Gear Monthly Updates: December 2021
By: Gear Technologies
Tags: Smart Contracts, Polkadot, Polkadot Network, Blockchain, Blockchain Technology

The end of the year has been a very remarkable period for Gear. We finally announced that we had raised $12 million in a private investment round led by Blockchange Ventures. In addition to Blockchange, other top venture capital funds who participated in this round include: Three Arrows Capital, Lemniscap, Distributed Global, LAO, Mechanism Capital, Bitscale, Spartan Group LLC, HashKey, DI Ventures, Elysium Venture Capital, Signum Capital, and P2P Economy lead by Konstantin Lomashuk, along with several top executives of Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies, including its founder Gavin Wood.

Other important milestones reached in December were mainly technical improvements to the Gear platform. The changes are as follows:

We added a program_id() function to gstd, which returns the program’s identifier. It can be used where the program wants to store funds, like fungible-tokens for itself.

New message processing logic with core-processor has been implemented.

This migrates current processing to the new logic of processing messages with a functional approach, and includes message journaling. This allows us to use multiple methods to execute core logic in different environments (collator, validator, and cumulus setups).

We have enabled a mechanism for the network maintainers (a.k.a. validators) to charge fees for the network’s resource usage. In particular, having a message stuck in the Wait List will cost the original sender a certain per-block fee. Furthermore, external users can participate in this game by keeping track of the WaitList state and suggesting those messages which have stayed there longest, thereby increasing the overall efficiency in terms of collected rent per message, in exchange for a portion of the total fee.

We added a submit_code call. This allows committing actors to the chain to be instantiated later from other actors.

In December we saw strong growth of the Gear community around the world. Following our series of educational events in both the US and Russia, we held another workshop at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University and two online workshops for the Chinese community. We outlined the benefits of our technology and demonstrated how to deploy smart contracts on the Gear platform.

According to tradition, before New Years is a good time to reflect on the achievements of the year, so we also would like to share a small summary of what we accomplished during 2021.

Since our GitHub became public in August, we reduced block time and the process queue at the end of a block. We replaced the procedure of handling the message queue to something more similar to what will be used in production mode. Messages are handled immediately; in other words in the same block, and they are submitted to the message queue (if the block gas limit is sufficient). Block time was also reduced to one second. As a result the latency of the network theoretically goes down (improves) by a factor of 18x.

In September, we made changes to the process of obtaining Metadata. In October, we wrote our custom Asynchronous Mutex, which allows programs to exclusively lock specific data and ensure it is not mutated by other messages while locked. Along with Asynchronous Mutex, we wrote Asynchronous RwLock — a reader-writer lock that allows more fine-grained async data locks.

Tree structures have been valued for the (future) gas spending algorithm, which isa step towards a self-consistent gas economy where gas associated with the message is always preserved. This was one of the milestones from our November report. ​

The growth of the community has played an essential role in 2021. In October, we launched our website with a new design and user-friendly interface. We held seven workshops and various MeetUps. Three workshops took place in Russia and one in the USA. The other three events were held online: the first was for students from the Computer Science and Engineering Society of the University of California San Diego. Another two were held for the Chinese community. So far, we have held five successful AMAs with our CEO and Founder, Nikolay Volf, hosted by PolkaWarriors, PolkaWorld, the famous Turkish influencer OrientusPrime, and Russian YouTube channels Cryptovo and ProBlockchain.

If you would like to learn more about Gear’s development in 2021, you can keep up with our monthly reports on Medium.

We would like to thank our fantastic audience who participated in all our events during the year, and we hope to see you again in 2022! More great things are coming, and we cannot wait to share them with you! We wish you all a Happy New Year!

Sincerely,

The Gear Team