Enhanced Developer Tooling and Improved Data Availability in the July 2023 Engineering Update | SKALE

Welcome to the SKALE monthly engineering recap! SKALE is thrilled to share the latest advancements and developments from the SKALE developer community. In this edition, the focus will be on exciting updates and additions that enhance the SKALE ecosystem.

wagmi Additional Functionality‍

The SKALE Developer Success team has helped update another incredible tool for developers to use! The wagmi package is a great collection of tooling for Ethereum in the Typescript language and is available as an NPM package. It is commonly used within RainbowKit and other popular libraries that developers in the SKALE and greater Ethereum ecosystems use to build their platforms. This SKALE wagmi update has improved the following specifically for SKALE:

- Multicall deployed across SKALE Hubs, both on mainnet and testnet, and Chaos testnet

- Multicall3 to SKALE Hub Chains in wagmi - allowing for batched transactions natively

- Added websocket (wss) Endpoints to all chains in wagmi‍

New SKALE Developer Recipe: Dynamic NFT Creation‍

A new developer recipe has been added to the SKALE docs portal that provides an in-depth guide to creating an animated, dynamic NFT that stores all graphics and metadata on-chain and utilizes SKALE's on-chain RNG for unique mints for each user. Learn How To Create A Dynamic NFT! 

Video Tutorial: Mint your first NFT Recipe

‍Deploying an NFT collection has never been easier, thanks to SKALE's fast and free architecture! In 4 easy steps, you can mint NFTs for FREE on SKALE using Remix. After watching the video tutorial, dive into the full Mint Your First NFT recipe. 

SKALE Network Release 2.2

SKALE upgrade 2.2 is on the horizon, and the SKALE developer community has proceeded with testing, cleaning up, and making a final pass on the code. As a reminder, release 2.2 includes:

• Optimizations to the IMA bridge to make transactions process even faster
• Improved operations with state in SKALE chains
• Increased stability of SKALE chain performance under high load 
• Improved node rotation mechanism 
• Re-Enabling self-destruct functionality in SKALE chains for smart contracts 
• Return transaction signature in receipts to be compatible with Ethereum JSON RPC API

Block Explorer Stabilization‍

Due to SKALE’s ability to generate extremely high transaction loads (up to 400TPS), the initial versions of the block explorer experienced some lag in reporting blocks, for high-performance Dapp chains. A new, more stable upgrade to the block explorer is being finalized and will increase the reliability of high-load chains. 

Levitation Protocol Research & Experiments

‍Earlier this year, SKALE announced the Levitation Protocol, a fully-decentralized ZK scaling solution designed to revolutionize the world of zero-knowledge proofs by enabling a full host of ZK solutions to connect seamlessly into the SKALE Architecture with rollup connectivity to the Ethereum Mainnet. Levitation Protocol is open-source and decentralized enabling any ZK solution the potential to plug into and utilize Levitation’s architecture. The SKALE developer community has begun researching and experimenting with different open-sourced ZK solutions, and their implementation with SKALE. 

SKALE Dashboards on DUNE Analytics‍

In an effort to provide more transparency and accessibility to SKALE Network’s operational metrics, Artem Payvin, Director of Deployment Engineering, and Manuel Barbas, Deployment Engineer, created a Dune dashboard for SKALE. This dashboard provides open insight into validators, delegators, SKALE chains, node rotation, and more! Check out the SKALE Dune dashboard here. 

As we conclude this month's engineering recap, the SKALE team continues to push the boundaries of blockchain technology with their relentless dedication to innovation and improvement. Exciting times lie ahead as SKALE continues to shape the future of decentralized ecosystems. Stay tuned for more groundbreaking developments in the coming months!