
If all the parachain blocks referred to by a relay chain block have enough validity reports and there are no challenges, then the relay chain block can be finalised by GRANDPA.
Cross-Chain Message Passing
Cross-Chain Message Passing (XCMP) allows messages to be passed between different parachains in a secure and trust-free way, quickly and in order. One of the main goals of XCMP is to provide a consistent history for messages that have passed between parachains.
This contains two parts:
• Consistent History: Metadata on the output queue of a parachain block are included on the relay chain and later used to authenticate messages by the receiving parachain.
• Reliable Delivery: The message bodies corresponding to this metadata need to be distributed from sender to recipient.
The order of messages is resolved using a simple queuing mechanism based around a Merkle tree to ensure fidelity.
Read the substantial report on Polkadot Governance here
Web3 Foundation’s Grants Program has distributed nearly five million U.S. dollars to one hundred open-source projects contributing to the Polkadot ecosystem. The program includes two additional Polkadot Host implementations, dozens of components like wallets and block explorers, bridges, and other critical infrastructure and tooling. These teams are spread across the globe, and Web3 Foundation is proud to have them supporting Polkadot. Read more about the 100 Projects Milestone.
Learn more on the Polkadot Launch Roadmap or find out how to get involved in the Proof of Authority network.
Explaining the Polkadot Launch Process
By: Logan Saether and Joe Petrowski
Kusama
- Kusama is an early release of Polkadot. Kusama will serve as a proving ground, allowing teams and developers to build and deploy a parachain or try out Polkadot’s governance, staking, nomination and validation functionality in a real environment.
- Kusama is meant to be Polkadot’s canary network, warning of issues to keep things safe for the developers downchain. Without a network like Kusama, there is no reasonable way to fully understand the potential dangers that lie ahead.
- Kusama is an early, highly experimental version of Polkadot presenting real economic conditions. The community will own the network — there will be no central kill switch. Kusama will exist as long as its community maintains it and the team envision it will cater to new, early functionality and projects preparing to develop and deploy on Polkadot.
- One percent of DOT tokens at Polkadot genesis have been reserved as an eventual incentivisation grant to Kusama’s stakeholders and community. The precise mechanics of this have not yet been finalised.
- There is also a standard bounty program for critical issues. You can find out more here.
- With KSM, you can validate, nominate validators, bond parachains, pay for interop message passing, and vote on governance referenda. Check out more in the KSM user guide.
- The genesis distribution of KSM will be exactly as for DOT: if you purchased DOTs in the sale then you own an equal share of the Kusama network. The Web3 Foundation will use some of its holdings to fund a frictional faucet for those that do not currently hold DOTs. Here’s how to claim KSM.
- Alternatively, a public faucet and a KSM grants process will also be made available upon genesis.
- Kusama is a completely different network than Polkadot, but has many of the same features of Polkadot (like parachains) and uses an early version of the code that will be used for Polkadot.
- Long-term, the Kusama network will evolve into an experimental testbed for projects and progressive concepts. Kusama will likely continue on as a community project that will operate alongside and complement the Polkadot mainnet.
- KSM are utilitarian. The team do not condone trading or selling of KSM, only using them to experiment on the canary network.
What can you do on Kusama?
Run a Validator (Kusama)
Lunie Rolls Out Staking For Kusama Ahead Of Polkadot NPoS Launch
The Lunie team is welcoming Kusama Network to their list of integrations.
Lunie is a non-custodial staking and governance platform that allows users to safely store, manage and stake crypto assets in Proof of Stake (PoS) networks.
This integration is part of the team’s first milestone associated with a grant received from Web3 Foundation to build out a staking interface for both Kusama and Polkadot.
As described by Web3 Foundation:
Kusama is a canary network for developers to run experiments in a Polkadot-like environment. Think of Kusama as an early proving ground for things like upgradeable runtimes, on-chain governance, and parachains.
Lunie will be ready to provide the same easy-to-use experience in Polkadot’s next stage of the roadmap, migrating from POA to NPoS.
The Kusama Staking Experience
The first reveal of the Lunie app suite will be staking/un-staking, sending and receiving KSM as well as browsing validators within the Lunie iOS and Android mobile apps and the Lunie browser extension. Users will also be able to explore any Kusama address within the web app as well as view information about Kusama validators.
The Kusama + Lunie integration features some incredible optimizations. Viewing validator and personal rewards data is nearly instantaneous.
Users staking their KSM on Kusama with Lunie will be able to:
- Sign transactions with the Lunie browser extension
- Create, recover, sign with or explore Kusama addresses on Lunie iOS or Android
- Stake and un-stake KSM with one or multiple validators
- Explore the active and inactive validator set
To come in the roll-out:
- Real-time push and email notifications
- Full governance support
- Ledger Nano S and X hardware wallet support
LocalCoinSwap Х Kusama
LocalCoinSwap are working with the community-led Kusama Treasury DAO to implement LocalCoinSwap’s non-custodial trading technology on Kusama.
The LocalCoinSwap development team is increasing the utility and capabilities of the Kusama network by expanding the LocalCoinSwap P2P platform to support the trading of KSM across global jurisdictions.
LocalCoinSwap is one of the first projects successfully approved through the Kusama treasury process. The LCS development team will be working on building out the open-source functionality in the Kusama protocols and libraries to allow decentralized, secure, and unrestricted value exchange via multi-signature P2P trading.
After completing the initial milestones expanding the capabilities of the Kusama protocol, LocalCoinSwap will then work to integrate the trading of Kusama directly into the Peer-to-Peer exchange. This will put LocalCoinSwap in position to be the first P2P platform to enable users to enter and exit the Kusama ecosystem utilizing 160+ local fiat currencies. All platform users will be provided with easy to manage, non-custodial KSM wallets where they will be in complete control of their private keys and funds at all times. In addition, this integration will create a system that incentivises users to set up businesses and generate income from providing liquidity for KSM.
LocalCoinSwap (LCS) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange — a decentralized marketplace that supports a wider variety of cryptocurrencies, and more payment methods than any other P2P platform. Users can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and more, utilizing secure and non-custodial technologies.
To learn more about Kusama, visit the Kusama or Web3 Foundation websites.
Social encounters
Polkadot Shot is a monthly snapshot of the recent happenings in the Polkadot, Kusama, and Substrate ecosystem. The video is produced by Polkadot Ambassador, Theresa Boettger.
Polkadot Behind the Code, Episode 1: The Idea, featuring Gavin Wood
Polkadot Ambassador Spotlight: Francois Branciard | Lyon, France
Los Embajadores de Polkadot: Daniel Olano | Bogotá, Colombia
Polkadot Ambassador Spotlight: Adrien Berthou | Barcelona, Spain
Parity Technologies
Pallet Coupling, Runtime Upgrades, and Storage Migrations — Substrate Seminar 02 June 2020
Adding SM2 Crypto to Substrate — Substrate Seminar 26 May 2020
Sub0 Online: Starmesh: What Can We Extract From the Orbit — Matej Nemcek, Starmesh
Sub0 Online: Darwinia Relay and Bridge Chain — Bree Yin, Darwina
Sub0 Online: How to Balance Staking Liquidity and High Yield — Bunny Nie, Bifrost
Upcoming events
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions (information from Polkascan.io)
What are DOTs?
DOTs are the native token of the Polkadot network, and are integral for key functions of the platform (detailed below).
What is the key difference between PoA and PoS?
Polkadot will be operated by Web3 Foundation nodes during PoA and will be a permissioned blockchain in this stage. When Polkadot transitions to Proof of Stake, the network will be a permissionless and decentralized chain operated by a set of community validators.
Why is Polkadot launching as PoA?
Polkadot will launch as PoA in order for DOT holders to claim their tokens, and to configure validator infrastructure. By launching in PoA mode, the network will build a decentralized validator set ready to take over on the switch to NPoS. The functionality of the network will be restricted to claiming DOT tokens and staking, and Web3 Foundation does not make any inflationary rewards during this period.
How long will Polkadot be in PoA?
The benchmark to move into the next stage is a sufficient amount of validator intentions, which ensures a stable and secure network. The number of intentions can be as low as 50 but will probably be closer to 100, as it was with Kusama.
How will Polkadot move to NPoS?
Web3 Foundation will use ‘Sudo’ — a superuser account with access to governance functions — to initiate the first validator election.
Can I transfer my DOTs?
No, DOT transferability is not yet enabled in the PoA stage. However it is possible to claim DOTs if you bought them in an earlier DOT token sale. Go to claims.polkadot.network to start your claim.
The main reasons to stake DOT right now
The team encourage people to signal their intent to nominate in the PoA phase to back validators so they can get in the active set in the NPoS phase! Validator elections and rewards will be activated during this stage.
- During NPoS, all nominators will earn staking rewards. For those who haven’t nominated yet, each day will result in a missed opportunity to receive additional interest on their DOT holdings. The period between NPoS and transfer activation is not defined. After the enablement of decentralized governance, a technical committee and first councils should be elected. It will take at least 14 days. After that, someone will make a runtime upgrade proposal to remove sudo module, voting will take 28 days with an additional 30 days of enactment period before the upgrade. More than 4 months and more than one third of annual DOT rewards can be lost just waiting for the right moment to stake.
- In the early days of the network the number of staked DOT will start from a lower value and will increase gradually over time as new holders will join staking. Assuming a constant number of validators before network stabilization, the barrier for a node to enter the active set will be lower in the beginning.
- The average annual percentage return for a nominator depends on his share in the validator’s total stake. It means that nominators who stake early obtain a bigger share in the validator pool receiving a higher portion of rewards. With enabled compounding nominators will be able to retain or even increase their share.
- In Polkadot, it is possible to vote without locking DOT in the enactment period, in this case, the weight of a vote will be decreased by 90%. There will be enough time to initiate unbonding for those who wish to fix a portion of DOT holdings as soon as possible.
Staking in Polkadot
Read these detailed guides to simplify the process:
Here is more info on nominating on Polkadot: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/maintain-nominator
for Kusama:
And how to be a nominator: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/maintain-guides-how-to-nominate-kusama
Polkadot DeFi Day
A Polkadot decentralized finance (DeFi) community conference hosted by Acala and Polkadot will be held virtually on June 18 2020.
PolkaDeFi Day is focused on showcasing teams building and collaborating on decentralized cross-chain finance applications, protocols and infrastructures.
There are three one-hour sessions, featuring Acala, a cross-chain stablecoin and finance DApp platform, Centrifuge, a decentralized asset financing platform, ChainX, a Bitcoin smart contract platform, Chainlink, an oracle service provider for any blockchain, Laminar, a synthetic asset and margin trading platform, Plasm Network, a layer 2 DApp scaling platform and Interlay, a trustless Bitcoin bridge.
Robert Habemeier, co-founder of Polkadot, will showcase cutting-edge developments in parachains while Joe Petrowski of Parity Technologies will demonstrate cross-chain communication.
Register for free! http://polkadefi.acala.network/
The event is hosted on Crowdcast https://www.crowdcast.io/e/polkadefi-conference
Other
Partnerships and team members
Join the Polkadot Ambassador Program
And if you become a Polkadot Ambassador, from day one, you’ll have the chance, very practically, to write the next chapter of Web3. Contributing for the sake of being a contribution is its own great reward, but you’ll also enjoy these benefits:
- FUNDING — You’ll get first-call, early access to bounties, and be eligible to receive funding to host local meetups and workshops
- SPECIAL ACCESS — You’ll be invited to exclusive events, an Ambassadors-only Riot channel, and behind-the-scenes phone calls with core-team members
- FREE STUFF — You’ll stand out with cool Polkadot swag, marking you as an extra-special member of the crew
- TRUE COMMUNITY — You’ll be working closely alongside some of the most notable figures in the Web3 space, while forging ties with others who are equally as passionate about architecting a better future for everyone
What are the expectations of an Ambassador?
Anyone is more than welcome to join the Polkadot community, but to become an actual Ambassador requires a bit more commitment, and a few extra steps. An Ambassador is a self-starter who is keen to demonstrate their dedication to the project. Ambassadors should contribute significantly each month to tasks and actions designed to help Polkadot grow.
Find out all the details and the process of becoming an Ambassador here.
Build a better web: build on Polkadot
