The Dusty after Plasm
The King is dead. Long live the King!
Just as we planned, the Plasm Mainnet has been launched in early May. Great thanks to the community which was actively involved in testing and supported us during the launch process. We are so humbled by everyone’s participation.
Launching the mainnet is not the end of Plasm Network’s story. In fact, it’s only the beginning. There are a huge number of new featured planned to come in the near future and the Plasm development team will need help from the testnet as ever before. This is the driving force of our support for the Dusty network’s development and evolution.
The State of Dusty Network
Our mainnet had a soft-launch on May 1st, and on that fateful day, Dusty network block propagation was suspended. The final block number was 119,978. The nature of BABE (chain block production algorithm) makes it practically impossible to wake up the network once it’s in suspension mode (according to the devs at Parity Technology). Therefore, it implies that the current Dusty chain as it stands will be suspended forever.
The future of Dusty
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
-Dr. Seuss
However, there’s no need to feel sad about the death of Dusty. First and foremost, Dusty is a testnet, which is meant to face disaster.
The good news is that Dusty chain will be relaunched from scratch! This should save the developers and the validators a lot of GiB for each node. Furthermore, the state of the last finalized block (including balances and session keys) will be transferred to the new chain with a dedicated chain id. For end-users, the new Dusty release will simply be like a simple upgrade to the version of Plasm Node and probably wouldn’t feel anything except for the different numbers. Internal relaunch makes it easy to create a new chain with runtimes that are absolutely identical to the mainnet. During the development of Plasm Network, the team will test each runtime upgrade on Dusty before applying it for mainnet.
Validator Application Process
The objective of Plasm Network is to become a Polkadot Parachain. However, during the rapid development stages and before the official launch of Polkadot, Plasm Network will have to use a PoA consensus that will rely on trusted validators within the community.
If you are interested in becoming a validator for Plasm Network, you can follow the instructions below to get started!
- Setup a Plasm Network validator node (detailed instructions can be found in our Validator Guide).
- Fill out the Validator Call Form.
- Wait for the Stake Technologies team’s approval. A new validator set is announced every week.
Our side validator selection procedure consists of two steps:
First, elected validator candidates for Dusty testnet should have a stable uptime and associated session keys should be available. When a validator is elected for the Dusty network and they start to actively participate in both the bock validation and within the community, the evaluation period has begun. Because a mainnet validation is a pretty sensitive process, we are very careful in our validator election process.
Next, only the validators who have passed the two week evaluation period without any critical issues (high downtime and low availability, not applying each node upgrades during 24hrs after publishing, responsiveness in messengers) are given the right to be involved as part of the mainnet validators. In some cases, a short call with the team members could be required in order for us to prevent Sybil attacks.
On the way to Parachain
In any case, PoA is only a temporary solution, that is, until the Polkadot ecosystem warms up to the public. We are hoping to change the consensus mechanism as soon as possible and our team is working hard on implementing Cumulus as a native way for Substrate-based projects. We cannot give any concrete dates as to when this will happen, as there are many moving parts that rely on each other for Polkadot and Parachains to be accessible for everyone. But we can assure you that so far we are on the right track.
We would love to keep in touch with you, the reader! Feel free to ask any questions on Discord!
