Tech and Research Update: May
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!
May was a busy month as we prepared for the successful soft launch of Polkadot’s first chain candidate. Everyone across the team was crunching on making sure that the procedure went smoothly. Nonetheless, that did not stop progress from churning on and continuing to move forward and there’s plenty to report in this month’s Tech and Research update.
Without further ado, read on below to learn about what the tech teams at Web3 Foundation have been up to this past month. This month’s report is brought to you by Logan Saether, from the Technical Education team.
Research
- The Polkadot overview paper is ready and has been promoted by a medium blog post.
- Alfonso Cevallos and Alistair Stewart prepared the first draft of the NPoS paper.
- Alistair, Handan Kılınç Alper, Florian Franzen, and Syed Hosseini have cross-checked the code with the designs of GRANDPA and BABE, where only small discrepancies were found that are being addressed now. Alfonso is cross-checking the implementation of NPoS currently.
- The specification document for the sub-protocols Availability & Validity and XCMP is nearly finished.
- The research team started a research collaboration partnership with the University of Zurich to tackle cryptoeconomic research questions together.
- Aleixo, Master student from ETH University, will start his Master thesis at W3F designing a private interoperability protocol between Polkadot and zCash
- Fatemeh Shiraziwas invited to the program committee of Usenix Security 2021 (Summer 2020 and Winter 2020/2021 submissions).
Technical Education
- As always, the Technical Education team has been expanding, updating, and refining the Polkadot Wiki, a one-stop shop for everything you want to know about the Polkadot ecosystem. Some notable additions over the past month are updated guides for validators and nominators of Polkadot, a page that explains the Polkadot launch procedure, a re-do of Phragmen optimization page, and more!
- The Thousand Validator Programme for onboarding validators to the Kusama Network now has over 60 active validators participating. Ever wanted to set up your own validator? Applications are still open for the programme and if accepted you will get nominations from Web3 Foundation’s stash at regular intervals.
- Bill Laboon’s MOOC is now on week 9 and it’s never too late to sign up and get started. If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the fundamentals of blockchain there’s no better place to do it.
- Polkadot’s subreddit, r/dot, is being monitored and an effort to revive it as an active place for the community to gather and ask questions is underway.
- The chainspec generator for generating the Polkadot genesis state from the Ethereum smart contract was finalized for Polkadot’s launch and augmented with a more comprehensive state-checking script.
- The Polkadot Digest is going strong, with the latest news on what’s happening in the Polkadot and Substrate ecosystems delivered directly to your feed every working day. Follow Bill’s twitter for daily updates.
Events and Crowdcasts
- Bill presented “An Introduction of Polkadot for DeFI” at DeFi Discussions.
- Logan presented “Parachain Economics” at DeFi Discussions.
- Bruno Skvorc gave an interview with Mousebelt on Technical Education and Web3.
- Bruno participated in a fireside chat hosted by Polkadot Ambassador Zoé Meckbach.
- The research team presented numerous talks at ReadyLayerOne, recordings of which are hopefully coming soon.
- Bruno gave a talk at ANON Summit with a Q&A. Recording coming soon.
- Bill and Dan Reecer gave a Crowdcast for Polkadot for Beginners.
DevOps
Polkadot Launch: the team contributed to the launch sequence by deploying the PoA validators and the initial network bootnodes,which are actively monitored 24x7. The process was uneventful and so far we haven’t had any alert related to this infrastructure.
We have focused on development of Polkadot Lab, a framework for running generalized tests on substrate-based networks. We are about to have a fully running version in the next days, the project uses the several component packages we have been developing in the last months and the pieces are coming together nicely.
Monitoring: we have started using the Prometheus metrics exposed by substrate-based nodes for an improved monitoring and alerting of Polkadot and Kusama nodes. We are working with Parity developers and devops on shared alert rules.
Cloudflare client: during this month we developed a typescript client that wraps the official cloudflare client and makes it easier to interact with it for common tasks, like keeping DNS zones clean or updating DNS records. This will be helpful for publishing data to IPFS and managing access to it using DNSLink.
For more information about Web3 Foundation, check web3.foundation. If you want to follow more real-time updates out of our team follow @bitfalls, @BillLaboon and @logansaether. For a deeper dive into Polkadot, check our Wiki, which we are constantly updating and elaborating. We’re preparing some other platforms on which you can join us, stay tuned!
