Weekly Wings: September 20 - Paloma Upgrades to v1.8.2 and Pigeon 1.8.2 for Bridges, Arbitrum, and ERC-20 GRAIN Token and Jail Fixes

Your new Paloma hatchlings this week?

We’re catching up for 2 months in this weekly wings. Weekly wings will restart weekly publications this week.

REMINDER WARNING: The Hatchling Paloma Network of “Messenger” (v1.8.0) is still young, and its Cosmwasm and EVM contracts are still unaudited. 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 v1.8.2 and Pigeon v1.8.2

The Paloma flock is now running the fully functional and upgraded bridge on Paloma v1.8.2. In addition, new features in Pigeon v1.8.2 aim to address a number of validator issues, including fixes for the Paloma bridge and additional logging for pigeon jailing and keep alives. Paloma now continues to improve in order to handle higher relay volumes and launch its Pigeon Feed marketplace. Below are some of the key updates.

2. Paloma Gravity: Mainnet Bridge is Released

Paloma’s gravity bridge is now deployed to messenger mainnet after testing on Testnet and we continue to test the following first-release features:

1. Gravity now comes with batch signing to lower cost of processing cross-chain messages on target chains

2. Vote through governance to track a token as the official token on each supported chain. This delivers canonical token tracking between Paloma tokens and their target chain counter-parts

3. Submit "send-to-eth" transactions to send from a paloma account to an evm account

4. Batching of transactions every 50 blocks

5. Observer "send-to-paloma" events to add to a paloma account when deprecating from an evm account

Additionally, the flock of Paloma community voted to approve the GRAIN ERC-20 token that would be the template token copied by the Compass-EVM. The details of the Paloma ERC-20 token design, and vote, are available here: https://forum.palomachain.com/t/pip-43-paloma-grain-token-erc20-design-specification-and-signaling-vote/434

3. Paloma on Arbitrum: Ready to Deploy

Paloma now hosts the Arbitrum-geth client as the ethereum client for Ethereum, Optimism, and Arbitrum. Amazing work done by the Volume team now allows one GETH client to handle multiple L2 and Ethereum L1s. Paloma pigeons. Upgrades to Arbitrum GETH will push new updates to Paloma’s Arbitrum GETH client so the Volume team will monitor upgrades on Arbitrum. Validators will be invited to deploy Compass-EVM on arbitrum as more bots are designed for Arbitrum deployment on DEXes such as Uniswap v3 on Arbitrum.

4. Pigeon Improvements: Relay and Jailing Issues

Pigeon now comes with a number of improvements to ease validator pain around relay activities and the ongoing issue around constant jailing for pigeons not being active

1. More Pigeon logging on attestation and keep alive: We want to lower the jailing issues around pigeon and continue to add more logging for validators and developers

2. Create new template for Pigeon Traits. These traits are performance traits that will allow users to select pigeons for relays that have best uptime and delivery behaviors on the network for message relays

3. New logging for Pigeon relay failures that were not implemented. Increased telemetry in pigeon relay performance will allow validators to faster debug relay failures on their data centers. A new gRPC endpoint will allow adding of these logs in debug mode.

Paloma & Pigeon Network Performance: Logging & Monitoring

1. Ensure that all validators support active chains that are voted into governance. In this way, all validators are operating on the same level and rewarded on cross-chain performance.

2. Upgrade handling of failed smart contract deployments so that they may be restarted automatically. As such, Compass-EVM upgrades voted into governance automatically deploys across all active chains.

3. Add new logging to allow validators identify relay issues for message failures that were previously unlogged.

4. Add Health Server address binding so that it’s no longer hardcoded to localhost,127.0.0.1, but is now customisable so that validators can change this to 0.0.0.0 via a parameter in the config. This would allow external services to monitor and report pigeon uptime performance

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: Belgian Racing Pigeon

Pigeon racing is an International sport with the Belgian & Netherlands Racing Pigeons as the recognised bloodlines in racing olympic racing pigeons. Belgian and Netherlands bloodlines are proven over decades to be winners and the best olympic racing pigeons have come from both Bloodlines. Belgians have long stood out as the best breeders, both because of their generations-long experience and the density of a network where many breeders can organize races close together. It’s not a short-term endeavor, however, since becoming expert at genetic breeding with the constant mixing and mating of birds takes years, if not decades. Belgian Racing pigeons can live up to 15 years.

source: https://dutchpigeons.nl/our-company/

Conclusions:

We have more work to deliver a stable and robust relay system with Gravity Bridge. This update highlights those new changes that will include less jailing of validator pigeons and more reliable relaying with Paloma’s Gravity bridge. Paloma is also now Arbitrum-ready and will invite the validator community to deploy Compass-EVM contracts to the Arbitrum network. Arbitrum availability will be critical for decentralized application execution on Arbitrum network.

Thank you to all the pigeon validators on the Paloma network, the Paloma community, and Palomabot uses. Let’s continue to fly and fly fast.

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