Blog

Polkadot guarantees valid state transitions for its member parachains. Beneath the surface, an orchestra of nodes, from validators and collators to fishermen and full nodes, play their parts to deliver parachain blocks to the final Relay Chain.

We have learned that a phishing email with the subject line: “1% DOT allocation for KSMs stakeholders” is being circulated from a fraudulent version of the Polkadot.JS domain. Do not respond to this email; it was not sent from the Web3 Foundation nor from our Kusama or Polkadot accounts.

This development update is part of our work that provides the Polkadot-ecosystem with an enriched Substrate Interface (API) for any Substrate-based blockchain with full decoding context of the chain’s respective runtime.

Details Runtime version: 1037 Supported natively by Polkadot v0.7.17 Polkadot Git commit hash: f570356 Substrate Git commit hash: 860b79b Council motion: #85

A little chaos ensued on the Kusama network, Polkadot’s canary-net. Here’s a quick summary of the cause and solution.

I started the last year-end round-up with some statistics, and it seems fitting to continue the trend and report some numbers from this year. In total, the Polkadot project, including Substrate, Grandpa, Cumulus and a few bits of support code, has over three hundred thousand lines of code!

Kusama is about to get a new logic core; here’s the details.

To close out the year, we asked colleagues across the Polkadot Launch Team to reflect on their work in 2019 and discuss what part of their work they’re most looking forward to in 2020. We’re excited to share their answers (some serious and some light-hearted!) with you below.

So far, we have discussed how BABE creates blockchain candidates and GRANDPA finalizes them. We know that we need more than two-thirds of validators to properly follow the protocol. But how many validators are there? How are they chosen? Why should they follow the rules?

Blind Assignment for Blockchain Extension (BABE) is a block production engine that was inspired by Ouroboros Praos, another proof-of-stake protocol. It can be used on its own because it provides probabilistic finality, or it can be coupled with a finality gadget like GRANDPA.

In the introduction to this series, I outlined that a consensus algorithm helps a network of computers answer three questions. GRANDPA addresses the second.

This series will be a discussion about security and consensus in Polkadot. In part 1, we will define some terms before getting into the details of how Polkadot creates and secures blocks.