Abstract
Moonbeam’s current lease period on the Polkadot network will expire in October 2023. In June 2023, the Moonbeam Foundation successfully secured a new parachain slot on Polkadot covering lease periods 13 through 20.
This proposal is a necessary step to extending Moonbeam’s Polkadot lease period through June 2025 by executing a “swap” of lease periods.
If the swap is not completed before October 2023, Moonbeam will not occupy an active parachain slot and would stop producing blocks.
Details
The lease for periods 13 through 20 is currently occupied by “Moonelement” with parachain ID 3342, a dummy parachain runtime created by the Moonbeam team.
In order to complete a lease swap between Moonbeam (parachain 2004) and Moonelement (parachain 3342), a “handshake” must be completed whereby both parachains authorize the lease swap.
From the Moonbeam side, Moonbeam OpenGov Referendum 11 is expected to be confirmed in approximately 1 day (September 6, 2023). The passage of this referendum will cause an XCM message to be sent to the Polkadot relay chain calling the registrar.swap extrinsic. This extrinsic will authorize the swap from the Moonbeam side.
To complete the “swap” process, a similar swap authorization will be required to be made on behalf of the Moonelement parachain (ID 3342). The Moonbeam team had planned to start the Moonelement parachain and initiate a similar XCM message to be sent to the relay chain.
Unfortunately, there was a misconfiguration in the genesis head that was submitted along with the WASM when the parachain was initially registered. The Moonbeam technical team has determined that starting Moonelement will not be possible.
For this reason, the Moonbeam Foundation has created Polkadot OpenGov Referendum 139 which, when passed, will execute the registrar.swap extrinsic on behalf of the Moonelement parachain.
Using “Chopsticks”, the Moonbeam team has verified that the parachains will successfully swap leases once both the Moonbeam and Polkadot governance motions are passed and executed.
Once the parachains swap leases, the Moonbeam Network will be able to continue operation without interruption for the remainder of the full lease period (approximately 96 weeks from August 1, 2023).
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