Tech and Research Update: December & January

Web3 Foundation nurtures and stewards technologies and applications in the field of decentralized web software protocols.

Welcome to the latest installment in Web3 Foundation’s Tech and Research updates — this time brought to you by Logan Saether.

Since December was a shorter month with the Web3 Foundation’s winter retreat and many people away for the holidays, we’ve combined the December and January updates into one post.

First off, the winter retreat in Lisbon, Portugal was a fruitful experience for all of us on the team. Those who work remotely were able to spend valuable team-building time with our Zug colleagues. We were able to collaborate face-to-face and make some exciting plans for the year ahead.

But the past two months weren’t all sunshine and tuk-tuk riding. Much happened on Kusama and the team continues to be hard at work finalizing research, educating developers, and making preparations for Polkadot.

Most notably, since December we’ve seen Kusama being released fully into the hands of the community via on-chain governance. We’ve also been working with auditors on the ever-ongoing process of performing security audits on Polkadot’s codebase.

We’ve seen continuing excitement and participation in our CrowdCast webinars, and are always looking for new ways to get the good word out there. Soon we will start experimenting with streams on Twitch and exploring other new content mediums.

Proceed below for quick bullet points of what we’ve been up to!

Research

• The writeup detailing Polkadot’s parachain messaging scheme, XCMP, was released.
• An updated block production mechanism termed Sassafrass has been designed by the team. Sassafras is a cryptographic sortition for constant-time block production which may one day be used in place of BABE.
• A draft of Polkadot’s overview paper is making steady progress. Look out for a release of this updated description of Polkadot shortly!
• The Consensus on Clock in Universally Composable Timing Model has been published in pre-print by Handan Kılınç Alper.
• A new design for off-chain Phragmen elections has been specified by Alfonso Cevallos with Parity developer Kian. This will allow validator and council elections to be much more scalable.
• At Financial Crypto 2020, Dr. Jeff Brudges will present a poster on Incentivising Correct Mixing without Authorities and Handan will present a poster on Availability and Validity.
• A new member of the team Eray Sabancilar has been analyzing Polkadot’s NPoS economic model. The two versions of analysis can be found here and here.
• Resident expert in Zero Knowledge, Sergey, has been busy implementing subversion check for Groth16 proving system on the Bellman library. This cryptographic primitive will be useful for more advanced schemes that are on the horizon.
• Ximin has worked on many aspects of the networking protocol underlying Polkadot. Some segments that have been more stabilized as research proposals include discovery and authentication.

Technical Education

• The Technical Education team has been busy building resources and documentation. Recently the team started a Wiki Blitz to update all of the outdated documentation ahead of Polkadot launch. Members of the team are also contributing sample applications, tooling, and technical programs to augment the ecosystem. The team continues to educate, in person, around the globe:
• Bill Laboon held a crowdcast on developing applications that interact with Polkadot. The video recording can be found here.

• Logan Saether traveled to Tokyo, Japan to give a talk on Interoperability at the Polkadot Japan meetup and a full-day course to University of Tokyo students covering topics from the basics to how to prototype parachains with Cumulus.
• Bruno Škvorc hosted a crowdcast on adding web3.0 logins to web2.0 applications, recording here.
• Anson Lau has been testing the Ethereum checker script that monitors the Foundation’s addresses and other objects of interest for suspicious or irregular activity.

• Bill has completed a majority of the MOOC courses and is currently finalizing agreements for a distribution platform.
• Bruno was in Barcelona for the European Blockchain Convention and a Caelum Labs meetup.

• Logan and Anson are working on assurance of the operations for the chain specification and injections procedures that will accompany the Polkadot launch.
• Logan has started work on a backend script for an upcoming validator program from Web3 Foundation and Parity.

DevOps

The infrastructure team’s main focus right now is the Polkadot launch. Preparations are being made in regard to deployment tools, improving the observability tools, and perfecting the incident response procedures. The learnings of Kusama have been considered and applied to the processes in order to ensure a successful Polkadot launch. In this sense, the DevOps team has been collaborating with security auditors for the final checks of Polkadot, creating specific infrastructure for them to verify. More details below:

• Paging and runbooks have been established for usual cases, to shorten the response time.
• Dev runners have been set up to speed up the speed of development.
• Managing the Web3 Foundation’s own validators on Kusama and Plasm. Including an advanced wireguard set-up among a series of nodes including sentries.
• Set up a CLA assistant to automate licensing tasks.

For more information about Web3 Foundation, check web3.foundation. For a deeper dive into Polkadot, check out the Wiki. We’re preparing some other platforms on which you can join us, stay tuned!