Significantly Improves Developers Experience and Infrastructure to Provide Baseline Launch-Ready Functionality
Singapore – April 5, 2021 – Moonbeam, the Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on Polkadot, announced today the latest version of its TestNet, Moonbase Alpha. The Moonbeam team added exciting new features in the TestNet that will significantly improve the experience of developers building on Moonbeam and strengthen the network’s stability and decentralization. These updates are an essential step forward toward the launch of Moonriver, which is expected to happen in the following months.
The Moonbeam team is continuously working to streamline the experience of Solidity projects that want to expand to Polkadot. Moonbase Alpha v7 includes significant upgrades that improve the experience even further:
- Debugging and tracing node APIs: The implementation of debugging and tracing node APIs will allow devs to understand nested smart contract calls and replay complex smart contract call executions. These APIs are currently available in OpenEthereum and Geth implementations supporting Ethereum MainNet.
- Advanced block explorer support: This add-on will allow Moonbeam users to have better visibility into the EVM execution stack and the availability of indexed API services, which will give them access to valuable data to create performant user experiences.
- Pre-funded accounts standalone dev node: Similar to how Ganache works, the new standalone dev node has pre-funded accounts that make local development faster and easier.
The availability of these APIs opens the door for future integrations that will continue expanding Moonbeam’s growing portfolio of tools and integrations.
Moonbase Alpha v7 also includes significant infrastructure improvements. Most important are significant updates to Substrate and Cumulus, which will make the Moonbeam network compatible with the Rococo v1 branch of Polkadot. This opens the door to Moonbeam’s registration as a parachain on the current Rococo test environment. Additional infrastructure upgrades include improvements to the Moonbeam staking capabilities (announced in the previous version). The network has expanded its number of active collator slots from 8 to 16. A broad and decentralized set of collators is an important goal for Moonriver and Moonbeam to create a solid decentralized infrastructure for Moonbeam’s parachain.
Lastly, the Moonbeam on-chain governance system is functionally complete with the Council and Technical Committee modules’ addition. This builds upon the democracy functionality that was added in the previous version of the TestNet.
The complete list of updates included in Moonbase Alpha v7 can be found here.
Moonbase Alpha was created for development purposes; our team is continually developing and building the technology that will bring more features, security, and performance as we move forward. More information on Moonbase Alpha, including the features currently available, can be found on the project documentation site.
Learn how to start building on the Moonbeam TestNet, Moonbase Alpha, by visiting the official project documentation site or joining us on our Discord server.
About the Moonbeam Network
Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. As a parachain on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam will benefit from the shared security of the Polkadot relay chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot. Currently, in active development by PureStake, Moonbeam is expected to reach MainNet by mid-2021. Learn more: https://moonbeam.network/.
About PureStake
PureStake’s team has extensive experience building technology companies and complex software platforms. Led by Derek Yoo, former Fuze Founder, and CTO, PureStake provides protocol implementation services and creates developer tools for next-generation blockchain networks. Learn more: https://www.purestake.com/.
