Weekly Wings: May 31 - Paloma v1.0.0 Mainnet, Paloma Compass on ETH & BNB, and Paloma v1.1.0 for Cross-chain Security
Your new Paloma hatchlings this week?
Paloma completes the month of May with messenger mainnet now upgraded to v1.0.0 of Paloma and Pigeon. Compass is now on Ethereum and BNB chain mainnets which means new applications for cross-chain execution. Lastly, we continue to upgrade Paloma to v1.1.0 with new security features for remote contract execution.
REMINDER WARNING: The Hatchling Paloma Network of “Messenger” (v1.0.0) is still young and its Cosmwasm and EVM contracts are unaudited. Although the flock is flying on mainnet, it is still subject to the continued development of Paloma’s cross-chain messaging system. We expect “Messenger” to possibly have chain halts and chain restarts as well as undiscovered vulnerabilities. The community will strive to preserve state, but considers this mainnet high-risk. Proceed with caution.
1. Paloma v1.0.0 and Pigeon v1.0.0 both go mainnet
Congratulations to the Paloma community of pigeons. Congratulations to all Volume team members and as well as Cosmos community members. Paloma messenger mainnet successfully upgraded to Paloma V1.0.0 and Pigeon v1.0.0 with Cosmos SDK v0.47.1 having no major issues. Over 50 validators are in sync with new validators coming online daily. Last week’s mainnet switch was the success we were planning to achieve and we are very fortunate it went off so well. We did have some tweaks with GLIBC libraries being unsupported on Ubuntu installations, but Pigeons were quickly able to build Paloma from source.
Now that Paloma Cosmos SDK v0.471 is live, it’s time to turn attention to Pigeon cross-chain relay communications on mainnet with proposals to upgrade and deliver BNB Chain mainnet and Ethereum mainnet validator set updates.
Stay up to date and follow the Paloma public repositories and the commits of ongoing upgrades to Paloma Cosmos-SDK blockchain here:
https://github.com/palomachain/paloma
https://github.com/palomachain/pigeon
2. Paloma Compass deploys to BNB and ETH chains
More Paloma wins from last week. Paloma’s Compass-EVM was successfully voted into the network and deployed on two major blockchains. Validators are currently delivering validator set updates on both BNB and ETH chains. Over 50 validators now are running security updates on BNB and ETH. These security updates consist of all validators and their power, by stake, on the Paloma network. When the powers of the validators change, either due to spending tokens or adding to their delegation, Paloma will update the snapshot of the validator set and publish the signed set to the target chain. Now that validator set updates are being delivered cross-chain, it’s time to optimize those messages to lower the cost burden on validators.
3. Paloma v1.1.0 for cross-chain security
Now that we have accomplished cross-chain messaging from Paloma mainnet to BNB and ETH mainnet, we now observe that security is the next important phase of development. Developers launching Python or JavaScript programs that control smart contracts via Paloma want some assurance that the Paloma layer will respect restrictions on which users can call commands to specific contracts. As such, Paloma v1.1.0 is an upgrade with the first such security features. Paloma will now send both the sender public key and the cosmwasm contract address in the payload of any EVM message. This additional information acts an authentication check to confirm which user sent the message from Paloma. Developers writing contracts that are owned by the Paloma validator set can verify message sender authenticity and limit all calls only to public keys and addresses that are pre-approved to send messages. We will be testing Paloma and Pigeon v1.1.0 on the public testnet this week, preparing for a mainnet release quickly thereafter.
We will be sharing further invitations to developers to test Paloma’s security features in the upcoming version with a new decentralized application that controls cross-chain contracts without the risk of unauthorized access.
Pigeon of the Week: The Rock Pigeon
The rock dove, rock pigeon, or common pigeon is a member of the bird family Columbidae (doves and pigeons). In common usage, it is often simply referred to as the "pigeon". The domestic pigeon (Columba livia domestica, which includes about 1,000 different breeds) descended from this species. Escaped domestic pigeons have increased the populations of feral pigeons around the world. Wild rock doves are pale grey with two black bars on each wing, whereas domestic and feral pigeons vary in colour and pattern. Few differences are seen between males and females. The species is generally monogamous, with two squabs (young) per brood. Both parents care for the young for a time.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dove
Conclusions:
Congratulations to the Paloma community for bringing Paloma’s mainnet and cross-chain relays to life. Now that validator set updates are continuing across chains, the Paloma team aims to optimize and lower cost to support Paloma chain relay activity with more efficient validator set updates as well as increase the number of chains supported by the network.
The Volume and Binary teams also now turn towards delivering additional security upgrades so that developers and users will have confidence that Paloma’s basic security ensures that smart contract developers can challenge message sender identity checks via Paloma public key or Cosmwasm contract.
There are still over 500,000 GRAINs to collect from https://www.palomaswap.com/ and most GRAINs are being collected on stable swaps. Make sure to swap, collect, and stake your GRAINs as much as you can as the bots come online from Paloma.
To learn more about Paloma, please visit https://palomachain.com
To follow the project on Github, please star the project https://github.com/palomachain/paloma
To participate in the community, please join the Paloma Discord: https://discord.gg/HtUvgxvh5N
