Paloma Weekly Wings: November 8, 2023 - Paloma Deploys to Gnosis Chain for Euro Bots and Pigeon Upgrades to v.1.9.5
Your new Paloma hatchlings this week?
Welcome to the weekly update on new software from the Paloma community of developers.
REMINDER WARNING: The Hatchling Paloma Network of “Messenger” (v1.9.2) and the Pigeon relay module is on v1.9.5. Paloma is still young, and its Cosmwasm and EVM contracts are still un-audited and undergoing continuous upgrades. The GRAIN token is launched but not yet trading on any exchanges. Although the flock is flying on the messenger mainnet, it is still subject to the continued development of Paloma’s cross-chain messaging system as well as to the security guarantees offered by the GRAIN token. We expect “Messenger” to experience weekly chain halts and chain restarts to upgrade. We also expect numerous undiscovered vulnerabilities. We also do not control nor influence the price of GRAINs. The community will strive to preserve stated but considers this mainnet high-risk. Proceed with caution.
1. Paloma Pigeons deploy to Gnosis Chain
Paloma Pigeons deploy the Compass-EVM light client to Gnosis chain. https://gnosisscan.io/address/0x2e00587b846ec97b293f86b1243dd4280aa22cbf. Now anyone may use the Paloma SDK to execute transactions on Gnosis chain with the support of the Paloma validator set. Developers may now build bots that transfer funds from Ethereum to Gnosis via the Gnosis bridge for use cases including exiting to fiat offramps for Euros with the Monerium EURe pools on Curve.
Deployment of Gnosis Chain experienced a long delay prior to deployment. The post-mortem analysis revealed that Paloma’s current design does not limit valset pigeons to the pigeons that are actively supporting the chain that needs a Compass-EVM client deployment. As such, many Paloma validators were given Gnosis Compass-EVM contracts to relay, but were unable to complete the message as no RPC was set up. In the next version of Paloma and Pigeon, validators with full support of all chains will be added to the validator set and will be permitted to relay. Pigeons that do not have their target chain configurations set will be excluded from the relay validator set.
2. Paloma Gravity: Fixing Batch Bugs
The Volume identified a bug in the Gravity bridge on paloma-testnet-15 that is used for actively testing bridge transactions. According to ByteBandit:
We have a gravity batch stuck that is being relayed over and over again every 10000 blocks. Pigeon actually see the event on the target chain, but fail to inform Paloma because the gravity messages hadn't been registered against the
sdk.Msginterface.
This was most likely just forgotten in the bulk of work for gravity. What bothers me is that this happened before with the
AddStatusUpdatemessage, and apparently for some nodes this works just fine, while for others it doesn't and leads to a crash. Definitely needs more understanding. Either the type is registered or it isn't, and if it isn't, it should fail deterministically across all nodes. But it doesn't.
Tested in private test net, this resolves the issue and Pigeon successfully reports the batch as relayed. With this change, we can create a new Pigeon release. Once the majority of validators upgrade, the batch should be removed successfully.
The release of Pigeon v1.9.5 allowed the batch to be moved successfully, but highlighted new issues that require a refactor of the Paloma Gravity bridge in high block time environments.
Stay up to date and follow the Paloma public repositories and the commits of ongoing upgrades to Paloma Cosmos-SDK blockchain and the Pigeon relay module, here:
https://github.com/palomachain/paloma/releases
https://github.com/palomachain/pigeon/releases
Pigeon of the Week: Trumpeter Pigeon
One of the fancy varieties of pigeon developed through selective breeding is known as the trumpeters. Members of this distinct breed are descendants of the rock pigeon. The distinguishing feature of trumpeter pigeons is their special cooing. It sounds like human laughter or trumpeting. The group of trumpeter pigeons is further divided into several varieties. They exhibit slight variation in colors and other physical features, but produce the same characteristic trumpeting sounds while cooing
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpeter_(pigeon)
Conclusions:
Paloma deployment to Gnosischain is an important step for Paloma validators to successfully execute offramp bots. The Gnosis chain deployment highlighted some issues ongoing with Paloma’s selection of validators to relay messages. We have more work to improve validator relay selection.
More work continues on Pigeon Operator Keys for improved relay performance. We look forward to sharing updates next week! COO! COO!
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
