Gavin Wood: Polkadot 2019 Year in Review
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This article is Gavin Wood's annual review of Polkadot, current progress, and plans for the next 12 months.
introduction
introductionPolkadotThe ecological project has more than 300,000 lines of code! This is three times what was done last year (note that it contains neither the user interface nor the smart contract codebase). A total of 121 people completed these lines of code, nearly half of whom, in addition to Parity employees, were community contributors. The code added nearly 3,000 individual donations, which more than doubled last year. Now, nearly 1,000 people in the Substrate English chat room and the Substrate community have answered many questions about Polkadot, Substrate, and Parachain development.
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Team and Community
Although the Polkadot ecosystem is born with its own aura, it started with some accomplished teams and individuals, but this does not mean that the development of the team will stop here. There have been some very obvious leaps in the past year. Chronicled, a supply chain startup located outside of San Francisco, announced that it will upgrade its Mediledger Network from Parity Ethereum to Substrate, and its ultimate goal is to use Polkadot to interconnect various supply chain networks and achieve distributed, integrated supply chain data system.
About a month ago, Polymath (a comprehensive blockchain-based securities platform) announced that they had been quietly building their new platform, Polymesh, on Substrate for the past nine months. In the announcement, they analyzed many factors in detail, identified Substrate as the best solution, and studied various options. “There were many variables involved in the decision process, involving technology, roadmap, product fit, and community aspects.” In the end, Substrate was chosen because they found many factors that other frameworks could not deliver, including the modular framework used to compose (“Frame "). Business logic, forkless upgradability, governance and overall community. On behalf of the community, thank you for the outcries of support 😉
The Shift Project, a decentralized cloud hosting service based on IPFS sharding, recently announced that after weeks of research on various existing modular kernels, they decided to move to the Substrate/Polkadot implementation. These three key factors include Substrate's hybrid consensus, cutting-edge staking system, and off-chain work framework.
Blockchain.com, the well-known Bitcoin (and now mainstream currency) wallet/block explorer, announced plans to build Polkadot token and governance support earlier this year. "More than 41 million wallets will not only be able to store, send and receive DOT, but also drive the governance of the network by voting on key issues such as proposed amendments to the network protocol and council members." As Polkadot emphasizes solid governance mechanism, so such integration is critical to ensure good full node inclusion.
I have held a number of online/offline seminars and other activities around the world, covering topics such as verification mechanisms, Polkadot basics, Kusama, node addresses, security, and Substrate. In these activities, I have witnessed a lot of helping professors Excellent work on Substrate; among others I'll give a special call to the Plasm team in Tokyo, as I was lucky enough to attend a great workshop on the topic of Substrate. At the same time, they also announced the release of their testnet, which is one of the most exciting projects in the Polkadot field, and I look forward to trying it out when I have time.
We have seen a lot of very interesting technologies, not only the Web3 Grant program, but one of the most impressive things about the Polkadot (and Kusama) community is the great energy and productivity of the community contributors. Although there are too many projects to discuss all of them (such as Centrifuge, Laminar, Acala, KILT, Nodle, MXC, Celer, OAX, Katal, imToken), I will specifically mention Polkascan, the more visual It keeps getting better - thanks Emiel for being so attentive to my exploration needs. Polkastats, a great resource for 'spinach' in Kusama, recently released version 2.0 of their website, and it looks great. Chevdor, the longtime dot tokenizer, recently released srtool, a method for efficient deterministic builds of the Polkadot Runtime, which is very helpful for validating Runtime upgrades. Subsocial (a general purpose social networking tool based on Substrate and IPFS) looks great. There are some ideas for Kusama (and perhaps Polkadot) governance platforms. I think this is exactly what we want to see, continued support for Polkadot and Kusama in 2020.
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Organization and Sales
Earlier this year, we completed some private placements and sold a little over 5% of the DOT. There are many global contributors, including companies like Innogy (who also expressed their willingness to run validators on the mainnet in the statement), as well as venture capital firm Placeholder Capital, which regards governance as the first, and several community teams. The last batch of DOTs to be deployed by the Web3 Foundation has been earmarked for the public sale, Kusama Staking rewards, and long-term ecosystem incentives, including future core developers and community builders who have not yet been paid.
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development in progress
The Polkadot Ecosystem Fund (Polkadot Ecosystem Fund) was established with Polychain Capital, and we are very happy to see it gain a firm foothold under the support of other large funds in the ecosystem. Polkadot Incubator (Polkadot Incubator) was launched by Longhash in Singapore. Several teams have joined the project, and more teams will follow up. Moreover, the Web3 Foundation has joined the Proof-of-Stake Alliance (POS Alliance) on behalf of Polkadot Protocol.
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global activities
The second Web3 Summit was also held in Berlin, bringing together more than 1,200 attendees to discuss all issues related to the decentralized web. Thanks to Edward Snowden (Edward Snowden) for taking time out of his busy schedule to convey his views on identity proof for us in the video conference. He said that ubiquitous identification is dangerous because it will force many of our social activities to be linked to personal identity, not "if you have money", but "if you have identity"
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Polkadot Kusama network released
At the time of writing, it is maintained by 130 staking validator nodes from around the world, including fifty or so professional validator operations, and future on-chain development is deliberated by an elected parliament in a public chat room and approved through a transparent stakeholder referendum for approval. This is open on-chain governance, which is currently being advanced.
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Substrate2.0 launched
Substrate version 2.0 is coming soon, this version includes a variety of cool upgrades, including
Numerous plug-and-play modules for on-chain governance;
Run-Ahead, Runtime Complier compiler, even if your Substrate node is an old version, they can run at close to full speed;
Fast-Forward, a hybrid consensus algorithm, under network operating conditions, other traditional algorithms (such as PBFT/Tendermint) will stagnate, but we still allow us to complete tens of thousands of blocks at once;
Hand-Off, an emerging technology, can easily pair on-chain and off-chain logic, allowing chains to distribute arbitrary, non-deterministic work across the network, and even update workloads when on-chain updates are made.
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Compatibility and Bridging
In addition to the compatibility with EVM, the smart contract language (codenamed Fleetwood) we tried to develop last year has also evolved into ink! language, now at version 2.0, which looks very concise and easy to grasp. Based on Rust, your smart contracts will benefit from its extensive compilation correctness guarantees as well as its world-class package management, documentation system and testing framework. As a core product of Parity and an important part of Polkadot's future, our smart contract toolset will be doubled in the next year, adding documentation, optimizations (such as a streaming AOT compiler for native speed smart contracts) and interoperability foundation Architecture, especially interoperability with the Substrate Runtime and the broader Polkadot ecosystem.
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project
Significant progress has been made on key projects and important components across the ecosystem. Parity Signer, a software that lets you turn your unused smartphone into a cold wallet device with space left, is now compatible with Polkadot and Kusama. It supports scalable HD key generation, making it very easy to manage all accounts. It also works perfectly with the Polkadot web application and the Polkadot Chrome and Firefox plugins.
Other hardware wallets are also optional. Ledger support for Polkadot is now available, and it will connect directly to the Polkadot web application. Bipai and Wookong are also developing hardware wallets that support Polkadot encryption.
Speaking of which, the pace at which Polkadot web applications are evolving is mind-blowing. It offers a beautiful, craftsman-inspired wallet with excellent key management and key organization features, and full support for Polkadot's complex fee and locking mechanisms. It provides excellent feedback on all on-chain activity and notifies you of important events like chain upgrades or democratic referendums. Polkadot's staking functionality is fully supported, and support for various other Polkadot modules such as governance and identity is growing.
Polkadot Telemetry has been moved to a high-performance Rust backend, enabling it to support hundreds of nodes across the network, all providing real-time updates.
Substrate smart contracts have become increasingly mature, with many features implemented and code refined over the past 12 months.
Our Fast-Forward hybrid consensus system is complete. It is a combination of the Grandpa Finality Algorithm and the Babe Block Generation Algorithm, the former being able to complete millions of blocks instantaneously across thousands of validators, and the latter keeping the chain up and running even during severe network outages. This combination allows us to provide a high level of security for each of our Parachain shards while continuously adapting to network conditions Real world testing on the Alexander test network and on the Kusama network Real-time usage has confirmed its excellent performance even with a large number of validators.
mid-year, during a trip to shanghai, the idea for "parathreads" was born. Parathread is Polkadot's technical name for shards that are not scheduled (i.e., have transactions executed) in each block. They allow projects to enter the Polkadot ecosystem efficiently and at a fixed and cheap price. Each chain can then schedule its own time on a pay-as-you-go basis, processing blocks more frequently when needed and pausing activity when there is less work to do. This provides a more flexible economic model for project teams to conduct heavy task slot auctions.
Critical parts of auditing and launching Polkadot were completed during the year. The initial implementation of the sharding device is complete, supporting both continuously and sporadically scheduled shards (referred to as parachains and parathreads in the code, respectively). In addition, the "Slot Auctions" module and the "Crowdfunding" module have also been completed. These allow teams to permissionlessly acquire a portion of Polkadot with the help of trustless fixed deposits provided by public DOT holders. They will all be rolled out to Kusama in 2020.
We've completed two reviews of the codebase and design, both with positive results. We have now begun our final round of external review. The reviewers come from three separate, well-respected teams who will examine different places in the code, and a team that will do penetration testing of our code, trying to find bugs in our protocol. The results of the final round of reviews are expected in 2020.
The final parts of the Polkadot protocol are already under intense development. We are currently prioritizing the underlying networking issues as this is critical to the success of sharding. We successfully demonstrated Cumulus at Sub0.1, the second Substrate developer conference in Berlin, which will allow Substrate chains to be bridged to Polkadot as a "Parachain". We expect to release the first official version of the project in early 2020.
After we released Parathreads in November, the cross-chain messaging system XCMP has also been developed, please wait for the good news.
All in all, if Polkadot is compared to a house, then 2018 is the year of laying the foundation and building the structure, 2019 is the year of hard decoration, and 2020 is the year of soft decoration. And the work in 2020 will be finished soon. This means that the debut of Polkadot will be accompanied by a series of mature functions, including governance, parachain, slot auction, parathreads, XCMP and Spree.
We will always focus on optimization, and it is expected that by the end of the year, the TPS of each Substrate-based shard will reach a level worthy of Parity Ethereum. In addition to CPU and I/O, we will also work on optimizing the network layer, from the lowest level of 'chaotic' systems to more complex systems, which will require more parachains and we hope to see parathreads deployed on the main online.
On the research side, I expect the main feature of Polkadot 2.0 to be parachain composability with exponential scalability. Polkadot 2.0 is designed to provide support for up to three layers of parachains, with a theoretical limit of one million parachains, each running in full parallel. Needless to say, this will enable an incredible amount of verificationless, interoperable transaction capabilities
That's all I want to say, I wish you all a happy new year and a happy holiday.http://www.mimajike.com/
