New learning material 📚| Polkadot Hackathon Announced 🏗️| Sub0 videos published 📺
The Substrate and Polkadot community has wrapped up 2022 with its traditional yearly round-up highlighting some of the major milestones since parachains launched on Polkadot just over a year ago. Building on the excellent work this community has accomplished over the past year, 2023 will no doubt see a prosperous wave of innovation in creating value for users of the decentralized web and empowering builders. As the Zulu term “Ubuntu” roughly translates to:
“I am because we are.”
This edition of the Substrate newsletter kicks off the new year with more comprehensive updates from the Substrate and Polkadot ecosystem. If you’re looking to learn about existing parachain builder platforms, keep reading the following sections. If you’re looking for core development updates to Substrate and Polkadot, including tooling developed by Parity Technologies, skip to the Technical Updates section.
⭐TL;DR and important announcements
- The second wave of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy has kicked off at the University of Buenos Aires, where over 100 developers have gathered to start a month-long program covering the conceptual underpinnings and the hands-on application of blockchain technology.
- Check out new technical learning material from ecosystem builders, including SubSquid, ink! boxes, Manta Network, and Astar
- Apply to the Polkadot Hackathon Global series: Europe Edition (January 25 - February 17)
- New tutorials released on Sidecar and FRAME pallet building in the official Substrate Developer hub
- New features added to FRAME and bug fixes in latest tooling releases by Parity Technologies
🔦 Community highlights
- Sub0 video recordings are published, check them out in this playlist on the Polkadot Youtube channel.
- Videos from DOTBrno are going to be released periodically. Check out KodaDot’s talk presenting the unified NFT developer experience on Polkadot here.
- Polkaholic is leading an initiative for builders to contribute to an XCM global asset registry, solving the problem of having a multitude of different local representations of assets among parachains. If you’re a parachain developer, submit a PR to this repo to help curate the registry.
- SubWork, a co-working space for Substrate builders on the foothills of the Julian Alps in Bled, Slovenia is officially open!
Ecosystem builders
- Check out ink! boxes, a collection of helpful ink! smart contracts boilerplates. Make a PR to this repo to add a box to share with the community.
- With their new website launched, Astar introduced a Starmap to follow 2023 developer updates. Read Astar’s 2022 Recap + Building into 2023 for all major upcoming updates and be sure to check out their recently released XVM SDK Public Testnet – the dev team explains the code in this blog post.
- Subsquid published Building a blockchain data ingestion service (Part 2), outlining their approach to indexing and archiving. Be sure to also check out the kick-off of their full course on Blockchain Indexing here.
- Learn about Societal, a DAO tooling platform built with Substrate, in this interview with the team’s engineers.
- InvArch launched the On-chain Innovation Funding protocol, providing a suite of tools to build custom governance protocols, organization and funding mechanisms for dapps on their network.
- Manta Network summarized their first OpenZL conference in this Twitter thread, featuring videos of each of the talks, including one from Web3 Foundation’s applied cryptographer Jeff Burdges. OpenZL is a new middleware platform leveraging an embedded DSL that lets developers build circuits in a proof-system-agnostic way without sacrificing performance and modularity.
Working on something you’d like to share here? This newsletter is open for contributions – make a PR to the next edition of the newsletter.
Polkadot Forum Digest
In case you’ve missed some of the discussions happening in the Polkadot Forum:
Learning
Some new learning material is out, with the launch of Polkadot Deep Dives and other gems on the Substrate documentation website:
- Two new tutorials have been released on the official Substrate documentation hub: the “Collectibles workshop” tutorial teaches you how to build a blockchain that manages digital collectibles, while the “Sidecar tutorial” helps you explore Sidecar’s REST API for interacting with Substrate chains using Postman
- The first Polkadot Deep Dives is out, covering everything you need to know about the Balances pallet. Polkadot Deep Dives is a new series led by engineers at Parity diving into all things FRAME and XCM.
- Looking to make a treasury proposal but not sure where to start? Check out this guide in the Polkadot forum that provides clear guidelines for structuring a proposal.
- Create an ink! smart contract that controls ERC20, ERC721, and more assets with ink! XVM SDK.
- Principal Developer Relations Engineer at Parity, Kirk Haines shares how to approach a sorting algorithm programming problem in Rust. Learn with him in this blog post: “Peeking into Rust”.
- Dive into a two part blog post (part 1 and part 2) on a practical guide to Rust programming by Ben Greenberg, Senior Developer Relations Engineer at Parity.
- Learn what this month’s hottest questions are on the Substrate and Polkadot stack exchange.
As always, a reminder to propose or request a topic you’d like to see on Substrate Seminar.📺
📆 Upcoming events
☕️ Technical updates
New features added to FRAME, weight constants are now u64, a new RPC server was merged and the try-runtime CLI has been updated to provide more flexibility.
FRAME
- A new trait called StreamIter (see Rust docs) was added to the FRAME storage API, (currently only implemented for StorageValue) which ensures constant memory usage over the iterator’s lifetime when decoding a storage value. This can be used for decoding large data, such as events in an off-chain worker (#12721).
- A whole new family of ensure operations have been added to Substrate’s primitive traits for doing safe arithmetic in a node’s runtime (#12967). This reduces the code boilerplate, improving readability, and returns the correct
ArithmeticError type instead of an Option.
- Pallet calls now have explicit ordering by default (#12891), and a warning is emitted if calls do not have this attribute declared (#12894). Ordering calls is important as governance voting happens on a
(pallet, call) pair and having explicit indices will make it harder to accidentally change them.
- Weight constants have changed type
Weight to u64 (#12868) making them more sensible for keeping units of time.
- In
pallet-assets, builders can now simply call asset_exists to check if an asset exists (#12782).
General
- The types of try-runtime checks with
on-runtime-upgrade are now selectable, accepting all, none, pre-and-post and try-state which enables more flexible and faster testing, instead of always needing to run all checks which typically can be very time consuming (#13045).
- A new RPC server was added which supports both WS an HTTPS on the same socket (#12663).
👀 Releases
Go to Polkadiff for a full list of merged PRs into Substrate, Polkadot and Cumulus since the last Polkadot release and be sure to read the Polkadot Release Analysis of v0.9.36 on the Polkadot forum. In this section, we go over updates from various core tools developed by Parity for the ecosystem.
Sidecar is a REST service that makes it easy to interact with blockchain nodes built using Substrate’s FRAME framework.
- Bug fixes including using the local version of wasm-pack, avoiding the use of the transaction payment RPC in favor of the runtime API, sets RPC to call for
queryInfo in transaction/fee-estimate.
Tx-wrapper (v4.1.0) 🍬
Tx-wrapper provides tools for FRAME chain builders to publish chain specific offline transaction generation libraries.
- Updates include updating the new transaction names (
createPure and killPure) from Polkadot releases > 9.30.
Zombienet is a CLI tool to easily spawn ephemeral parachain networks and perform tests against them.
- Updates include improved logs, error decorations and CLI user experience.
📰 Substrate jobs
Have a look at all the open roles in the ecosystem on the Substrate Job Board.
Got ideas for content you’d like to see in future newsletters? Make a PR to the next edition here – we’d love to include them. ❤️
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