Tech and Research Update: March
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 Anson Lau.
Despite the spread of coronavirus globally, Web3 Foundation is moving forward with the launch of Polkadot.
This month we hosted many workshops on webinars through Crowdcast.
We will continue to deliver the mission of Web 3 in the coming months while most people are working from home.
Proceed below for quick bullet points of what we’ve been up to!
Research
The research team is working on a parachain economics model that aims to give insights for different incentive models of parachains and pricing of parachain tokens.
Fatemeh Shirazi is a program committee member for this year’s International Workshop on Privacy Engineering, IWPE 2020.
Alistair Stewart, Jeff Burdges, Syed Hosseini, and Fatemeh Shirazi are writing the specification for Availability and Validity (A&V) checking, a protocol that is crucial for Polkadot’s security.
The team finished the Polkadot research overview paper. This will be made available shortly.
Technical Education
The Technical Education team has been concentrating on updating the Polkadot Wiki to keep the information up-to-date. There’s quite a bit of change happening, and we want to make sure that you know all about it! New content on topics such as lazy payouts, democracy and prime council members, identity, nomination using CLI, and more were included. The team has also contributed to hosting webinars on various topics, developing more tooling, and the Thousand Validators Programme to help build up the ecosystem. Moreover, the team has been working hard behind the scenes in preparation for the Polkadot mainnet launch.
Bill Laboon has spent much of his time on the upcoming Blockchain Fundmentals MOOC course. It is a 100% completely free course which will teach blockchains from the absolute beginning, starting with hash functions and public-key cryptography, all the way up to building your own blockchains and smart contracts. After announcing, over 150 people signed up in less than a week.
Logan Saether has been focused on the Thousand Validators Programme that helps more people become Kusama validators, including those who may not have the technical expertise or sufficient stake to do so. Check it out if you’re interested in becoming a validator yourself!
Anson Lau hosted two webinars on Kusama governance and what Polkadot is for the Chinese community. Videos are available here.
Bruno Škvorc was in Paris for EthCC to give a workshop on building your own blockchain with Substrate.
Logan and Anson continue to work on planning and tooling for the injections procedure and scraper that will accompany the Polkadot launch.
Bill was at the MIT Cryptoeconomic Systems (CES) conference to give a talk about Polkadot’s hybrid consensus model. While he was in Boston, he also co-hosted a Substrate meetup with PureStake, a Kusama validator.
Logan hosted a crowdcast on Substrate Democracy for Kusama and Polkadot. The recording is available here.
Bruno held a crowdcast on building your first custom Blockchain with Substrate. The video recording can be found here.
Infrastructure and DevOps
During the last month, the infrastructure team has been working on several software projects. The main one is a testing framework to help Web3 Foundation researchers validate their theoretical assumptions about Polkadot. This project is still ongoing and the team plans to deliver an initial version during the next month.
The infrastructure team worked on several software projects in March. The main project was a testing framework to help Web3 Foundation researchers validate their theoretical assumptions about Polkadot. This project is ongoing and the team plans to deliver an initial version during the next month.
The team is also working on a project for managing validator rewards automatically, defining the retrieval frequency and destination account in a declarative way.
Recently the DevOps team released matrix-recorder, a tool that saves messages sent to specific public matrix rooms and makes them available on a web page. It has already been enabled for several Kusama-related rooms and more are on the way.
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!
