Tech and Research Update: July & August
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 members of all the teams so you can know what we’ve been up to!
Without further ado, this Tech and Research update presents what Research, Technical Education, and DevOps have accomplished. This blog post is brought to you by Anson Lau from the technical education team.
July and August were busy months as we prepared for enabling transfers and the redenomination of DOT. Everyone across the team was in crunch mode, making sure that everything went smoothly.
Research
- Ximin Luo designed a Parachain networking scheme.
- Alistair Stewart developed an ultralight light client design that can be used for Ethereum bridges.
- Jeffrey Burdges wrote drafts explaining the approval checker assignments process which runs before finality.
- Jeffrey Burdges wrote code for Availability and Validity (AnV) approval votes.
- W3F researchers and some Parity Technology developers joined together for a 2-day workshop in Berlin on the 20th and 21st of August discussing implementation details of Polkadot components such as the AnV and XCMP protocols.
- A workshop on sharding and interoperability was accepted to be co-located at DISC 2020.
- Fatemeh Shirazi became a program committee member of USENIX Security 2021.
Technical Education
As always, the Technical Education team has been adding the latest information in the Polkadot ecosystem to the Polkadot Wiki. Some notable additions over the last two months are the redenomination of DOT, and Horizontal Relay-routed Message Passing (HRMP).
In collaboration with the Communications team, the Technical Education team is pleased to announce the Polkadot Support site. Here you can find help troubleshooting issues and answers to your FAQs.
The team has also been producing Tech Ed Explainers — short-form videos that answer FAQs and interesting topics about the Polkadot network, such as:
- Polkadot Redenomination
- How to create Polkadot accounts
- How to pick validators in Polkadot
- How to claim DOT post genesis
The Blockchain Fundamentals MOOC by Technical Education lead Bill Laboon has now published 17 lectures. Check it out if you would like to learn more about how blockchains actually work.
DotLeap has now released 16 issues. This newsletter covers Polkadot, Kusama, Substrate, and all related Web 3.0 projects, with tutorials on a variety of related subjects.
The Polkadot Digest is published every weekday, detailing the latest news in the Polkadot, Kusama, and Substrate ecosystems. You can find it in Matrix/Riot/Element chat on channel #dailydigest:web3.foundation, on Twitter by following @Polkadot, or in Telegram by following the Polkadot (Official) channel.
Crowdcasts
Kirsten Richard and Bruno Skvorc hosted a Crowdcast on the Overview of Polkadot and Substrate during the Hackusama Webinar Series.
Bruno Skvorc also presented another one about the On-chain Identity registry during the Hackusama Webinar Series.
Logan Saether presented Account Primitives that cover multi-signature and proxy accounts during the Hackusama Webinar Series.
Continuing that, Anson Lau gave a Crowdcast on Parachain Economics at during the Hackusama Webinar Series as well.
DevOps
The Polkadot secure validator repository has an update on secure validators working without sentries. The tool has been adapted to create a reverse proxy and configure validators to connect to the wider network through it.
The Polkadot watcher is an unresponsiveness detection program that has been improved aiming to prevent slashes. Now, it can detect if a validator is unresponsive in the middle of a session and alert accordingly before the session ends.
For more information about Web3 Foundation, check our website. If you want to follow more real-time updates from our team follow @bitfalls, @BillLaboon ,@logansaether, and @Anson_LauHK. For a deeper dive into Polkadot, join the community or check our Wiki, which we are constantly updating and elaborating. We’re preparing some other platforms on which you can join us, stay tuned!
