High Priority

• Actionable: Councilmember Remz has shared their work reviewing the Wako release after continued work by Drew and Raymond.  They document several of their findings on Github, but they involve repairing unintended changes to network parameters. When this upgrade is ready and deployed successfully, EDG will have a stable EVM platform. Developers and validators are requested to review these changes, provide their thoughts on parameters and fixes, and otherwise test and run this node release and report bugs to the Github repo. Additionally, you can participate at the Builders channel in Discord at edgeware.chat

+ Reverted the bonding duration to 2 weeks (was changed to 24 weeks)

+ Reverted slash duration to 1 week (was changed to 6 weeks) 

+ Changed the vote locking period back to 1 week. This one was changed from 1 week to 1 day on last upgrade, as an unwanted result of changing the voting enactment time. The change is probably uncontroversial (the parameters now just don't make sense), but would need to be mentioned when deploying launching the upgrade for good order.

+ Reverted GAS_PER_SECOND to 8_000_000, which was the previous value intended for mainnet instead of 40_000_000. The EVM is untested in production and there isn't much value in deploying with a massive gas capacity before getting any usage. We can scale this number up as we get more confident over time. 

+ Removed the dumplicate definition of EthApi.There were two identical enum definitions in different files, with one mapping all elements to the other on funcction call to avoid type mismatch. Why it was done that way is a mystery, but functionalities shouldn't be affected by the change. It needs to be tested for good order."

Status updates

• Introduction to Cohorts: We're looking for ambitious learners that would like to grow with Edgeware, and become a core part of our community. The Edgeware cohort program is a new program that will educate individuals on the structure and operations of Edgeware, Substrate, and blockchain technology, and provide the skills necessary to contribute to the evolution of Edgeware's ecosystem. The first cohort session will be limited to 10 spots and will be starting: Nov 23rd, 11:00 AM EST in the Voice-Builders voice channel on the Edgeware discord. An introduction seminar will take place and will follow a weekly schedule for 6 weeks.
• Bi-weekly Builder's Call + Community Hackday: November 23rd, 2:00 PM EST in the Voice-Builders voice channel on the Edgeware discord. Every other Tuesday at 2p EST. Bring questions, projects to show off, and ideas!
• You can listen to the recording of the last builders call on November 9th here!
• During the Sub0 conference, the Edgeware agency took notes! You can check them out here. You can read through and get the main points and the slides of each presentation. It is not fully completed we will add to it over time as we finish watching the intermediate and advanced presentations.

Ecosystem Headlines

Core Stack

• A bug with off chain workers where their http agent couldn’t parse http2 returns is now fixed.
• Every single Substrate pallet has been migrated to the newer `!pallet` macros from the “old” approach of writing pallets. A monumental achievement!
• Substrate’s JSON RPC server will now fall back to a random port if the default fails.
• Users have been complaining that the AllowDeath flag on crowdloan contributions is unexpected and has been eating dust out of accounts when users do not contribute the full amount into the crowdloan. This PR changes the AllowDeath flag on contribute to KeepAlive, which forces the user to keep the existential deposit of funds in their account after the crowdloan contribution. As an alternative option, users can now also call contribute_all, which automatically calculates the full balance available to transfer from the user, and contributes that to the crowdloan while allowing death of the account.
• It looks like Parity will be taking over and leading the development of the sub-bounties extension for the Bounty pallet.
• Substrate nodes would store private keys in the somewhat insecure 644 mode on the filesystem they run on. This has now been fixed to be mod 600 (read/write owner only).

Substrate

• Next Substrate Seminar Nov 30th

"Michal Swietek, Co-founder of Aleph will be presenting Aleph, the first asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol that achieves asymptotically optimal performance: constant latency and communication complexity. The goal of this seminar is to give a bird’s eye view of Aleph, its implementation in Rust and our experience in integrating it as a finality gadget in Substrate (replacing GRANDPA with Aleph). The differences between Aleph and GRANDPA will be discussed, including performance benchmarks and some tradeoffs."

Tools

• Polkadot JS API 6.8.1 is out with some low-priority performance fixes and other minor updates.
• Polkadot JS API 6+ will soon have improved type generation, so that the promise of auto-built types from Substrate nodes can finally become a reality.
• Substrate API Sidecar 11.3.0 is out with low upgrade priority, minor bug fixes.