Gear Monthly Updates: October 2022
November is here and we are back with our updates from the past month! We would like to start with highlighting the important announcements we made in October.
First off, we held our first-ever Community Call where we discussed the upcoming release of Vara Network, a standalone blockchain based on Gear Protocol! More info will be coming very soon, to hear all the latest updates follow us on Twitter.
Another important announcement from the past month is the integration with Crust Network. Crust provides a decentralized storage network for the Web3 ecosystem. It supports multiple storage layer protocols such as IPFS, and exposes storage interfaces to application layers. Crust’s technical stack is also capable of supporting a decentralized computing layer. It is designed to build a decentralized cloud ecosystem that values data privacy and ownership. This will provide developers in the Gear Ecosystem with a decentralized storage protocol for their own particular use case. You can find out more on our Medium.
Also our team went to Devcon, Bogota, hosted an online Workshop for the Chinese Community and held the first-ever Meetup in Madrid. Starting in October, we are participating in Polkadot Hackathon Latam by holding a number of workshops. Also Gear was represented at DOTinVietnam, the 1st Polkadot Meetup in Vietnam organized by the projects from the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. Sponsored by the Polkadot Event Bounty, this event aimed to raise awareness of Polkadot, Kusama and Substrate in Vietnam and onboard the Vietnamese developer community to the Polkadot ecosystem.
In October we participated in Twitter Spaces held by Crust Network, Automata, SubQuery and Pendulum. We took part in various AMAs with different communities such as Crypto Detector, Universal Crypto World, Cryptominers, Crypto Cash, Crypto Rush, Crypto Analyzer. Also our Chief Ecosystem Officer Pavel Salas took part in the live interview organized by a Spanish influencer. We believe such events help the community get to know us better, learn more about Web3 technology, and answer any questions they might have, so we highly recommend joining the AMAs!
This month we also posted a very informative article about the Persistent Memory Concept. We’re hoping that this will provide a great introduction to what is one of the most important and influential aspects of Gear’s tech stack. Read more on Medium!
We are constantly updating our Wiki and making it more and more informative so we recommend checking it from time to time to learn something new about Gear. And don’t forget you can always check your knowledge about Gear by taking part in our Community Quiz every month. We have quizzes available not only for English speakers but also for Spanish and Chinese speakers.
Let’s move to the technical updates starting with news from core.
We made an initial gas reservation API. Gas reservation has arrived! You can make gas reservations inside the program now. See gstd::ReservationId for documentation. Such features will allow you to send messages using reserved gas, receive system signals, keep some gas to be used later and other neat things in the future.
Since we removed panic ability in our runtime in order to stop queue processing until recovery, we introduced chaining any time-dependent logic to the custom Gear block number as an alternative to the common pallet_system. This will show the block number within the queue through which it was processed to provide a source of truth and avoid rent charging, in addition to preventing time-dependent logic fails due to queue processing skipping.
On the Ecosystem side we proposed the implementation of the fungible token with following contracts: the main fungible token contract that receives the message for actions with users balances; the token logic contract that includes the realization of main standard token functions (mint, burn, transfer and approve); the storage token contract that store the balances of the users and has only 2 actions: increase and decrease balances. We also modified the Escrow smart contract example and updated the DAO smart contract example.
That would be all from the last month! Don’t forget to follow our Twitter to be the first to know about our future events and announcements and our GitHub to follow the development process.
