Polymesh has been upgraded to v6.0!

We’re excited to share that Polymesh has been upgraded to v6.0, bringing tons of exciting new features in response to feedback from the institutions and entities working with the blockchain. 

Please note that for this release, a new version of the Polymesh Ledger App is required since the previous app is not compatible with the 6.0 runtime. This 6.0 compatible version of the Polymesh Ledger App has just been released in the Ledger Live store.

For this major release, the Polymesh Association engaged SRLabs, an experienced auditor of Substrate blockchains and partner of Parity. SRLabs diligently performed a full audit of Polymesh’s codebase to identify and resolve any issues. The full report will be released following the chain’s upgrade.

As is standard in upgrades, new features are introduced first at the chain level, with SDK and RESTful API integrations following. 

Read on for a brief overview of the exciting changes and how they’ll ease integration and increase the utility of Polymesh! 

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Child identities

Polymesh v6.0 introduces the concept of child identities, which are identities created unilaterally by an existing user without requiring them to re-complete identity verification. 

Previously, assigning a new identity to a user required the individual or entity to complete a customer due diligence (CDD) process with one of Polymesh’s permissioned identity verification providers. While this bolsters chain security in alignment with Polymesh’s public permissioned model, it meant extra overhead for entities requiring multiple identities, who needed to re-perform identity verification for every new identity.

Child identities make it easy to create multiple identities on Polymesh by letting existing users create new identities from a parent identity that inherit the parent identity’s CDD claims. Unlimited number of child identities can be created and tied to a parent identity. Child identities can be detached from parent identities if needed on the condition that the child identity has its own CDD claim.

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NFTs

With Polymesh v6.0, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have moved out of beta to become a fully productionized feature. 

NFTs allow the representation of non-fungible assets that belong to a common collection, with a common set of metadata to describe each individual item in the collection. 

Like fungible tokens, NFTs interact with Polymesh’s on-chain compliance engine and settlement engine, enjoying the full functionality Polymesh provides. The chain can enforce complex compliance rules around who can hold or transfer tokens, enforce affirmations from all involved counterparties of a multi-legged settlement instruction, and execute atomically alongside other fungible and non-fungible token transfers. 

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Affirmation exempt assets

Polymesh v6.0 introduces the concept of affirmation-exempt assets, or assets that do not require the receiver to explicitly affirm instructions for receipt. 

This feature is added to remove complexity from on-chain assets for which explicit affirmation of a transaction is unnecessarily burdensome, such as stablecoins. Exemptions can be set at the individual identity level by the owner of that identity, or exempted globally in the network via on-chain governance. 

Unless exempt, asset transfers will be enforced in line with Polymesh’s existing settlement flow that requires each counterparty in a transaction to explicitly affirm (either directly or via their custodian) each related settlement instruction. This model is especially useful for transactions involving security tokens or other regulated assets with legal and tax implications. 

To ensure the integrity of Polymehs’s on-chain settlement system, transactions concerning receipt of both exempt and non-exempt assets by a counterparty will still require affirmation by the counterparty for the non-exempt assets.

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Settlement

Settlement sees various improvements with Polymesh v6.0.

Off-chain settlement can now be represented by legs (payment receipts) of their own type and workflow to remove risk of user confusion between on- and off-chain assets. 

Additionally, a new settlement type has been introduced. Alongside relying on a scheduler via “settle on affirmation” or “settle on block”, users can now choose to manually execute a settlement instruction should they require fine-grained control over when a settlement instruction executes. 

Finally, settlement weight calculations have been improved to better manage throughput and more accurately represent the on-chain cost for settlements. 

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Sudo permissions

Polymesh v6.0 takes an important step towards further decentralization by removing the “sudo” pallet, which previously allowed a specified “sudo” key to execute admin-level transactions on-chain.

New chains commonly launch with guardrails such as sudo keys. The Polymesh Association is confident in Polymesh’s stability and security after a successful two years in operation and chosen to remove this break-glass functionality for increased decentralization. 

As of Polymesh v6.0, no “sudo” permissions on-chain remain and the chain’s governance features can only be executed through its formalized on-chain governance process. 

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Upstream updates

The Polymesh Association is committed to ensuring the chain remains up-to-date with upstream dependencies for Substrate.

Polymesh v6.0 includes large updates for the chain’s upstream components, including both the upstream Substrate library, and secondary dependencies such as updates to the Ink! Libraries used by Polymesh’s smart contract functionality. 

These updates ensure that Polymesh continues to remain aligned with the wider Substrate ecosystem, bringing compatibility benefits in the form of third party tools and libraries. 

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Miscellaneous improvements

In addition to the above headline features, Polymesh v6.0 brings a wide variety of enhancements, code hygiene improvements, and quality updates. 

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The full change log can be found at https://github.com/PolymeshAssociation/Polymesh/releases/tag/v6.0.0. 

To get notified ahead of Polymesh upgrades or features, join Polymesh’s developer mailing list.