Conferences, Crowdcasts and CC3: Tech and Research Update November

Web3 Foundation nurtures and stewards technologies and applications in the field of decentralized web software protocols. One way the foundation does this is through its Research and Technical teams. We’ve collected the most recent updates from all members of the teams so you can know what we’ve been up to!

Bruno Škvorc here — technical educator at W3F and this month’s town crier! I’m chiming in from sunny Croatia to let you know it’s not all about fun, games, and devil worship

This month we’ve unleashed the collective tentacles of the research, tech ed and devops teams far and wide, Cthulhuing Web 3.0 knowledge into at least one soul on almost every continent.

The new platform for screencasts and webinars we’ve been trying out — Crowdcast — has been a major success, driving an incredibly diverse and curious audience to every session so we absolutely intend to keep that up, but we’re open to experimenting with some less conventional platforms too.

Two other major events marked this month — Kusama went CC3, and a Parity coding retreat + mega brainstorming session happened near Paris. With both implementers and researchers in the same place, problems could be tackled more head-on, and the results of these brainstorms will be published in the weeks to come.

See below for a quick summary of everything we’ve been up to!

If you’d like to get in touch with me my doors are always open on Twitter or via email: bruno@web3.foundation — please share your feedback about this update post, about updates I’ve missed, interesting projects from the community, or anything else you think is worth calling out in the next edition!

Research

• Spec on Availability and Validity is in final stage.
• Draft of the Polkadot overview paper is nearly finished.
• Nested relay chain meeting held and some initial ideas were discussed. If you don’t know what this means, it’s related to being able to run relay chains inside of parachain slots, so that a relay chain could have several levels, thereby allowing for more parachain slots in the system.
• The audit report by NCC on Schnorrkel has been released.

We released the audit report by NCC on Schnorrkel

• Alistair Stewart presented a poster session about the Grandpa finality gadget at the Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CSS) in London.
• Alfonso Cevallos and Syed Hosseini hosted a 3 hour think-tank session about Polkadot in Paris, organized by LaBChain and hosted by Caisse des Dépôts.
• At the Parity Technologies Coding Retreat: Dr. Jeff Burdges presented a crypto overview session, and Ximin Luo lead a networking overview session. Alistair held a session on ICMP implementation, while Handan Kılınç Alper and Syed lead a session on parachain strategy.
• Some members of the research and HR teams presented a recruitment talk for masters and PhD students at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland

Technical Education

• Bill Laboon held two talks on BABE/GRANDPA (a.k.a. block production in Polkadot and Kusama) online and at the University of Pittsburgh. You can find the video of this webinar here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/polkadot-block-production

• Some Polkadot Wiki pages have been overhauled to be much clearer, and we’ve got more in the pipeline. For now, check out Phragmen, Randomness, BABE/Aura.
• I (Bruno) hosted a meetup on Polkadot vs Ethereum 2. I’ll document the topic in detail in this post series and also in a YouTube series on my channel.
• The team is looking for an intern to help us with everyday tasks, many of them code-related. More info on the position here.

Bill had another webinar on keys and accounts in Polkadot and Kusama — the different kinds of each you’re going to need and will probably be exposed to as your role in the ecosystem evolves. Watch it here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/polkadot-keys

• Logan Saether has been working on a Polkadot genesis flowchart that many might find interesting, in particular if they participated in the original crowdsale. Stay tuned for more info on that soon!
• I (Bruno) spoke at the AI & Blockchain Leadership Summit in Barcelona — you can see a bad quality, awkwardly cropped and uncut version of it at this URL (watch the first 20 minutes of the 4 hour video), but a better quality edition is supposedly coming in the next few weeks.
• Logan held two Polkadot / Kusama workshops in London.
• I (Bruno) spoke at BSA EPFL and participated in a panel on blockchain technology there
• Anson has prepared a guide for deploying a sentry node for your validator, available now in the Wiki.

• Anson built a script for generating some stats about validators: https://github.com/ansonla3/kusama-validator-stats
• A series of meetups was held around Europe by Farid Rached. The meetups were in Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and Brussels and featured call-ins from Logan, Bruno, Logan, Bruno, and Bill respectively.
• Logan hosted a “Participating in Kusama” workshop on Crowdcast which, if you missed it, can be viewed in its archived form on the Polkadot Crowdcast channel.

DevOps

• After the switch to proof of stake in Kusama, the focus of the team has shifted to the validators managed by the Foundation: Besides the operational and incident response tasks, we have developed tools for deploying, maintaining and monitoring them; and have been keeping the pace of the validator-set increments during the month to maintain a fixed percentage of validators held by W3F. These tools in particular shine:
• https://github.com/w3f/polkadot-watcher is a tool for getting metrics and alerts when “queriable” endpoints change
• https://github.com/w3f/polkadot-secure-validator/ is our ever-evolving setup for setting up validators securely, and it’s one we use at W3F for our own validators
• Under the ever-watchful eyes of Federico Gimenez and Pantelis Ampatzoglou, Kusama has moved to version CC3 — the last release before its full unleashing into the hands of the Kusama community. Full details on what this means and which bugs have been fixed are available in Gavin’s post.
• We’re keeping the number of validators relative to total pool of validators reasonably high (but not dominating) in order to get upgrades across much faster and to be able to update our nodes asap when critical updates appear. Once we’ve squashed all the bugs and transfers have been enabled, our influence will decrease dramatically.

For more information about Web3 Foundation, check web3.foundation. If you want to follow more real-time updates out of our team follow @bitfalls, @laboon and @logansaether. For a deeper dive into Polkadot, check our Wiki, which we are constantly updating and elaborating. We’re preparing some other platform on which you can join us, stay tuned!