Paloma Weekly Wings September 20 2022: Laying our first Ethereum NFT Eggs from the Cosmos

What’s New in Paloma this week?

1. Paloma testnest-10 upgrade a success!

   1. Paloma-testnest-10 upgraded successfully with fixes to the EVM submit logic call encoding of the message payload type to byte arrays. This was blocking successful delivery of Ethereum mainnet messages.

   2. Paloma-testnet-10 proposal #1 failed due to the chain halt block height happening before the end of the voting period. Proposal #2 fixed this issue and the chain upgraded successfully. We now have upgrades schedule with 3 days after vote initiation.

   3. Paloma also adjusted the inflation rate via a new proposal #3 to test validator performance with lower targets of 3% to 7%. Given the goal of maximizing fee revenue for validators and stakers, Paloma will explore lower rates of inflation while maintaining the maximum security possible.

2. Pigeon Upgrades:

   1. Pigeon is now working successfully at version 0.8.0. No active validators are experiencing or highlighting any issues with pigeon relay software.

   2. Validators have highlighted that each validator cosmos address binds to only one target-chain private key and public address. As a result, a validator who needs to replace their cosmos validator keys is unable to use the same Ethereum keys in their pigeon to collect gas fees and relay messages. Paloma will need to revisit this design decision to allow more flexible interchange between validator addresses and target chain addresses in the pigeon relay manager software.

Minting an Ethereum NFT Egg from the Cosmos

Paloma Testnest-10 has successfully minted its first NFT Egg on the Ethereum Blockchain from the Cosmos. See the Cosmwasm NFT Egg contract here: https://paloma.explorers.guru/transaction/35C610EB064FC07114E5793722183B52117294862DBFA924B29859BDB6ACA554 and then the Ethereum Mainnet egg minted here: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1f5357a0ce7647225566e404b5f56bdf15e735737472fcad26621d4ae7ac271b/advanced. Congratulations to all the validator pigeons and devs! Nice work! Paloma is the first blockchain protocol to complete cross-chain minting between two different blockchain architectures and technologies. We look forward to making it easier for developers to control NFTs on any EVM chain from within the Cosmos.

The Dragoon Pigeon:

This is a cross-breed pigeon that originated from England. It is a cross between Horsemen and Tumbler. They have a blunt beak and wedge-shaped body. This pigeon is actually a bit heavy and weighs about 20 ounces. They can be found in some unique colors like checkers, grizzle, silver and reddish purple in blues.

Source: https://tailandfur.com/popular-pigeon-breeds/

Lessons Learned from Minting NFTs on Ethereum from the Paloma Testnest 10 network

1. Cosmos-SDK Upgrade scheduling with onchain voting should always be scheduled with sufficient time after the voting period has passed, but on a weekday so that validators are able to quickly upgrade. We will now be publishing the Paloma upgrade schedule and onchain voting proposals to the Paloma Forum here: https://forum.palomachain.com/c/governance/6

2. We are getting better at troubleshooting and delivering successful message passing to the EVM. The Paloma egg minting consists of two contracts:

   1. Cosmwasm Egg Contract to compute the correct Ethereum address that will receive the egg rewards. https://paloma.explorers.guru/transaction/35C610EB064FC07114E5793722183B52117294862DBFA924B29859BDB6ACA554

   2. The Ethereum contract for minting the Paloma egg is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0x4d746e8f7567d3bdaf64c0c366e6517b3cbe2acf#code

3. We successfully minted our first Ethereum NFT. It took us three full months of ongoing development and iteration and we were successful. The pigeon relayers sent the byte array message to the Ethereum network from the Cosmos. We are now able to improve this workflow and prepare for more deployments of the Compass-EVM to other EVM chains.

Conclusion:

We have reached a massive milestone in the Paloma community. Paloma now successfully delivers NFT feature functionality from the Cosmos to any Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain. Paloma pigeons on the Paloma testnet are able to send messages and maintain in-flight security for message handling on the Ethereum mainnet. Developers that want a low-cost scaleable intelligent endpoint for delivering their messages now have a new network to help: Paloma.

Our next steps will be to explore further minting of Ethereum NFTs and new functionality with our Pyth price feeds.

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