Hello everyone. This is Sota, founder of Astar Network and Shiden Network. it’s been a while since I published the last weekly update. Recently, I have been busy working on various things such as making our strategy, hiring, and fundraising. Our development has been good so far and we are doing our best now to stabilize the Shiden Network and introduce new features.
PoS will be ready very soon
Shiden Network is going to be a PoS network very soon. PoS is different from Nominated Proof of Stake. Currently, introducing NPoS on a Parachain is not possible because of this known issue. That’s why some of other Kusama Parachains are not ready for NPoS. Once this issue is resolved by Parity and ecosystem projects, we will officially switch from PoS to NPoS.
At this very moment, Shiden’s Testnet is running as a PoS network. We will monitor the network for a few days and we will upgrade our mainnet from PoA to PoS this week.
Ethereum Bridge
As Phase3–4, Ethereum bridge is added. We will use ChainSafe’s Ethereum bridge to bring Ethereum assets including ERC20 and ERC721 to Shiden Network ecosystem. We have already complited the first PoC (EVM<>Substrate bridge). In this month, we will connect Ethereum’s testnet and Dusty testnet.
OnFinality Joins Builders Program
OnFinality, Astar’s infrastructure partner
OnFinality, a leading blockchain IaaS (infrastructure as a service) platform, is providing a reliable and scalable infrastructure to Astar. The Astar community can now build applications on high-performance RPC archive nodes in the Shiden Network (and future Astar Network) for free.
This service is currently online and can be connected to via these endpoints;
- https://shiden.api.onfinality.io/public
- wss://shiden.api.onfinality.io/public-ws
Covalent’s Proposal Has Been Approved
Covalent API - builders program application
Covalent submitted a Builders Program application to implement Covalent API for the Astar ecosystem. And, the proposal was approved by the core team and ambassadors this week. Developers who use the Covalent API to access all endpoints to pull all on-chain data to a level that is done similarly to other blockchains that Covalent has engaged with to date.
Other Technical Updates
- Created dusty node repo on Docker Hub https://hub.docker.com/r/staketechnologies/dusty-node
- Added block reward pallet and PoS pallet for Shiden. Upgrade Shiden runtime https://github.com/PlasmNetwork/Astar/pull/373
- Refactored Lockdrop UI to remove Dusty page and improve code structure https://github.com/PlasmNetwork/lockdrop-ui/pull/170
- Updated Astar repository readme file https://github.com/PlasmNetwork/Astar/pull/372
- Started drafting Astar runtime development (versioning) guideline and release strategy.
- Started development for Ethereum bridge forms, Substrate bridge pallet implementation for dusty, and plans for PolygonScan explorer on Dusty EVM
- Astar Portal ECDSA MetaMask account support implementation has been started and it is under an audit.
About Astar
Astar Network is a dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum, WebAssembly, and layer 2 solutions like ZK Rollups. Astar aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform that will support multiple blockchains and virtual machines.
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Weekly Update #21 was originally published in Astar Network (Previously Plasm) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
