All of the parachain auctions finished a few months back... and most of the projects that I had wanted to support managed to find a place in the Polkadot ecosystem. Sadly, not everything managed to win a parachain slot... and mostly, it was the really interesting ones that didn't manage. Ah well... perhaps next time, we really don't need a million DeFi clones... but that is all that most people are interested in.
Anyway... I have written before about the extra level of pain that interacting with Polkadot promises. Using Polkadot.js is just annoying, and the interface is jam-packed full of information... but presented in such a bland and dry manner that is often not really that intuitive to navigate. This is in stark contrast to the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems, two other universes that also promise a way to design an interoperable ecosystem of blockchains. Yes yes, I know that Cosmos has that at heart as a principle design feature, and that it isn't really the main target for the Ethereum ecosystem. Anyway, it could well be that I'm just more familiar with interacting with these two blockchains (Cosmos and Ethereum), but part of that has been that initial "icky" feeling that I had (and still have) with interacting with Polkadot.
Suffice to say, that means that I've been really procrastinating on checking on how to interact with the parachains that I backed... from claiming the crowdloans rewards, through to just governance interactions via voting. I was dreading it... but I have had a Centrifuge (CFG) crowdloan claim FAQ tab open on my phone for a few months... and I was pretty keen to just do it, just so that I could close that bloody tab!
As soon as I navigated to the Centrifuge claim portal, it was pretty straightforward... just sign and claim via the Polkadot.js extension. No problems... and navigating back to the dreaded Polkadot.js webpage was a quick switch to the right parachain to confirm that the tokens had arrived, and then a quick vote for governance candidates went off smoothly. What was immediately noticeable was that there appeared to be little use-case for the CFG token... pre-parachain, you could stake CFG, but after parachain, the security was provided by the DOT mainchain... and so, there was no need to stake CFG... hmmm... and that reminds me, I had another CFG account that had was staking on the old chain... I probably should try and figure out what is going on there! (Yay for Polkadot...).
However... that was where things stopped going easily. I noticed that some of the parachain auctions had already sent tokens to my account. Well, either that or I forgot that I had claimed them, but I'm pretty sure that I hadn't claimed anything yet. So, that was one headache out of the way... however, when I tried voting on Phala, there were errors... and it wasn't totally clear what the problem was (and I'm not particularly keen to go hunting around developer docs to figure out what the error code that flashed through meant... perhaps later, I will check out the block explorer to try and figure out what happened). Two failed transactions... and no voting was set. Hmmmm... really, I don't have this amount of problems in Cosmos or Ethereum... and again, it might just be familiarity... but I still find that Polkadot is currently terrible to interact with, and I'm vaguely competent with this sort of stuff, I can only imagine it would be nightmarish for someone who didn't know much about it.
So, I figure that I'm done with the Polkadot ecosystem for the time being. I have other things that I need to log and document (for taxes...), and I'm not prepared to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. I will just log the crowdloan rewards, and then try to return back to this when I have more free space in time and mind.
... but my previous impressions about Polkadot still remain. It is a complete poop to navigate and make sense of.... all the information is there, but it is not really front and centre, and it is as if the entire thing is just built for developers, and even then, it would be confusing to someone who wasn't working with it at all times. There doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason about why things do or don't work... and if you want to find out, you need to go searching for the information. It would be much handier to have clear instructions on the user interface, and clear reasons about why something didn't work.
I can also be found cross-posting at:
Publish0x
Handy Crypto Tools
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