Tech and Research Update: October

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

Research

• Alistair gave a talk at NodeTokyo 2019 on our NPoS solution.
• Alfonso, Alistair, and Fatemeh attended Devcon 5 in Osaka, Japan, Oct. 8 - Oct. 11, 2019.
• On October 8th, Fatemeh hosted a short presentation about Polkadot’s needs for the p2p stack.
• On October 11th, Alistair gave a talk at Devcon on W3F’s availability and validity scheme and how it can be useful for Ethereum. Alfonso also gave a short presentation about Polkadot’s governance.
• Alistair participated in a panel organized by Near protocol after Devcon 5 about cross-app communication.
• Fatemeh gave a talk on the importance of decentralization for privacy and Alfonso gave a talk on Polkadot’s governance mechanism at a Web3 meetup at the end of October.
• Fabio worked on the Polkadot Runtime Environment API testing. This is an automated test to execute a custom wasm runtime and call the API to verify its behaviour and output.
• Fabio has been testing node communication and how they send and receive data.
• The Bridge RFP for our BTC bridge has been decided. A group including two XClaim authors will be writing the bridge spec for Polkadot-BTC.
• The team addressed slashing compatibility with NPoS and its implementability issues.
• The Schnorrkel audit was successfully completed by the cyber-security firm NCC Group.
• The research team designed an ICMP solution for parathreads that is more feasible in terms of storage on the relay chain and started an ICMP write-up that will be coming soon. Stay tuned!

Technical Education

• New team member! Bruno joined us this month to work on the production of technical content. He is working on writing articles, as well as helping with the Polkadot Wiki.
• Bill wrote the initial draft for Polkadot’s learning resources hub which will be the central source for all Polkadot educational material. Bill also gave a governance talk early this month and an online webinar about Polkadot’s consensus algorithms last week, and a colloquium on the topic at the University of Pittsburgh.
• Logan worked on the injection tool for both Ethereum and Kusama. Logan will also give two workshops in London next month on Kusama.
• Anson integrated Crowdin into the Polkadot Wiki for managing the translation, along with leading translation efforts of the wiki into Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Furthermore, Anson will give a Substrate workshop this Saturday at Shenzhen University.
• The team has updated various sections of the Polkadot Wiki to align with the current Polkadot development progress. Likewise, they also have started to work on the MOOC technical education materials plan.

DevOps

• New team member! Pantelis Ampatzoglou joined us last week to work with Federico on the infrastructure team.
• Federico has been working on the infrastructure for Kusama CC2 and monitoring tooling for the network.