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Gavin Wood's handwriting: poka's 2019 annual summary

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If 2018 was the year we laid the foundations for our new Polkadot house, 2019 is the year most of its structure was built. I don't think it will take a long time to finish the interior of the house and finally use it in 2020

Gavin Wood's handwriting: a summary of boca 2019

Gavin Wood is the founder of Polkadot

Source: PolkaWorld

Yes, it's the end of 2019; This is an annual review not only of what we have achieved and where we are now, but also of what we plan to do in the next 12 months.

I started last year's end-of-year review with some data, and this year seems like a good time to continue the tradition by reporting some of this year's data. Overall, Polkadot, including Substrate, Grandpa, Cumulus, and some other supporting code, has over 300,000 lines of code! That's three times the amount of code completed last year, and that's before you even count the code in the UI and the smart contract code base. A total of 121 people worked on the code, about half of them Parity employees and half of them community members. Fewer than 3,000 people contributed to the increase, more than double the number at the end of last year. Currently, there are close to 1000 people in the English edition Substrate technology chat room, where the Substrate community has answered many, many questions about Polkadot, Substrate, and parallel chain development.

Team and community

Initially, Polkadot's ecosystem was full of high-achieving teams, but this past year has seen some notable migration teams emerge.

Chronicled, a supply chain startup operating out of San Francisco, announced an upgrade of its Mediledger Network from Parity Ethereum to Substrate, with the ultimate goal of using Polkadot to interconnect various supply chain networks and achieve a decentralized, integrated supply chain data system.

About a month ago, Polymath, a blockchain-based platform for integrated token securities, announced that it had been quietly building a new Polymesh platform on the Substrate for the past nine months. They also covered some of the details, including why they concluded that Substrate was the best solution after investigating a number of alternatives. "There are a lot of variables in the process of making this decision, such as technology, roadmap, product positioning and community level." Ultimately, the Substrate was selected because it had a number of factors that no other framework could, including a modular framework for building business logic, bifurcation-free upgradability, governance, and the entire community. On behalf of the community, I thank you for your high profile. -)

The Shift Project, a decentralized Shared cloud hosting service based on IPFS, recently announced that they would migrate their implementation to Substrate/Polkadot "after several weeks of research into the various modular kernels currently available." They do so for three key reasons: the Substrate has a mixed consensus, a leading-edge equity system, and an off-chain worker framework.

Blockchain.com, the famous bitcoin (now universal cryptocurrency) wallet/blockbrowser, announced earlier this year that it plans to support Polkadot tokens and governance in its toolset. "The blockchain has more than 41 million wallets that can not only store, send and receive DOT, but also promote network governance by voting on core issues that might be amendments to network protocols and members of parliament." Because Polkadot emphasizes consolidation of governance mechanisms, an integration process like this is important to ensure stakeholder engagement.

A number of online and face-to-face seminars have been held around the world on topics such as validation, Polkadot basics, Kusama, addresses, security, and Substrate. In various community activities, I have witnessed some excellent work that has contributed to the teaching of Substrate; I'd like to make a special call to the working group in Tokyo, who have given me the good fortune to attend a wonderful Substrate seminar. The same team recently announced the release of their final test network. This remains one of the most exciting projects in the Polkadot space, and I look forward to using it in my free time.

Our global ambassador program has attracted 111 people from 37 countries/territories, bringing together 3,700 members in various Polkadot/Substrate gathering organizations. After visiting 20 cities around the world (including three trips to China) and hosting 15 events with builders, media and influencers in San Francisco alone, 2019 is clearly an important year for Substrate in terms of global advocacy. In each city, we see a dynamic dynamic -- teams using Substrate and Polkadot to build new products. From awesome hardware wallets and DeFi products to clothes (thanks for the Goda hoodie :-), I've always been impressed by entrepreneurship. We will strive to provide a platform that lives up to these passions.

We see some very interesting technologies coming out of the Web3 Grant project or beyond. One of the most impressive things about the Polkadot (and Kusama) community is the energy and productivity of the volunteer contributors. Although wave card and there were too many projects in Kusama now, I can't mention here all projects (yes I say is you, Centrifuge, Laminar, Acala, KILT, Nodle, MXC, Celer, OAX, Katal, imToken!) , I'll mention Polkascan in particular, whose block browsers are getting better and better -- thanks to Emiel's focus on my search needs. Polkastats is a great source for Staking on Kusama, and recently released version 2.0 of its website, which looks great. Chevdor, a longtime holder of dot, recently released srtool, which is a way to effectively deterministic build the Polkadot runtime, which is useful for validating run-time upgrades. Subsocial, a general-purpose Substrate - and ipfs-based social networking tool, looks great. There are also ideas that can be applied to Kusama, Polkadot, and governance platforms. I think these are the things that we want to support more in 2020 with Polkadot and Kusama.

Organization and marketing

Parity has now grown into a team of more than 100 outstanding people, and the Web3 foundation is expanding to about 50. This year the teams have expanded some of our outstanding staff, such as Ximin (from Dfinity to W3F as a senior network researcher), Yaoqi (from Zilliqa CTO to Parity), and Christine (from ConsenSys to Parity and W3F to become our CMO). Our goal is not to grow for growth's sake, but our doors will continue to be open to the best minds both inside and outside the ecosystem.

Earlier this year, we completed some private sales, selling just over 5% of the trands DOT. There are a wide range of global contributors, including companies like Innogy (which also announced their intention to run verifier nodes on the network), governors-preferred VCS like Placeholder Capital, and several community groups. The Web3 foundation has earmarked the last batch of deployed DOT's for public offerings, Kusama holder rewards, and long-term ecosystem incentives, including future core developers and community builders who have not yet been compensated.

Establish ecological

The Web3 foundation has funded 62 projects established by 54 teams in 20 countries/territories. Some $4.4 million has been awarded (or is expected to arrive soon). This includes two grants for other implementations of the Polkadot runtime environment (PRE) and one grant for the full C ++ implementation.

We have established the Polkadot ecosystem fund with Polychain Capital, and we are pleased to see it among the other important funds in the ecosystem. We launched the Polkadot incubator in Singapore with Longhash, and already have several teams working on the project, with more to watch. Furthermore, the Web3 foundation has joined the certificate of interest alliance (POSA) on behalf of the Polkadot protocol.

The global activity

Throughout the year, many parties have been held around the world. A total of 22 teams participated in the Polkaworld hackathon competition in hangzhou, China. Sub0 and Sub0.1 were held in Berlin, where more than three hundred developers from around the world gathered for Substrate workshops, presentations, workshops, and networking. We hosted the Web3 Foundation ETHCC conference in Paris and the Web3 Foundation ecosystem sub-conference at the Consensus conference in New York.

The second Web3 summit was also held in Berlin, where more than 1,200 participants gathered to discuss everything related to the decentralization of the Web. Edward Snowden was kind enough to speak to us via a video link, in which he reiterated the dangers of providing universal proof of identity, making society increasingly a place of permission, not payment, but ID.

Poka Kusama network started

The Kusama network (KSM), known as the "canary" network because it was an early, unaudited (and possibly not entirely secure) version of Polkadot, was successfully launched as planned. This release really demonstrates the advantages of amorphous networks. Kusama started out as a Proof of Authority network run by the Web3 foundation, gradually opened up the collateral and governance, and became a decentralized and unlicensed cryptocurrency in early December. The network has been upgraded about two dozen times so far, the last two or three of which have added KayWhySee, our extensible federalized decentralized identity system, as well as new multi-signature, pseudonyms, and transaction batch capabilities. Many, many new upgrades are coming :-)

At the time of this writing, it is maintained by 130 mortgage verifier nodes from around the world, including around 50 professional verifier operations, future development on the chain is reviewed by an elected parliament in a public chat room and approved by a transparent holder referendum. This is open chain governance, which is happening right now.

2.0 start the Substrate

Substrate 2.0 is coming soon, and the final issue was resolved a few days ago. This release contains all the great features, specifically:

Many plug-and-play modules for on-chain governance;
Run-ahead: our Run compiler is able to Run up front, which means that even if your Substrate node is an older version, it can Run close to full speed.
Fast-forward: our hybrid consensus algorithm is capable of Fast Forward, even in network conditions that make other traditional algorithms (such as PBFT/Tendermint) stagnant, we can write blocks. We've written thousands of blocks so far;
KayWhySee: our extensible federated identity system;
Hand-off: a technique where we can easily match logic on and off the chain. It enables the chain to distribute arbitrary uncertainty work over the network, even updating the workload with updates on the chain.

Compatibility and bridging

We released a four-point plan to ensure long-term compatibility with ethereum, and received positive feedback. One of these has been duly fulfilled in a few weeks: the Substrate is now evm-compatible with ethereum, which means you can now run ethereum contracts directly on the Substrate chain! The development in the second element, the Parity POA ethereum bridging of the Substrate, is well under way and we expect to complete this early next year.

In addition to compatibility with EVM, the smart contract language we tried to develop last year, code-named Fleetwood, has morphed into ink! Language. The language, currently in 2.0, looks very clear and easy to grasp. Based on Rust, your smart contract will benefit from Rust's extensive correctness compilation guarantees and its world-class package management, documentation system, and testing framework. At the core of Parity products and Polkadot future an important part of our intelligent tool set the number of contract will double in the next year, and increase the document, optimization of smart contracts (such as for local speed a streaming AOT compiler) and interoperability infrastructure, especially for Substrate operation environment and interoperability between the Polkadot vast ecosystem.

project

Significant progress has been made in key ecosystem projects and components. Parity Signer, software that turns your unused smartphone into a cold wallet with an air gap, is now compatible with Polkadot and Kusama. It supports extensible HD key derivation, making it easy to manage all accounts. It also works perfectly with Polkadot web applications and the Polkadot Chrome and Firefox browser plug-ins.

There are other hardware wallets available. Ledger support for Polkadot is now available and will be directly connected to Polkadot network applications. Bepal and Wookong are also developing new hardware wallets that support Polkadot encryption.

Polkadot web applications are evolving at a dizzying pace. It provides a beautiful, complete user experience. As a great wallet, it has excellent key management and key organization capabilities, and fully supports Polkadot's complex cost and locking mechanisms. It provides timely feedback for all activities on the chain and notifies users when important events such as chain upgrades or democratic referendums occur. It fully supports Polkadot's pledge functionality, and support for other Polkadot modules, such as governance and authentication, is growing.

Polkadot Telemetry has moved to a high-performance Rust backend, enabling it to support hundreds of nodes across the network, all of which provide real-time updates. Substrate intelligent contracts have become increasingly sophisticated, implementing many functions and refining the code over the past 12 months.

Our fast-forward hybrid consensus system is complete. It combines the finalized Grandpa finality algorithm, which can instantly complete millions of blocks in thousands of verifier nodes, with the Babe block generation algorithm, which can keep the chain running even in the case of severe network outages. This combination allows us to continuously adapt to network conditions while providing an incredible level of security for each of our parallel chain slices. Alexander's real-world testing of the network and its real-time use in the Kusama network have proven that it consistently performs well, even with a large number of validators.

During a trip to Shanghai in the middle of this year, the idea of "parallel threads" was born. Parallel threads are the technical name for Polkadot's sharding, which is not scheduled to execute (that is, executed transactions) in each block. They provide efficient access to the Polkadot ecosystem at a fixed and low cost. The chain can then arrange its time on a pay-as-you-go basis, processing blocks more frequently when needed, and temporarily suspending activities when the workload is smaller. This provides the project team with a more flexible economic model for high-load parallel chain slot auctions.

Audit and release

A key part of Polkadot was completed this year. The sharding device, which supports continuous and sporadic sharding (known as parallel chains and parallel threads, respectively), has completed its preliminary implementation. In addition, the slot auction module and the crowdfunding module have also been completed. These enable the team to obtain Polkadot shards without permission, supported by untrusted time deposits from public DOT holders. Within the next year, all of this will be applied to the Kusama network.

Two reviews of the code base and design have been completed, with significant positive results. The final round of external reviews has already begun: three from three separate, respected teams, each covering different parts of the code base. And the fourth penetration testing team tried to find holes in our protocol. Final results are expected next year.

The final part of the Polkadot protocol is currently under development. The development of fundamental networks that are critical to support multiple sharding is leading the way. Cumulus was successfully demonstrated at sub0.1 of the 2nd Substrate developer conference in Berlin, which connected the Substrate chain to Polkadot as part of a "parallel chain" segment. We hope to release the first full version of the project early next year. In the development of XCMP, development of the cross-chain messaging system began after we released a revised design in November that allowed for parallel threads.

conclusion

If 2018 was the year we laid the foundations for our new Polkadot house, 2019 is the year most of its structure was built. I don't think it will take a long time to finish the interior of the house and finally use it in 2020. In practice, this means launching the Polkadot network and rolling out features in stages, including governance, parallel chains, slot auctions, parallel threads, XCMP, and Spree.

Optimization will be the focus of the team, with the goal of reaching TPS Parity-Ethereum levels on each Substrate - based segment by the end of the year. In addition to focusing on CPU and I/O, we will also work on optimizing the network layer from a "stupid" gossip-based system to a more complex system, which is necessary because we want to see more parallel chains and parallel threads deployed on the primary network.

In terms of research, I would like to see the final design of Polkadot 2.0, which is primarily characterized by composable parallel chains with power extensibility. Polkadot 2.0 is designed to support parallel chains of up to three layers, theoretically limited to a million parallel chains, each of which has been run in complete parallel. Taken together, this will result in an incredible number of trust-free, interoperable transactions.

That's my conclusion for 2019. Happy holidays and happy New Year!

Translation: Qinwen & KIKO & amp; Silvia
原文：https://medium.com/polkadot-network/polkadot-2019-year-in-review-8c852ef42668