As we enter August, it’s time to look back and reflect on everything that we have achieved in the month of July. As usual we will start with our latest updates surrounding our technical developments.
Core updates:
Now we have a mechanism to do some planned actions on a specific block. For example, wake message at block “N” or pause program at block “M”. This will be used for rent charging and implementing time-locking primitives inside the programs. We also have an understanding of what will happen at specific blocks and can suppose the whole lifecycle of a particular message. For now it implements only waitlist logic but new features are just around the corner!
Mailbox interaction logic has also been updated. Please check the pull request details to find an explanation of various scenarios of new logic. Also, the rent charged from the message while staying in the mailbox has been fixed.
Among the tooling updates we made some changes to the gtest library. Now gtest allows dealing with actors’ balances. During developing dApps, it is possible to mint value to users and programs, send it between them, and check the resulting balances. This helps to efficiently debug programs that transfer tokens between actors. Also, another update in gtest library enables catching panics or other errors when calling the program’s meta_state function. Now the gtest::Program::meta_state function returns either metadata collected from the program’s state or error details in case of failure. Refer to the docs to find a more detailed error description.
The other technical updates are related to the ecosystem and they are the following:
We implemented On-Chain NFTs. Instead of storing the content of an NFT somewhere else (e.g. a distributed file system like IPFS), it is stored directly in the contract on the blockchain. Every time an NFT is queried, the user gets its content (all the layers) instead of the link. If you find it interesting you can read more information about that on our Wiki.
We made an initial release of an example of the escrow smart contract. An escrow is a special wallet to which some assets (e.g. money or stocks) are deposited and stored until certain conditions are met. In terms of smart contracts, an escrow is a wallet that is stored on a blockchain and, like the regular escrow, can receive some assets (e.g. a cryptocurrency or fungible tokens) from one user and, when certain conditions are met, send them to another. If you want to learn more about Escrow and test it feel free to check our Wiki and GitHub. Soon we will be posting a video tutorial on how to use this example!
We also introduced an example of a DEX (decentralized exchange) as a pair of smart contracts. The first one creates and handles different trading pairs, where the second one is the actual pair performing trades (or swaps). This contract is based on Uniswap-V2, and implements some basic functionality (e.g. adding/removing liquidity, swaps).
Regarding community development, the month of July started with two meetups in different parts of the world, with a meetup in Buenos Aires and a meetup in Hangzhou. It is important to highlight that both of them were held in these locations for the very first time! As you already may notice, our meetups in Mexico are now held on a monthly basis at the Bitcoin Embassy Bar, which means that it’s time to see you again very soon! Come and join us at the next event, and let’s talk about smart contracts, the Gear protocol and blockchain technology in general!
We also participated in various AMAs in collaboration with Darwinia, Crypto MeLon, CryptoPanda, Crypto Solution, Crypto Wolf and Crypto Arena. Our Chief Ecosystem Officer Pavel Salas took part in our first-ever AMA in Spanish! The event took place at Bitcoin Embassy Bar (Mexico city) and was hosted by its CEO Lorena Ortiz. The AMA was also live-streamed on Twitter Spaces! If you speak Spanish and you missed it, then don’t worry. We are soon going to be taking part in another one organized by Polkadot Español, which will be held on the 4th of August!
We attended a Twitter Space event where we discussed what went down during one of the latest Polkadot Hackathon! After introducing the Gear Protocol to the listeners, we discussed some of the outstanding projects from the Hackathon before the teams themselves joined and shared their thoughts and insights on their Hackathon journeys.
We were incredibly delighted to participate in the Web3 Bootcamp Twitter Space event with multiple other promising projects. During the event, we introduced the Gear Protocol and its unique technologies, as well as its growing ecosystem, to the participants before discussing some of the more intricate details of the Polkadot ecosystem with the rest of the hosts.
We also organized various workshops. Among them was the workshop at the Universidad Politécnica del Valle de México, workshop in China “Codingday”, workshop for the Chinese community: “Develop your own NFT Marketplace” and the workshop at ICEL University. At these events, we provided a brief overview of the Gear Protocol, showcasing some of Gear’s key technologies and we even presented a demonstration on smart contracts too. The events turned out great! Thanks to everyone who attended, and we hope to see you soon!
Gear participated in the Polkadot Community Call last week, where our Chief Ecosystem Officer Pavel Salas and our Head of Business Development Dave Bean spoke about the Gear protocol! They presented the latest major updates, gave a brief introduction to our key-features for those who are unfamiliar with how the platform works and also spoke about Gear’s plans for future partnerships. We would like to say thank you to all the listeners who joined the Polkadot Community call and also we would like to thank Parity Tech for inviting us, we are looking forward to much more!
Among these events we also participated at the BlockchainBattle where we discussed potential future possibilities regarding technical innovation from within the Polkadot ecosystem and we were sponsoring Blockchain karaoke night. The karaoke event was the perfect opportunity to connect and make friends with like-minded individuals from within the ecosystem and it was surprisingly nice to get away from the tech for once!
To stay up to date with the latest news surrounding our events, follow us on Twitter or just go to our website gear-tech.io which, by the way, now has a new design!
