Parity’s Polkadot Dev Update #0
Well what a busy and exciting month September was in the Parity Tech offices!!
At the moment the Parity Tech team is split working on improvements to the Parity Client to make it run as smoothly as possible, while at the same time the team is also working on new technology and helping our friends over at Web3 on different components to fine tune the innovative technology they are implementing.
So first thing’s first, here is a little update on our work on the Polkadot Network Bridge:
- It’s a set of two smart contracts deployed to Ethereum and any other Ethereum-like proof of authority chain. It allows users to ‘transfer’ real Ether to the second chain in a secure way.
- Ether on such a chain can be transferred between accounts and no interaction with the Ethereum main chain is needed. The outcome of all transfers is ‘committed’ to the smart contract on Ethereum mainnet when user withdraws his funds.
- This project is a proof of concept for Polkadot bridges between various chains.
For more info and a link to the repo, as well as some fancy images explaining the simple bridge between Ethereum Foundation and Kovan networks check out the Github page:
We should also just add that this project is not deployed to the Ethereum Mainnet yet, but it’s on our roadmap at the moment.
Also this month we have been refactoring validator set contracts and making them upgradable with the recent fork features. This is striving towards making blockchain governance much easier, since changes to the validator set logic (e.g. changing from PoA to PoS) do not require hard forks. In particular this will be used for the Kovan chain.
We continue to improve our standard library for WebAssembly contracts development. Keccak cryptography and big-integer arithmetic crates are now included in “lib” and compiled into pure WASM. There is huge work in progress on supporting Solidity ABI in Rust contracts compiled to WebAssembly, nothing our ninja devs cannot handle.
Parity Tech is undertaking a refactor of large portions of the Core Client Code. Although Parity has had multiple options for consensus algorithms for several releases, the code has been tightly coupled to the Ethereum block structure. The refactor aims to logically split consensus-related block verification from all other parts allowing the consensus code to be used for other block types and chains as well. if we are framing this in the sphere of polkadot development, the context is so we can begin to prototype the relay chain using existing consensus code.
So lots of exciting stuff going on inside the Parity Tech office!! If you want to discuss anything in this update or join the conversation on all things Parity you can join our Riot channel: #parity-watercooler:matrix.org
