
**TL;DR**. Phala parachain is bricked. The team is requesting a Motion to fast-track a `Paras.forceSetCurrentCode` call to unbrick the parachain.

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Phala Network (id: 2035) became a parachain recently. However, during the progressive launching process, the team noticed that there's no way to upgrade the runtime due to the misconfiguration in the genesis runtime. Specifically, the genesis runtime has both sudo and democracy disabled. Without the help from the relaychain side, the parachain will be "bricked" forever -- all the functions need to be enabled by runtime upgrades which is infeasible due to the problem.

## Misconfigration in the runtime

The genesis runtime does have the sudo pallet, but the call was filterred by `BaseCall`. This is not the intention of the team or the community. So in [this commit](https://github.com/Phala-Network/khala-parachain/commit/2aa24fbe98c1071bd095e5ca3c0baaeac1ed528b#diff-8b627d75a9c3bb5efadbf5d7790f17649741fa78f7ced529be3c3b27cf943404), it includes the change to add it back. Without sudo enabled in the `BaseCall`, the team cannot call `sudo.Sudo` to access the root permission. On the other hand, democracy was also disalbed in the initial launching stage. All the ways to upgrade a runtime are impossible.

## Force runtime update on relaychain

The team request to reset the parachain runtime by `Paras.forceSetCurrentCode`. The team also hope that the proposal can be fast-tracked by the council and the technical committee, because it's aligned with the interest of the Polakdot community.

Without a fast-track, a democracy proposal will take around 2 weeks to be tabled (according to the current democracy scheduling), 4 weeks to be voted, and another 4 weeks to be enacted. There are more than 2451 DOT holders waiting for the release of the crowdloan rewards. The longer the parachain is bricked, the more risk the DOT holders suffers. If the proposal can be fast-tracked, we can quickly solve the problem in 1-2 weeks.

There are also similar cases in the past. [The motion 427](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/motion/427) unbricked a misconfigured parachain and was fast-tracked to execute in about one week. The team want to follow the same process to resolve the problem.

The team has already released the wasm to update and made the proposal preimage on the relaychain:

- Preimage: `0x7af427aa7665a073ca61b83c04791f185d9170ea2e49a8a7be323650cea8b75f`
- Code: [phala_parachain_runtime.compact.compressed.wasm](https://github.com/Phala-Network/khala-parachain/releases/tag/v0.1.13).

![](https://i.imgur.com/ooaAZHB.png)

## Phala's launch plan

Once the launch process is on track again, the team will enable full democracy and remove sudo pallet. Then the assets, [bridges](https://medium.com/phala-network/phala-network-launches-cross-chain-router-subbridge-breaking-the-boundaries-between-parachain-and-a55d38bc2557), and cloud computing resource incentives will be enabled gradually. Phala aims to provide its bridges, computation and network capacity to the parachains on Polkadot.



Unbrick Phala Network Parachain

I spent a few days to [fix a critical bug in Subxt](https://github.com/paritytech/substrate-subxt/pull/221), which have been blocking 3 teams for a few months. Before this fix, Subxt randomly crashes when submitting transactions, and it almost always crash when scanning a long range of blocks for their events.

The Pull Request is already merged.

Background: **[subxt](https://github.com/paritytech/substrate-subxt)** is the official rust client of Substrate. It's widely used by Polkadot ecosystem projects to interact with Polkadot and parachains. My team, Phala Network also relies on it to build all our bridges.

Time spent: 8 hours development, testing, and code-review

