Polkaholic.io dApp Staking Application to Support Astar WASM/EVM/XVM Developers

Archived Sections (Archived) Astar Initiatives Approved proposals
1

Dear Astar/Shiden community,

I am Sourabh Niyogi, who along with Michael Chung lead the development of Polkaholic.io at Colorful Notion. We humbly request to be a part of the Astar dApp Staking program and be a long-term contributor to Astar’s vision of the Future of Smart Contracts via Polkaholic.io’s multi-chain indexer and APIs.

Project Overview: Polkaholic.io

Polkaholic.io is a multi-chain block explorer complete with XCM / EVM / WASM APIs that is well matched to Astar’s vision. Over 2022, we have learned the internals of Substrate by indexing Astar, Shiden and as many chains in the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem as we could find endpoints for, running full archive nodes for Astar + Shiden for over a year now. We placed special emphasis on the key aspects of Astar’s chain:

  • XCM, indexing XCM Transfers, Messages, and Astar’s upcoming remote execution
  • EVM, decoding EVM Transactions with hybrid functionality
  • WASM, decoding Contracts calls

Polkaholic.io supports over 60+ Substrate chains now, and we are working on adding new cutting edge functionality that will be important in 2023 as new WASM + EVM=XVM contract functionality is rolled out to Astar. We learned from Maarten’s feedback that the Astar community needed a fully integrated approach (not EVM on blockscout, WASM in polkadot.js, governance and dappstaking elsewhere still), and how cutting edge Astar is on the WASM+EVM=XVM innovation curve, which we find very exciting. We further realised that because of Astar’s dedication to WASM+EVM=XVM success, we could serve the community best by combining { polkaholic.io WASM/EVM APIs with polkadot.js apps }. The core reason is pretty simple: WASM/ink! Contract developers start there and not going to be served by going to another interface. We Astar is leading the way in the larger Substrate ecosystem.

With your long-term community support, we aim to augment Polkaholic APIs + polkadot.js apps in the following ways:

  1. Provide full support for WASM/ink! Contracts in polkaholic.io APIs

  2. Enabling submission of WASM/ink! Contracts for verification

  3. Supporting contract reads + contract write calls

  4. Supporting decoding of WASM Contract calls

  5. Provide full support for EVM Contracts in polkaholic.io

  6. Enabling submission of EVM Contracts for verification

  7. Decoding EVM Contracts

  8. Provide full support for XCM Indexing of XCM Transfers and Remote Executions

  9. Provide easy access to developer tools to support EVM/WASM/XCM/XVM, where all feedback is welcome

  10. Further develop XCM + WASM + EVM APIs that meet developer and analyst needs as Astar grows in usage as one of the most innovative Smart Contract platforms in the ecosystem

  11. Explore a plugin model where others may also submit their dapps (e.g. a dApp Staking module) and form the basis for a well-integrated Astar developer experience and Substrate user experience.

  12. Develop actually useful ink! WASM+EVM=XVM Contracts of our own, so we may “eat the dog food”

Our Mission

Colorful Notion’s mission in being part of the dApp Staking program is to support developers in Astar’s ecosystem with a multichain block explorer that is ideal for cutting edge WASM/EVM/XCM related development.

Past Performance & Milestones

We have delivered many valuable features for the Substrate community. With Astar+Shiden community support, we aim to continue delivering

  • 2022 Jul - Soft launched Polkaholic.io to support Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem users and developers in a multi-chain Substrate future.
  • 2022 Aug - Implemented the first ever xcm indexer for the substrate ecosystem;
  • 2022 Sep-Oct - Implemented Astar/Shiden-specific parsing of XCM and basic “Contracts” pallet support; Implemented Arthswap Dex pool tracking
  • 2022 Nov - Tested XCM Remote Execution of WASM with Astar Founding Engineer Dino in Zombienet; Implemented the Astar-specific XCM remote execution parser
  • Attended Polkadot Summit and sub0 where we were inspired by Sota and Hoon’s Future of Smart Contracts vision to join in this program long-term.
  • December 2022/January 2023 - We are presently testing Pierre’s ground breaking Uniswap v2 + Astar PSP22/34/37 chain-extension-contracts to develop real-world WASM contracts that can connect to other XCM Assets (eg. USDT) and test remote swaps with real world assets on Shiden any day now!

dApp Staking Reward Usage

All rewards from Astar / Shiden dApp Staking will be used in 2023 to:

  • Operate indexing infrastructure and APIs of Astar + Shiden + increasing redundancy. And, with sufficient support and interest, we will index Shibuya as well
  • Support WASM/XCM/EVM Astar Developers with Colorful Notion’s highly reactive development where we aim to assist in a high impact way in the ecosystem to support Astar’s WASM/XCM/EVM Smart Contract future
  • Integrate Polkaholic.io APIs (e.g. Astar’s xcm) with polkadot.js apps in conjunction with the above

The rewards will effectively allow us to run more robust Astar/Shiden indexing services and remain focused towards what we hope will be a high growth WASM/EVM/XCM centric ecosystem.

Let us know how to help!

If you are an active member of the Astar community and would like to see us work on specific things in Astar’s WASM+EVM=XVM Future of Smart Contracts, please say introduce yourself in Matrix or find me on Telegram (@{firstname-lastname}) – we’d love to help grow Astar’s WASM/EVM/XCM/XVM ecosystem in 2023 with you.

Thank you for your support and Happy Holidays!

10 Likes
2

Welcome, Polkaholic Team!
Just one question from your deliverables:
What would the EVM Contract verification process be look like?
Could you please elaborate more on that? How it gonna work, why is it important, etc,.

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I really like what you guys are building. Always use your tools to generate useful insights for my data analysis. Its easy to evaluate a project that provide data and important information for the whole ecosystem.

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Another great team joining Astar :slight_smile: An easy readable and comprehensive data is very important , glad to read this proposal. I will support it :+1:

5

Thank you for your questions and support!

@rhee Since anyone can upload a EVM or WASM contract to Astar/Shiden, it is critical that users only interact with contracts that are verified by third parties instead of trusting the developer. The Contract verification process is simply answering the question “does the uploaded code, after compilation, match the EVM/WASM code on chain” and NOT answering the question “does the code do what a normal person thinks it should” which is an auditing question. But its a key first step. For Contract verification, we will be using APIs
(a) sourcify.dev for EVM Contract Verification
(b) a new “ink-verifier” server for WASM Contract Verification
The flow is:
(1) visitors to polkaholic.io in Q1 2023 will have a polkadot.js apps with Third Party API support
(2) when connected to Shiden + Astar the “Contracts” tab will enable devs to upload their source code (with .manifest) to (a) or (b);
(3) the APIs for (a)+(b) support fetching the uploaded code and (after compiling and matching) report back on the verification status;
(4) All uploaded EVM/WASM Contracts will be searchable in the same.polkadot.js Contracts tab – any contracts which are have been verified will show the verification status along with the ABI and ability to initiate reads and writes; While originally the Contracts tab is for WASM only, we will be adapting it to support EVM as well. By having the ABIs uploaded and verified, decoding WASM + EVM inputs becomes enabled for everyone instead of for just common methodID signatures. We hope to gain some experience on the WASM <=> EVM contract calls and ensure that new XVM calls will be decoded with ABIs of both sides.

Hope that short description makes rough sense – we hope to have a working prototype – in the meantime, Happy Holidays and Happy Birthday Astar!

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Totally make sense! Thanks for your ellaboration =]
I’m now more than confident that Polkaholic will be backing Astar’s vision and the needs from ecosystem developers!

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Join Astar dApp Staking
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Right now, if I transfer ASTR from native to EVM, Subscan shows the transaction between 2 native addresses.

With this new block explorer, will I be able to see the transaction between my native-evm and vice versa addresses clearly?

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We have not attacked this pain point in polkaholic as fully as we would have liked to but in our new UI: (a) we aim to show your linked evm vs substrate address balances when connected to Astar/Shiden (b) make it easy (as easy as in the Astar dapp anyway) to initiate the withdraw/deposit action when seeing (a) — this is a super common operation for Astar users/devs and we probably won’t have it perfect on the first try …so we are very much looking forward to iterating and optimizing based on everyone’s feedback.

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10

Do you have a revoke smart contract aproval tool?

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Great question. At present, no, but its undeniably a valuable ask. We have been considering a “DEX” plugin and Token Revoke Approvals functionality would be natural to add for ERC20/721/1151+PSP22/34/37 to keep “EVM[+WASM] DEXes” where Approvals are rampant. But some people think this “Revoke” is best done in Substrate/EVM wallets. Please allow us a week to check into it and get back to you – thank you for asking!

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