Gear Monthly Updates: November 2022
The year is almost over and we are here to share our monthly updates from November! This month was quite busy in terms of the events for our community as there were many going on. We believe that such events will help you to gain a better understanding about the Gear Protocol and its tech stack, while also providing you with a better understanding of Web3 technology in general. So without further ado, let’s dive in.
Starting with a short review of the conferences that we participated in last month, we attended WebSummit in Lisbon, Polkadot Summit in San Francisco and Polkadot World in Madrid. WebSummit brought together around 70,000 people and the companies that are on the cutting-edge of the tech industry. Its history goes back to 2009 starting in Ireland, then in 2016 it permanently moved to Lisbon, where it is now one of the biggest technical conferences in Europe! What’s super exciting was that our CEO and Founder Nikolay Volf was taking part in various panel discussions there!
Polkadot Summit took place in the USA and its main purpose was to present Polkadot Ecosystem Developments to the SF Blockchain Week attendees. Astar Network was coordinating the production of the Polkadot Summit and hosted top Parachain teams, such as the core Parity team members and Polkadot parachain infrastructure providers. This event hosted 400 people including academics, developers, VCs, students, enterprises, retail investors and blockchain aficionados. Our Head of Business Development presented Gear at the conference.
Another big event — Polkadot World, took place at the capital of Spain. It was a 2-day event suitable for all levels of blockchain knowledge! It enabled the Polkadot community to connect, network, explore collaboration opportunities and learn from each other. For newcomers to Polkadot, this provided an opportunity to learn more about the cutting edge technologies being built and deployed while facilitating new relationships to join. Our Ecosystem Tech Lead for Europe, Eugene Filatov, gave a speech about Gear and presented our upcoming standalone network Vara.
So while this was how our month started, we also have another two massive events we took part in that we would like to draw your attention to. First, Crypto Latin Fest 5th Edition was the second-largest event of its kind in Medellín, Colombia with more than 95 speakers and 130 exhibitors. It can be considered one of the best places to learn about DeFi, trends, cybersecurity, the metaverse and more through conferences, panels and activities which are specially designed for all kinds of attendees! Our Chief Ecosystem Officer Pavel Salas was invited as a speaker to the conference. His talk was about smart contracts, the new generation of blockchain, Web3 and he even touched on our latest updates in his speech!
And at the end of the month another big conference happened in Portugal and you all know we are talking about sub0! It is the conference for developers building at every level of the Polkadot tech stack, from custom Layer-1 blockchains to dApps & smart contracts, infrastructure and tooling. Sub0 provides an intro to next-generation multichain network, as well as it gives a chance for Polkadot and Substrate developers to deepen their skills and connect with each other. Our CTO Peter Volynsky gave a presentation about our innovative smart contact approach at this conference!
Now, moving on to some other news, last month we announced our integration with SubWallet which is a Web3 extension wallet for Substrate-based chains. SubWallet makes it easy to track, send, receive and sign transactions on DeFi and GameFi applications. If you have any questions about this integration we recommend you participate in our Twitter Space on the 8th of December.
Another integration that happened in November was our Talisman integration. Talisman is a self custodial and user-friendly wallet that unlocks a new world of Web3 applications for the Polkadot ecosystem. It provides a simple way for users to connect to dApps and safely store, send, and receive funds. You can learn more about this integration by listening to the recording of our Twitter Space with Talisman.
As you may know we have a philosophy to educate the community about blockchain, Web3 and smart contracts, for that purpose we held our first Gear Workshop in Ecuador at Escuela Politécnica Nacional. It is worth mentioning, its story dates back to 1869 and we definitely recommend learning a little more about their history. Also we held several workshops for the Chinese Community such as Build a public chat room using Gear and Pixel art on the Gear Protocol. Last month we also held various quizzes for our Chinese community, as well as quizzes for English-speaking and Spanish-speaking communities and we will be holding more in December too.
We also participated in AMAs with Polkadot Insider, Crypto Whale, Crypto Challenger, Crypto Wolf and Todo de Cripto, where we were discussing the upcoming first Web3 Universities Hackathon in Mexico.
Our Chief Ecosystem Officer Pavel Salas was invited to speak at the Polkadot LATAM Hackathon closing ceremony in Buenos Aires! The hackathon consisted of 6 weeks of online events, including mentorships, workshops and ecosystem sessions. Another hackathon we took part in was IstanHack. It was a 3-day hackathon for the developers from around the world to showcase their talent for building Web3 applications. During this event our Chief Ecosystem Officer gave a successful presentation of the Gear Protocol. Both of the events turned out great and we were very happy to be a part of them.
We also continued our series of monthly meetups in Mexico, with this month’s topic being “Gear & Universities Hackathon”. On the topic of upcoming events, we are sponsoring the 2022 Polkadot Winter Hackathon that’s being co-hosted by Parity Tech & OneBlock! You are required to build applications based on the Gear tech stack. For example, you can compile smart contracts to build dApps or develop infrastructures and tools based on the Gear Protocol. For more information about Hackathon click here.
Also we launched a new series of events titled “Gear Know Us” where our first guest was a Gear Validator manager who shared some of the recent updates about the Vara Network. Our second guest was our Ecosystem Tech Lead for Latam who shared some of the most recent updates about the Gear Protocol within the Latin American region. Another special episode of “Gear Know Us” is coming soon, so stay tuned!
In terms of development we have two important updates. Now it is possible to handle system signals. Now you reserve gas for system signal and handle it in a new handle_signal entry point. Signals occur when it is out of gas, panic or some other unrecoverable error occurs during the execution. Also we created the first ever implementation of the Monopoly game on blockchain and we would like to give you a short description of how it works.
There is one main contract (a master contract that includes all information about the game) and there are player contracts. Player contracts are strategies that decide which move they should make. The game starts on the master contract, the master contract starts sending messages to the players’ contracts in turn, and waits for them to make a move. The player’s contract receives from the master contract all the information about the field, about other players, and based on this decides what he will do, and responds to the master contract. The point here is not that people are playing, but their strategies have been played around. When the game starts, it spins on the network until it ends, thanks to our amazing technology and the new ability to make gas reservations so that the game continues and does not end due to lack of gas.
That would be all for this month! Monthly Updates will be available soon in Subsocial in Spanish and Chinese! Stay tuned!
