Pontem Network Joins Polkadot’s Substrate Builder’s Grant Program

Tortola, BVI, 24th October, 2021,

Pontem is excited to announce that after 3 months, they have achieved Milestone #1 of Parity’s Substrate Builder’s grant program. This program sponsored by Parity, the developers of the Polkadot blockchain, allows projects that are building Substrate-based blockchains, applications, or ecosystem components to receive support for technical challenges, strategy, and ecosystem building from Parity’s extensive experience and resources.

Pontem is one of over 50 projects that has been accepted into the Substrate Builders Program, and receives support from Parity Technologies on their technical and community roadmaps, as well as setting predetermined milestones to achieve their goals and launch their project.

As part of the Builder’s Program, Pontem has recently completed Milestone #1, which includes the following accomplishments:

Launching their own Parachain

Pontem converted their standalone Substrate blockchain to a Parchain using the Cumulus framework and the Nimbus consensus extensions.

Adopting the Diem Standard Library for compatibility with Pontem

While adopting the new standard library, compatibility issues arose. In order to solve the issue some functions were restricted, and some Pontem-only related functions were created.

Implementing collator staking

After launching the Parachain, Parachain collator staking – similar to Moonbeam and Moonriver, Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachains on Polkadot and Kusama respectively.

Implementing an alpha for Bridge

After being advised to implement an alpha version of Bridge between Pontem Network and Diem, Pontem chose to implement alpha versions of Bridge contracts that can later be integrated with ChainBridge.

Along with these major accomplishments, Pontem was also able to update all of their environments to the latest version of Move VM, including tools, VM WASM, and Pallet. They were also able to successfully set up and run their own Relay Chain during the launch of their parachain, which they then connected to the Parachain. Other, smaller accomplishments include updating their documentation and releasing a bootstrap docker compose for validators.

Pontem is already looking forward to Milestone 2, and they have already started progress on some aspects like governance, treasury, and xcmp. They plan to start working heavily on Milestone #2 in the coming days after starting with integration and runtime tests. Their goal is to be ready to become a Parachain on Kusama in the near future.

Pontem is working towards their ultimate goal of being a permissionless, experimentation testnet for the Facebook-backed Diem blockchain, and they are excited to head into the next milestone. If you are interested in learning more, you can visit their website, find them on Twitter as well as join their Telegram chat.

About Pontem

Pontem is building a bridge to connect the Diem Blockchain to the decentralized ecosystem of public permissionless blockchains like Ethereum via Polkadot. This will expose Facebook’s 2.7 billion users to any crypto use-case, from decentralized finance (DeFi) to non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With Pontem Network and development platform, users can build and test apps on Polkadot and other popular blockchains before migrating their products to the Diem Blockchain.