Patract 2020 Roundup

After more than half a year of studying abroad at the Queen Mary University of London, I decided to continue my entrepreneurship in Polkadot ecology. When Polkadot was founded, the W3F decided to launch a new contract technology. At that time, the four parachains that W3F was going to launch were: Bitcoin Bridge, Ethereum Bridge, Smart Contract Chain, and Fast Payment Chain. At present, the first two directions have been taken over by the Interlay and Snowfork teams.

The EVM contract chain is improved by the Substrate Frontier, Moonbeam, and Acala teams. The original Wasm contract was originally promoted by the Edgeware team, but no progress has been seen. The contract module on the chain is still being iterated by Parity. What the external team can start from the beginning is the development of supporting tools and services, and our goal is to be able to start a common good system parachain, directly using DOT or KSM as the native token to support the entire Wasm development of contract ecology. Compared with parachain development, the Wasm contract has a lower development difficulty, lower deployment cost, and wider ecological integration.

After initial research, we launched the Patract project, the name comes from Parachain Contract. On August 20th, we wrote the first Polkassembly Post #15, stating that although Wasm contracts are better than EVM contracts in principle, there are almost zero support tools for ecological development, which is far behind the EVM ecosystem. We described the two projects we plan to launch in the early stage, Redspot to target Truffle and Europa to target Ganache. We submitted the 0th Treasury Proposal on the Polkadot mainnet for Redspot v0.1 and it was approved by the Polkadot Council.

After our work of Redspot v0.1, we submitted another more detailed post #100 to describe 8 more projects, including contract library, SDKs, monitor, cloud IDE, PatraScan, and PatraStore, etc. Then, we gradually launched the Elara project to target Infura, the Megaclite project to target Ethereum’s ZKP pre-compiled contracts, etc. In addition, Himalia is a multi-language SDK specifically for contract development, and Ask! is a contract framework similar to ink! written in AS language. In summary, we have applied for 8 Polkadot proposals and 1 Kusama proposal and finished 7 of them on time. Welcome to our Patract official website and Github to test our work.

The current Wasm contract module and the ink! the framework is not mature yet, and there are still very few developers, so there are also fewer Polkadot ecological projects planning to be developed by Wasm contracts. But we think this situation will change drastically in the next year.

For the next year, we will vigorously promote the work of the PatraStore DApp store and the PatraScan contract explorer, combined with the Jupiter contract testnet we launched, to promote the use and feedback of the community on our toolchain.

We will expand our operating resources, and gradually iterate on-chain tech stacks (supporting pallets, faster Wasm executors, ZKP, IPFS, fee model, governance), the Jupiter independent chain, and Jupiter Rococo parachain so that they can reach the level of the production environment for Patract Network and ready for the start of the system parachain slot issuing.

In the end, here is the list of our 9 approved proposals:

• Redspot v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/0
• Redspot v0.2: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/13
• Europa v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/15
• Elara v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/16
• Elara v0.2: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/18
• Redspot v0.3: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/23
• Megaclite v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/24
• Himalia v0.1&v0.2: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/treasury/61
• Europa v0.2: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/27

2 of them are in development, and 7 has been finished with written reports:

• Redspot v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/78
• Elara v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/139
• Redspot v0.2: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/156
• Europa v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/166
• Elara v0.2: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/192
• Redspot v0.3: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/207
• Megaclite v0.1: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/221

2 more ongoing proposals:

• Ask! v0.1: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/398
• Elara v0.3: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/231