Dev Log #15

Welcome to our bi-weekly community dev log. As referenced in our previous edition, the entire team’s focus remains on preparing for our initial launch. The rollout of Picasso is now broken down into 4 distinct release phases, with release 1 marking the official beginning of Picasso season. In the Picasso section below, we will dive into further detail around these release phases and what they will entail. For our other products, the bridging team has made progress with the testnet environments to begin testing of the IBC KSM<>DOT bridge. This comes while we continue to push the progress for Centauri, as well as our work with NEAR. ICS8 and ICS10 remain the largest items for Centauri — with these expected to be the core focus once the KSM<>DOT bridge is released. For XCVM, the team is focused on the v0 dev related products, namely the CosmWasm VM interface and the XCVM pallet.

Bridging

Audits for GRANDPA light client, IBC pallet, and IBC-rs are still ongoing, with no major issues raised so far. This week, we completed and merged telemetry tooling for the hyperspace relayer. This will enable us to monitor IBC transfers and provide better reliability from our relayer.

Our team has made good progress towards dockerizing our various components and getting our system ready for deployment in testnet. We plan to have a fully functional devnet available next week. Shortly thereafter, we will promote our new pallets to our Rococo testnet parachain, Dali. This will allow us to experiment with creating devnet<>testnet IBC clients & channels. Provided everything goes smoothly, we hope to be ready from there to promote to mainnet!

As we approach mainnet, we are paying close attention to UX details. While the initial Picasso UI designs were completed months ago, we are now revisiting these designs to make sure end users are presented with improved user experience when they are interacting with the blockchain. Areas we’re looking into include handling IBC timeout & refund states, retrying failed txs, and wallet integrations. We’re also planning out bridge fees and incentives.

With respect to our in-progress IBC bridge with NEAR, we are in close communication with the NEAR devs furthering our collaborations on NEP-384 to add a host function for fetching block hashes in contract runtime. Similarly, on the cosmos side, we are collaborating with Strangelove Ventures on the wasm light client and the GRANDPA cosmwasm smart contract. Strangelove recently hired a developer to focus on these deliverables.

Picasso and Pablo

As the team prepares Picasso for launch, we will now share the relevant release phases that can be expected throughout Q4. Release 1 will be focused on setting the initial foundation of the chain, with all of the core pallets and infrastructure required to roll out subsequent products, such as Pablo or our IBC bridge. In addition to the +15 pallets that have been audited, QAed, and tested, release 1 will also mark the distribution of PICA crowldoan rewards. Users will be able to interact with the Picasso chain, claim their crowdloan rewards (tokens remain locked until release 3) and also bridge tokens via XCM our opened channels.

Release 2 marks the important runtime upgrade that will see the launch of Pablo DEX — including the significant amount of code we’ve pushed for our staking-rewards and fNFT pallets. Pablo DEX will therefore allow users to trade, swap, provide/remove liquidity, earn PICA and more. In release 2, we aim to build sufficient liquidity for our core base assets — KSM and USDT, before proceeding with release 3.

Technically, Release 3 is almost complete — with all components already included from Release 2. However, Release 3 marks an important milestone as it will herald the launch of the PICA token, unlocking crowdloan rewards, activating xPICA staking, and also turning on emissions for all farming pools. Whitelisted pools will include: KSM/USDT, PICA/USDT, PICA/KSM.

Release 4 is when our IBC KSM<>DOT bridge goes live, allowing us to bring significant liquidity to Picasso in the form of $DOT. This release therefore includes all of the work our bridging team have been focused on — IBC pallet, Grandpa light client, Hyperspace relayer, and all of the necessary peripheral items required to integrate, test, and build the bridge. Release 4 will therefore allow users to bridge DOT from the relaychain to Picasso, with Pablo supporting emissions for the following pools: DOT/KSM, DOT/USDT, and DOT/PICA.

XCVM

The team is now focused on the planning and execution of the XCVM MVP after a successful XCVM demo in Cosmoverse, highlighting a cross-chain swap program between Picasso and Juno (Cosmos <> Kusama).

Our goal is to enable users to build, orchestrate and execute cross-chain programs and smart contracts within and between the Cosmos and Kusama ecosystems parachains, including Composable’s parachain Picasso. The XCVM MVP will be powered by Composable’s trustless bridge Centauri, fully integrated on IBC. Therefore, the initial efforts for this accomplishment are currently centered around technical debt on infrastructure, fully spec compliant smart contracts, continuing developing our EVM contracts as well as writing its SDKs, and finally, the team is developing a new documentation site including XCVM docs thought to have the best building experience, all assembled with Docusaurus.

Regarding the last effort mentioned, we are continuing the CosmWasm Interface: our tooling project, shared recently on HackWasm, as part of the XCVM documentation and development kit. The CosmWasm Interface is a frontend application in which the XCVM CosmWasm VM is embedded. Within it, developers can efficiently and effortlessly create, query and execute a CosmWasm contract directly, meaning no environment, testnet, or blockchain running needed. Thus, we are currently redesigning it and building a slick frontend, with extra features and visualization for users to enjoy the interface performance.

Therefore, we are eager to have the community experience the power and complexity abstraction provided by the XCVM and its unique approach to user experience, so soon we will have further sneak peaks and news to share!

Mural

Following our realigmnent of Mosaic which powers Mural, our cross-layer NFT bridge, we are requesting those who have utilized Mural, our cross-layer NFT bridge to return any bridged NFTs to the original chain by the 1st of November as we are deprecating Mural.

For more information about Composable and how it is architecting the unified DeFi landscape of the future and composing DeFi for mass adoption, check out our socials:

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Important Disclaimer: Composable Finance Ltd. (“Composable”) makes no guarantee that services, functionality or various milestones announced in preview, beta or otherwise, will become available at a future date. The information or data contained in this update is for educational and informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any agreement and should not be relied upon. This update may contain hyperlinks to non-Composable websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites and the accuracy of any information shared at such locations. No statements or updates are offers or sales of securities or the provision of legal, investment or tax advice. As this update is based upon available information at the time of its publication, and circumstances may change following its publication, Composable assumes no responsibility to further update this information and fully disclaims any liability regarding the accuracy of its contents.