As you might already know, parachains are different individual layer-1 blockchains, running in parallel within the Polkadot ecosystem, on the Kusama network – and soon to be Polkadot as well. While they leverage the central Relay Chain to stay connected and secured, they benefit from Polkadot’s other properties, such as its security, scalability, interoperability, and governance.
The uses of parachains are multiple. Taking the advantage of Polkadot’s cross-chain composability feature, any sort of data or asset can be sent between parachains. While it makes Parachains eligible to connect to external networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the property also exposes a parachain to a host of new cases and applications.
These benefits are what make parachains the talk of the town. Becoming a parachain allows your project to operate without paying any fees, gas, or otherwise. You get unmatched access to the relay chain and can write transactions whenever you want. It gives parachains a striking edge over parathreads, which are essentially pay-as-you-go parachains.
Kusama Parachain Auctions
What is a Parachain auction? These are auctions held on the Polkadot relay chain. They determine which blockchain will connect to the parachain slot. Quite similar to the regular auctions we see in the world of mainstream physical transactions, here too, the teams bid on Kusama on Polkadot. Bidding on Kusama requires using KSM tokens, the native ones of the platform. Generally, the party who bids the highest
Being Polkadot’s canary network, Kusama rolled out five auctions during the period between June 15th, 2021, and July 20th, 2022. The five winners of these auctions were Karura, Moonriver, Shiden, Khala, and Bifrost. Here, we will have a look at the progress made so far by each of these winners. However, we will start with Kusama’s first featureful parachain, Statemine. The inclusion of Statemine, a common-good parachain for digital assets, dates back to its pre-auction time.
Parachain Progress so Far
Statemine
The latest update is that the Kusama community has just voted to upgrade Statemine parachain’s runtime. It became permissionless after successfully demonstrating its teleport functionality, both to and from Statemine, and implementing the security auditors’ recommendations.
Earlier, the Kusama Council had exclusive authority over asset creation. During the trial phase, the Parity and Web3 foundation teams and the Kusama Council evaluated Statemine’s performance. Subsequently, it lifted the restrictions, allowing anyone to create assets.
Karura
Karura, a DeFi-specific hub, was the first of the five to win a Kusama parachain auction. Since winning the auction, it has crossed many milestones. It has completed the Karura Genesis launch and finalized the distribution of KAR tokens.
On the governance front, it has decided to govern via the Proof of Authority or PoA consensus mechanism. It has also completed its tech verification and runtime upgrade, the enabling of inter-Kusama KSM transfer from Kusama to Karura, the enabling of appointed council governance and token transfers. Currently, the work for the Claim KAR functionality is in progress, along with the processes of enabling the Karura DEX and kUSD borrow functionality.
Moonriver
Moonriver has completed the launch of its Genesis block, simultaneously bringing its network to a centralized model where the governance and infrastructure will be run by the Moonbeam team.
On July 9th, 2021, the Moonriver team made an announcement. It began with decentralizing and adding third-party collators to the active set. The third announcement came on July 23rd, 2021, as Moonriver decided to use the Sudo Key to issue a runtime upgrade, along with enabling governance.
Shiden
After winning the Parachain auction, Shiden has upgraded the collator runtime to bring compatibility with the latest Kusama version. It has also adjusted the transaction fees for vesting tokens, enabling the batch utilization module. It is also done with the Kusama PLO reward distribution.
Phala
After completing the first round of Kusama Paradrop, Phala has completed the PHA mainnet migration. It has also finalized its token distribution model, with an allocation of 70% for the miners, followed by provisions for private sale (15%), airdrop (9%), team (5%), and incentives (1%).
Leveraging Web3 analytics, you can now tokenize your data to make profits for them. The decentralized dark pool will allow free on-chain trading. It has also introduced Phala DAO, a new concept council. Its liquid democracy capability exhibits a Phala-empowered novel democratic voting mechanism, realizable only on the power networks.
It has also fixed the chain-stuck problem, integrated Phala, rewarded crowd loan contributors on Khala, and published the Khala wallet.
Bifrost
According to the latest weekly report of Bifrost, the fifth winner of the Kusama auctions and a DeFi protocol designed to stake liquidity of different PoS chains, the mainnet is live with the collator upgraded to version 0.98. In node developments, Bifrost has fixed the SALP asset issue and added real-time refresh of addresses and plug-ins, while combining the optimized connection code load tokens.
It has also optimized its Dapp code structure and SALP code and solved the issues of data retention in the input box and incomplete flexible fee data loading.
Closing thoughts
Now that the initial winners are on track with their development, teams are free to extend their lease by winning another auction before their current slot lease period ends. Projects that have crowd loaned KSMs can unlock and return the tokens to the contributor’s control at the end of the lease period. It would be interesting to see how many of these projects renew their lease by the end of their tenure.
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As of July 13, 2021, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has infected over 187 million people and caused the deaths of over 4 million people worldwide. Upon infection by SARS-CoV-2, this virus binds with high affinity to the human angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (ACE2) receptor present on the surface of human cells. This mechanism has therefore been of interest to many researchers looking to develop treatments that could block ACE2 and/or disable the spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2.
A new study reports the results of molecular dynamic simulations that were performed in an effort to identify new drugs that could be effective against SARS-CoV-2.
Study: The molecular dynamics of possible inhibitors for SARS-CoV-2. Image Credit: PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek / Shutterstock.com
Background
The S protein of SARS-CoV-2 is made up of S1 and S2 subunits that mediate ACE2 engagement and viral-cell membrane fusion to ultimately allow for viral entry into the host cell. The S1 subunit carries the receptor-binding domain (RBD) that bears the receptor-binding motif (RBM), which is the location of residues that bind to the ACE2 interface.
Despite intensive efforts that have been made by the global scientific community to develop antiviral agents against SARS-CoV-2, their success has been limited. As a result, most physicians have instead relied on well-known drugs that are capable of reducing inflammation in patients with severe or critical COVID-19 in order to prevent multi-organ damage and death.
Many screening studies have been carried out to identify new drugs and/or repurpose those that are readily available. To this end, in silico techniques have been of great use in the initial identification of such compounds.
What did the study show?
In the current report, which was published in the Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, the authors described the use of molecular dynamics simulations to explore the binding affinities of nine compounds. Of these nine compounds, three were found to show significant therapeutic potential, which included SN35563, arbidol, and hydroxychloroquine.
SN35563, which is also known as R5, is a ketamine ester analog that wears off rapidly but continues to antagonize pain stimuli for a prolonged period. In the current study, the researchers found that while SN35563 binds at high affinity to the ACE2 receptor, it was not capable of binding to the SARS-CoV-2 S or RBD proteins at comparable levels.
Arbidol is a non-nucleoside broad-spectrum antiviral compound that is thought to inhibit virus-host cell membrane fusion while simultaneously strengthening immunity. At molecular levels, arbidol was found to preferentially bind to aromatic residues. When used clinically, arbidol has improved various health parameters in COVID-19 patients including oxygen saturation levels, as well as reduced intensive care unit (ICU) admissions and duration of hospitalization, with earlier discharge.
Hydroxychloroquine is both an anti-malarial and immunomodulatory drug that is widely used in the treatment of autoimmune arthritides as a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD). Both abridol and hydroxychloroquine were found to block the viral S protein without attaching to the ACE2 receptor. Based on the molecular dynamics simulations, the researchers believe that optimal blockade of SARS-CoV-2 invasion could successfully be achieved by a combination of arbidol or hydroxychloroquine with SN35563, as SN35563 can block the ACE2 receptor to compensate for the inability of the former agents to do so.
Remdesivir, which is an antiviral that has been extensively used to treat COVID-19 patients, was also studied in the current study. To this end, the researchers found that this agent may actually increase the risk of host cell infection as a result of its equal binding affinity to both the S and RBD proteins, as well as the ACE2 receptor. By binding to both simultaneously, remdesivir reduces the distance between the viral proteins and host cell receptor, thereby making viral infection more probable.
What are the implications?
Further tests will be required to determine whether combinations of SN35563 with either arbidol or hydroxychloroquine may have a synergistic effect on cell entry. If so, this combination treatment be extremely useful in blocking the ACE2 receptor and reducing the binding of SARS-CoV-2 to this receptor on the host cells. Moreover, the dose of each drug could be reduced in such combination treatment approaches.
Through the use of molecular dynamics simulations, the current study demonstrated a possible mechanism of action of three candidate compounds, which could lead to the development of potent antiviral drugs in the near future.