It’s been a year since we started sharing monthly updates with our community! In line with this milestone, we will begin this month’s edition by sharing some news about important updates and announcements. To start, we announced the launch of our official Whitepapper. The official Gear Whitepaper will be helpful for developers as it breaks down: the technology behind the Gear Protocol; Gear’s Architecture; the components of the Gear Protocol; how Gear differs from other dApp development networks.
We announced the integration with Subsquid, Bounce Finance, RMRK and Polkassembly.
Along with these integrations we hosted an AMA with Subsquid, our CEO and Founder Nikolay Volf was taking part in RMRK’s Roundtable on Twitter Spaces and talked about Gear, building with WASM and NFTs. On the 6th of September we will be hosting an AMA with Polkassembly and we are waiting for you to join our Twitter Spaces.
This month we reached 20k followers on Twitter, a big milestone! We participated in several AMAs hosted by Crypto Talkz, UCW, Polkadotters, Hola Metaverso, PolkadotEspañol, Geek Chat! We also took part in a live talk hosted by Research DAO and discussed new public blockchains and their possible future development. Also our Chief Ecosystem Officer Pavel Salas was invited for an interview with The Bad Crypto Podcast.
We organized and participated in some in-person and online events like the Gear workshop in Mexico, Workshop for Chinese Community, Meetup in Mexico, First meetup in Dali, China. Polkadoxxed Meetup, Substrate Saturday and published some educational articles about NFTs and their use cases and NFT marketplaces and the story behind them. More events are waiting for you next month!
We would also like to share some news and technical developmental updates to bring our core demographic up to speed with the latest improvements.
In August, we introduced support for multiple runtimes. This PR provides the support for multiple runtimes which presents the opportunity of having several chains with similar underlying mechanics but possibly different in some particular details (think of Polkadot vs. Kusama vs. Westend vs. Rococo etc.). For instance, there can be a standalone chain with PoS consensus and staking, whereas another chain can implement necessary machinery to be plugged into a relay chain and act as a parachain within the Polkadot ecosystem, thus providing access to our computing engine for other network participants by means of the XCM system. These runtimes co-exist all together within the same source code tree so that pallets can be shared between them eliminating the need to maintain separate branches for different chains.
We introduced a new extrinsic create_program inside pallet_gear. This update makes it possible to create a program from already existing code, the specific usages of this extrinsic. We also removed pages compared after execution. Now in lazy pages mode we upload page data to the storage. Old logic was comparing pages data before and after execution and uploading data if it has been changed. So, now in lazy pages mode, comparison is removed. We implemented the inheritance of the exited program balance by adding a new program status (Exited) with inheritor id. We also corrected the error replies’ lifecycle. Now, there is no need to store error replies in the mailbox, so this PR removed this possibility.
Now, moving on to news from our ecosystem, we implemented the NFT pixelboard code example, an NFT marketplace where NFTs are blocks of pixels on a canvas stored on a blockchain. The idea for this smart contract was inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage, but here NFTs can be colored at any time, not just at the time of a purchase and resold.
We all know how to play rock–paper-scissors, right? So we implemented the logic of a rock-paper-scissors game and made it a smart contract code example. We also made an initial release of an example of the escrow smart contract. Traditionally, escrow is a special account in which some assets (e.g. money or stocks) are deposited and stored until certain conditions are met. In terms of smart contracts, escrow is performed by a wallet that is stored on a blockchain and, like traditional 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. Check out our video tutorial here.
We also made an initial release of an example of the supply chain smart contract. A supply chain is a system for tracking and delivering to an end consumer various items. As a rule, such systems can’t work without a lot of paperwork and other layers of bureaucracy. All of this costs a lot of time and money and increases the likelihood of an accidental error or, worst of all, the potential for fraud. With the help of smart contract and blockchain technologies, it’s possible to eliminate these problems by making the supply chain more efficient, reliable and transparent.
To stay up to date with the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Telegram or just go to our website gear-tech.io.
