Pontem Web3 Foundation Grant

We are pleased to announce that Pontem Network has been approved for a grant from Web3 Foundation and has achieved our first milestone.
We are progressing in our aim to bring the Move VM, Move Language and the ecosystem around it to Polkadot.

This will support us in our aim to bring the Move VM, Move Language and the ecosystem around it to Polkadot.

In order to achieve this goal, we aim to make it easier to access decentralized tools and allow them to operate with each other. we aim to make it easier to access decentralized tools and allow them to operate with each other. This is why Polkadot, a scalable sharded chain and the first protocol that provides a secure environment for cross-chain composability across multiple shards, is an ideal protocol for Pontem Network to build upon.

Pontem has chosen Move Language and Move VM as they are one of the safest technologies for smart contract development. Yet, despite having built-in security by design such as resource-oriented architecture and formal verification, Move VM still severely lacks instruments and documentation. And we are proud to be supported by the Web3 Foundation fund.

The main goal of Pontem Network is to bring the Move Virtual Machine, Move Language, and the ecosystem surrounding it (Facebook’s Diem as known as ex-Libra) to Polkadot. We have chosen Move Language and Move VM as they are one of the safest technologies for smart contract development. But Move VM still severely lacks instruments and documentation. For this reason, the Pontem Network team actively participates in creating a rich toolset and documentation for Move Language in conjunction with Wings Foundation.

Our technology will provide great utility for the Polkadot network by enabling 2 billion Facebook Diem (ex-Libra) users to access decentralized tools, opening the benefits of the decentralized world to them. It will also allow new users to enrich the decentralized society and support existing and upcoming blockchain projects.

So what’s the plan?

Now we can proudly say that we have successfully achieved the first milestone and it got accepted by the Web3 Foundation dev team.
We developed an initial Move VM pallet, that any developer can use to try Move VM on Polkadot. And also adopted compiler for that, and allows to send first transactions contains Move language scripts/modules.

Even though the Pontem team has extensive practical experience working with Move and building different tools around it, we understand that implementing the Move VM pallet won’t be that easy. Yet, we have come up with an elegant solution for utilizing Move VM inside Polkadot WASM Runtime.

Here’s a short plan of how it’s going to work:

1. Move VM and language are written in Rust language, so they are compiled to Polkadot WASM. Unfortunately, we still cannot use the crates that depend on Runtime. For this reason, we can only create a stable pallet by forking Move VM/language and replacing crates with ones we can use. These new crates may include simple alternatives to the already existing ones or will be developed by our team.
2. During our latest research, we discovered that Move VM outputs, WriteSets, will not work with the Polkadot key-value storage as they are. For this reason, we’ll have to make them compatible with the storage and transform them from LCS to Polkadot codec format. The same thing will have to be done with address format SS58 and non-VM balances.
3. We’ll need to change VM gas usage units and math to make them compatible with Polkadot standards.
4. We will also build documentation around the Move pallet and adopt the existing tools and documents about Move VM and language.

This is just a brief explanation of the roadmap that we’ve developed.
In the second milestone we are going to upgrade the alpha version with arguments parsing, standard library support, adopt Move resource viewer, and much more.
For more details see our grant proposal, where we’ve described all the milestones in detail.

How will we accomplish it?

We believe that Pontem Network will fit the ecosystem perfectly since it will enable the development of custom DApps on Polkadot using the Move technology stack. This will help us gain the support of a wider audience as well.

If you are interested in following our progress as we continue down our roadmap, follow us on:

Telegram chat https://t.me/pontemnetworkchat

Twitter https://twitter.com/PontemNetwork

Or check out our website: https://pontem.network

Again, we thank Web3 Foundation for their support of Pontem Network and look forward to helping build the decentralized world.

To learn more about Web3 Foundation, visit their website or join them on Reddit or Twitter.

Web3 Foundation about us: Twitter | Medium