Bug Fix: Polkadot & Kapex — Update
A long and very painful referendum process to fix the Kapex Parachain via a Polkadot upgrade will end in around 15 hours from now, with the enactment of Referendum #85 on Polkadot.
Both the Totem Kapex Development Team and the Kapex community have had to wait 56 Days for the entire governance process to complete on Polkadot before we could move forward. Of course the most frustrating aspect has been the unfortunate delay in distributing the Kapex coins due to this bug. We won’t go over the history here, you can read about it in the referendum notes.
The purpose of this post however is to make clear what will happen next because there appears to be some confusion in the community regarding the referendum enactment and the distribution of Kapex.
tldr; all things being well after the enactment of the referendum and upgrades, KAPEX will be distributed to the Crowdloan participants on the weekend of 14th & 15th January 2023. (We didn’t want to choose Friday 13th!)
The enactment of the fix on Polkadot, does not immediately mean that the coins can be distributed to Crowdloan participants because a number of checks need to be performed before that can happen:
After the enactment the Polkadot Validators and Kapex Collators should be running identical versions of the validation code. The Validation Code is an important part of the security mechanism used by Polkadot because it means that Polkadot Validators actually ensure that the blocks produced by Parachain Collators is correct. In practical terms however for our chain this repair should allow the network to be upgraded — until now that has been impossible.
Upgrade Process
We will first need to check that this has been successful and this will be done as follows:
- Kapex will be upgraded to version 1.2 using the on-chain upgrade mechanism which was previously blocked by the bug. This contains a very minor update designed to test the upgrade process is working as expected.
This upgrade process involves sending an upgrade transaction firstly to notify the Polkadot Validators that a new version of Kapex is coming, and then when that has been confirmed as successful, sending a second transaction to instruct the Polkadot Validators to perform the upgrade.
This will be carried out by the Super Admin User on the Kapex Parachain, and if the fix has worked, the upgrade will pass without incident.
- Only when the Polkadot Validators signal that they accept the new version do they notify the Kapex Parachain Collators (via XCM) on which block they will be allowed to start using the new code version.
- This process is somewhat automatic in the sense that no physical person is responsible — the code and transactions themselves are sufficient to perform this check.
- Under normal circumstances Kapex Collators running Docker images, should upgrade to the latest version which would include the new code in the binary. This is not strictly necessary, but it will be done.
Once that upgrade process has been confirmed as successful, a second more significant upgrade will be performed to Kapex version 1.3.0.
This version has a more significant upgrade because it contains code that is compatible with version 0.9.28 of Polkadot and Cumulus, and will fix the XCM bug that has been known about for some time. The same steps are required to be followed as outlined above.
Lastly, as Polkadot itself is on a later version — 0.9.33 — another upgrade is foreseen, but the development team will just ensure that everything is running as expected, before proceeding with that update, and we will publish information about that at a later date. At this point we should be ready to start the distribution of coins.
Distribution Process
At this stage we will have completed the checks to ensure that Kapex is running and in good health.
At long last, the wait will be over — we will be able to distribute Kapex.
Since we know everyone likes a good heads up on when that happens, we have decided to begin this process on the weekend of 14th and 15th January 2023.
The first set of coins to be distributed are those from the Crowdloan & Pledge Rounds as well as the Referral Program as previously published in the Google sheet.
The migration from the Meccano Testnet is set to complete at the end of January 2023, and once that happens the eligable claimants will receive their migrated funds. We will post more information about that distribution closer to the time. Note: only Meccano users that existed before April 2022 are eligible to claim.
It is really important to make your claim before 31st January 2023 because the network will be deprecated shortly after that.
Head over to totem.live and claim now!
Thats all for now. If you have any questions reach out to us on our channels below.
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