Paradigm Community Update #10 — Portal Additions and Updates, Reference Implementation Update, Contract System and Tooling Update
These digests summarize the progress that we’ve made over the last month. If you’re new to Paradigm, we encourage you to read our documentation portal, and technical introduction article for a more complete summary of the project.
Portal additions and update:
Last month we briefly teased the addition of our Account, Governance and Create portals to our larger Paradigm portal suite. With our upcoming wider portal suite launch and alpha testing phases, it’s a great opportunity to briefly introduce our new portal additions.
The Account portal provides a UI for streamlining the interactions with the core protocol contract system, allowing users manage their token balances, allowances, and deposits within the contract system. It also lets users allocate tokens for various functions such as bonding to gain network write access, or participate in validator governance.
The Governance portal enables participants to view the network’s current validators, pending validator applications, and curate the existing validator set by submitting new challenges against validators and applicants, and voting in open challenge polls.
The Create portal presents a simple interface for creating and signing 0x maker orders for any ERC-20 token swap. In the future, orders for more complex settlement types (loans via Dharma, etc.) will be supported. The resulting signed orders can then easily be posted to the network, or copied and relayed by any means to potential takers.
Last month we ran a closed alpha testing session for some of our portal suite — we’d like to that all those that participated for their valued feedback. This month we’d like to do the same and extend an invitation to participate in our closed alpha testing of the next evolution of our portal suite. If you’re interested in getting involved, feel free to reach out directly.
Development updates
There were a couple of noteworthy development updates in May, including updates on our network client reference implementation as well as to our core contract system and developer tooling.
Development of the reference implementation of our Tendermint network continues to progress as we move toward feature completion of the MVP. More information about the client (including its official name) can be expected in a formal announcement in the coming months. The client’s development is being conducted in a private repository, but we expect to open-source it following an announcement. We are currently implementing what we unofficially refer to as “validator tracking.” Since the protocol’s network validators are curated by an Ethereum contract-based registry, the one-way peg zone must be used to apply validator updates to the Tendermint network. We are in the process of initially implementing the data structures and logic necessary to support contract-based updates to the validator set.
The protocol’s core contract system has mostly stabilized over the past few months as we have shifted our focus to the client reference implementation and developer libraries. However, some small changes have been introduced since the last update that are worth mentioning. We have added multiple methods to the ‘ValidatorRegistry’ contract to increase data availability and to make it easier to query individual listings and past governance activity. Our TypeScript client library has been updated to reflect these interface changes, and has been expanded with additional methods to simplify many read and write operations with the contract system. We have also introduced a Docker development image for our contract system that can be used to run single-node (or multi-node) proof-of-authority networks for testing. This image and others will be made public when our protocol monorepo is made public in the coming months.
Official Paradigm community channels:
