Release Summary
Runtime 2700 was released on January 4, 2024 and contains improvements targeting a variety of community stakeholders.
Audience: Community Members
Preparation for “Asynchronous Backing”
This technical milestone of the Polkadot Relay chain, once fully rolled out and adopted, should greatly increase the throughput of the Polkadot ecosystem. For example, in theory, a parachain’s blocktime should be reduced from 12 seconds to 6 seconds.
Enable Identity Precompile
Moonbeam and Moonriver enable users to include personal information (e.g., name, Twitter handle, email) in their on-chain account using a naming system inherited from the identity pallet for Polkadot parachains. Previously, identity features were limited to substrate transactions and wallets, excluding compatibility with the EVM and EVM-based wallets like Metamask. In Runtime 2700, an enabled identity precompile allows the utilization of identity features within EVM smart contracts and dapps.
Audience: Dapp Developers
Enablement of a Storage Limit per Gas (MBIP-5) on Moonbeam
This change is to ensure that the storage of the networks grows in a sustainable way by limiting the amount of storage that can be included in a given block. Going forward, a transaction will consume additional gas based on the storage used. This will be reflected in the gas estimation call of the transaction, as returned by Moonbeam’s Ethereum JSON RPC.
See forum post for details.
Simplified Fee Management for XCM Transactions
Runtime 2700 introduces the ability for developers to buy “Unlimited” execution for a given amount of tokens provided in the XCM message. Consequently, they don’t have to worry about setting the right values of execution that their XCM message needs, and only provide enough tokens to cover the fees. This is also accessible via the XCM-Transactor precompile.
Audience: Core Developers
Upgrade to Polkadot-SDK 1.3.0
The polkadot SDK is upgraded to 1.3.0 from 1.1.0. The upgrade contains many improvements across a multitude of “pallets” (modules) included in the Moonbeam runtime:
- Improvements for Preimage storage (used for governance proposals)
- Support for treasury spending across different assets/tokens (eg. stablecoins but note that Moonbeam and Moonriver remain configured to only use their native tokens for treasury spend)
- Improvements to how on-chain identity data fields are managed
- Improvements to XCM fee management