Polkadot and Kusama nominator controller accounts are being deprecated

[rossbulat]

Polkadot and Kusama nominator controller accounts are being deprecated

This is an issue to notify the maintainers of this repo that nominator controller accounts are being deprecated on Polkadot and Kusama, in favour of proxy accounts. In an upcoming runtime upgrade (version and date is yet to be determined), 2 call signatures of the staking pallet will change. These are breaking changes for UIs, so UIs will need to update their codebases when the changes come into effect.

Call Changes

The staking.bond and staking.setController call signatures have now changed in the Substrate codebase PR here, and will take effect in a future runtime upgrade.

• set_controller(controller) will become set_controller(). This call will simply set the controller account to the caller's stash account, if it is not already.
• bond(controller, value, payee) will become bond(value, payee). This call will now set the caller as the controller account (same as the stash).

UIs can prepare now by adding a controller deprecation message, and allow stakers to change their controller accounts back to their stash using the existing staking.setController(controller) call. The Polkadot staking dashboard recently deployed this functionality and may be useful as reference code.

Next Steps

• A follow-up message will be made when we know when these changes will be on Westend, giving UIs time to test any needed changes.
• Follow-up messages will be made here when we know the runtime version and date of the change on Polkadot and Kusama.

Other Resources

• Polkadot Forum Discussion: https://forum.polkadot.network/t/staking-controller-deprecation-plan-staking-ui-leads-comms/2748

[rossbulat]

8th June 2023 Update

Westend now reflects the changes of bond and set_controller.

• set_controller(controller) has become set_controller(). This call simply sets the controller account to the caller’s stash account, if it is not already.
• bond(controller, value, payee) has become bond(value, payee). This call now sets the caller as the controller account (same as the stash).

UIs can now test any necessary changes on Westend leading up to the mainnet releases.

We can assume that the next Polkadot and Kusama releases will reflect these changes, and that it will be at least 4-6 weeks before they are deployed on the networks.

[rossbulat]

Mainnet Deployment Timeline Confirmed

The corresponding referendum Ref 221 was submitted in Kusama and it is scheduled to be enacted on the 03/07/2023 (block #18625000).

Ref 18 was submitted in Polkadot and it is scheduled to be enacted on the 18/07/2023 (block #16450000).