PolkaGate 2nd milestone

Submission date: 13.3.2023 (discussion date: 13.2.2023)
Requested allocation: 6,533.71 KSM (210 kUSD, based on EMA7 by Subscan 1KSM = 32.141 )

Polkagate extension is a user-friendly extension/wallet to interact with the Polkadot/Substrate based blockchains through a browser. The extension allows users to access their Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem account(s), which can also be used to interact with decentralized apps. It injects a @polkadot/api signer into a page, along with any associated accounts.

Polkagate is now available on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge web stores for download.

Polkagate extension’s main supported functionalities, developed in milestone 1, are as follows:

• Add address only accounts (To be used as a watch only and proxied address)
• Contribute to Crowdloans (View contributions/auctions, and contribute to crowdloans)
• Export/Import/Derive account(s)
• Ledger support
• Parachain accounts
• Phishing website detection
• Pool staking (Fully supported, including pool management and owners exit facilities)
• Proxy management (Add/Remove proxy accounts, sign with proxy accounts)
• QR account import
• Solo staking (Fully supported, including fast unstake, reward history, and advanced settings)
• Support different remote nodes
• Switch to recent chains
• Transfer funds
• View balances (Crypto/USD)
• View transactions history
• View an address as a QR code
  
  Polkagate team aims to provide additional new features, and the budget is requested for the development of the 2nd milestone:

After the delivery of milestone 1 of the PolkaGate extension with the above mentioned features, We are going to develop the milestone 2 of the proposal to add the following features to the PolkaGate extension:

1. Identity management: Identities exist on-chain but cannot be managed via the extension, we already have shown the identity for accounts, but we want to bring the full management of identities into the extension. Accounts’ names in the extension may differ from their on-chain identities, and this may be inconvenient to distinguish which identity belongs to which name/Id. This problem will be more for users with multiple accounts. Moreover, in social account recovery, when you lose your account, most probably you cannot remember the address, hence on-chain names come in handy! By integrating the identity management into the extension, users not only can easily set their identities but also request judgements using the extension. In addition, using the on-chain identity instead of the local name of accounts, makes the accounts management more convenient. Identities also help social recovery be more user-friendly for users.

2. OpenGov: We would like to have OpenGov features in the extension so that most token holders of the community can easily participate in new governance activities. OpenGov is new with more changes in the pipeline (v2.5). Community involvement is still low in openGov activities. Sometimes proposals are very technical, and sometimes users may not be available in the voting period to vote. Making voting more accessible and providing vote/list delegation besides all governance facilities in Polkagate extension, will increase the tokens participated in different OpenGov voting activities.

3. Light client integration: We would like to provide the Polkadot light client as an end point in the extension, which will make the extension much more standalone, and help the ecosystem to be more decentralized. If blockchain endpoints stop servicing for whatever reason, since no data can be fetched from them, hence all extensions and wallets would be useless. Integrating the light client inside the extension not only helps to distribute the Polkadot ecosystem more but also lets the extension operate while all existing endpoints stop servicing. However, we need to consider the sync waiting time when using the light client.

4. Social Recovery: Managing your own private keys is a difficult task. The average person doesn’t want to spend multiple hours to ensure the security of their keys. This leads to people having difficulties to join the blockchain space or even worse leads to the loss of funds. Social account recovery is the solution. It allows users to recover their accounts if their key or other authentication mechanism has been lost. When an account is recoverable, if you lost the account, you can create a new account named Rescuer, and recover your lost account with the help of your lost account’s on-chain friends in a recovery process.

5. Misc. updates: Due to adding new features in milestone 2, some new functionalities need to be added to the currently existing features, and pages need to be upgraded. With vote locking in openGov, the extension’s account page needs to be upgraded to show locks information and let account holders to clear the locks, and also show suitable alerts when locks expire. With vote delegation, we are going to let users have the option to choose un-delegation while unstaking, to have the unlocking period overlapped not stacked. To support XCM, we want to add multi chain transfering to the transfer fund page to let users teleport their tokens.

Please find the full proposal here.