Polkadot introduced a new testnet this week as a step toward full parachain functionality in the network. The new testnet, called Rococo, integrates Cumulus and HRMP (Horizontal Relay-chain Message Passing) in Polkadot.
It is an essential step toward more efficient tools for parachain developers. Rococo offers them options like registering a substrate-based chain as a parachain and message the Relay Chain or writing logic for parachains to send messages to other parachains through the Relay Chain.
Rococo will help developers examine parachain functionality in Polkadot. It’s also a solution for testing the development of Cross-Consensus Message (XCM) format. Like any other testnet, Rococo will let community members – especially developers – to share feedback and ideas. It will hello the development team to improve the network for the final mainnet launch.
Parachain functionality is a step toward simple blockchain in Polkadot. Another chain called Relay Chain provides the security features in it and also guarantees the security of messaging between chains. Polkadot is the leading team to offer parachain in its network and will improve Rococo to achieve the final parachain-based network.
Parity Technologies, the company behind Polkadot project, will control the Sudo key in Rococo testnet. It’s needed because of the Proof of Authority nature of the network.
“Rococo will include three parachains that support sending messages to the Relay Chain, and messages between each other through the relay chain,” according to the blog post by Polkadot.
Rococo testnet is on the initial steps and needs multiple improvements and reset phases to become more stable. Polkadot says the current version is not feature-set. Some functionalities like HRMP have to be removed and added various times to become reliable after bug fixing and code improvements.
“Functions like XCMP (Cross-Chain Messaging Passing, enabling direct parachain-to-parachain messaging) and “hot-swapping” an independently running Substrate chain with a parachain are not yet activated. However, these features are planned for a future release of Cumulus on Rococo,” added Polkadot.
Cumulus is another vital component in Polkadot chain that acts as a consensus engine for substrate and runs a Polkadot node internally.
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