Network Update Highlights 1.6.23

The Pine Street Labs team monitors blockchain networks for code changes, network upgrades, and security fixes. The aim of this research is to ensure safety and limited downtime for on-chain users across the ecosystem.

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How To Use This Tracker

This blog post provides an overview of the updates that have been made over the past week, with a particular emphasis on changes relevant to wallet operations.

Under each network header, releases are formatted as follows:

<Link to full release> (release date)
- Release highlight 1
- Release highlight 2
- ...

Note: Prerelease updates will be marked as "prerelease" between the link to the full release and the release date

Polkadot

Substrate monthly-2023-01 prerelease (1/1)

• Allows the OpenGov staking admin to set a min_commission, the minimum amount of commission that validators must maintain. OpenGov is the proposed successor to Polkadot’s current governance system.
• Implements the chainHead RPC API. The chainHead API provides six different methods that are used to track the state of the head of the chain. This includes information about the latest finalized, non-finalized, and best blocks.
• Introduces abstention to OpenGov as a new variant in AccountVote. This allows voters who do not intend to vote on an issue to support the early termination of the vote without affecting its result.
• Reworks the gilts pallet to become the Non-Interactive Staking (NIS) pallet. NIS is a different type of staking that allows users to protect themselves from inflation without locking their assets or being subject to slashing risk. Unlike standard staking, non-interactive staking only provides inflation protection without any additional reward. For more on NIS, see Gavin Wood’s presentation here.
• NFTs 2.0: Reworks the uniques pallet to support a number of new NFT features. These features include atomic swaps, smart attributes, auto-incremental collection ids, and the use of bitflags for roles and collection/item settings. This update also introduces a new approvals structure and the ability to set different minting options.