Polymesh gets a major Substrate update with version 5.4!

We’re delighted to announce that Polymesh has been upgraded to 5.4, bringing the chain up-to-date with Substrate and adding support for smart contracts written in Ink! 4.0.

Among other updates, the 5.4 release also brings a new weight system (V2), asset metadata improvements, updated schema, and decode logic for ticker validation. 

The full release notes can be found at:https://github.com/PolymeshAssociation/Polymesh/releases/tag/v5.4.0

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Substrate Upgrade 

Polymesh 5.4 upgrades the blockchain to Substrate monthly 2022-12. This major Substrate update brings a new weight system (V2), a new version of pallet contracts supporting Ink! 4.0, and new data migration functionality through pallet scheduling and pre-imaging. 

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Asset metadata improvements

The 5.4 release introduces modified logic for metadata details that prevents locking a key with an empty value–a feature that would have been a footgun and caused problems for developers down the road. 

It also brings the capability to remove the local key or metadata values as long as they aren’t locked. 

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Ticker validation in decode logic

Decode logic is also changed to improve ticker validation. Previously on Polymesh, the SDK filtered out tickers with non-readable characters by validating ticker inputs as ASCII. As ASCII, control characters or trailing spaces could be used to trick users by creating tickers that look like other tickers, the logic for ticker naming and validation has been changed to only allow registration and validation of alphanumeric tickers as opposed to ASCII. 

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Schema update

The Polymesh SDK’s schema file has been updated for 5.4, enabling users to run the SDK against 5.4 without error. 

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Coming up next

Our next release will introduce sub-identities and changes to settlement. As this major release needs auditing, it will be several months before it occurs on-chain.

Separate from releases, we're smoothing and streamlining the user experience involved in getting started with Polymesh. 

Soon we’ll also introduce the Polymesh Portal, an interface for interacting with an account on Polymesh. The repository is now public under a GPL3 license: 

https://github.com/PolymeshAssociation/polymesh-portal