Dot Leap 2024-1
New Year, New Memecoin
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What is $DED may never die
According to the world outside Polkadot, Polkadot is dead.
You know me. I think the entire industry is “dead”. Or more accurately, it never came to life. And every time a new memecoin goes up 1000x and revitalizes the bot farms on a particular chain, a part of me dies because I know the ~three retail people it drew in will get rugged and will then tell ~300 more to stay away.
And yet… it’s memecoin season. We have (only) two main competing ideas: PINK and DED (though that might change - see Dogfood section below 😏).
Here’s a brief recap.
PINK emerged organically as a grassroots effort from a slightly degen community inside Polkadot. It burst onto the scene with strong memes and a fun game promising a “pinkdrop”, so go play (the physics angle is really what makes it addictive!).
The launch date is unknown but the PINKDROP stapshot has been taken and the basic tokenomics are out. The game itself will still evolve as part of the Pink gaming universe. PINK “captures new mindshare by reinforcing the image that Polkadot is Pink, a color of positivity and laughter.” Moonbeam, Astar, Acala, Bifrost, and 10+ blockchains will allegedly be launching native utility for Pink upon TGE.
On the other hand, DED appeared as a way to board the hype train of memecoins as other chains explode in that direction, but in a more “official” way.
The friendly neighborhood whale, GiottoDF, thought it was time to put the Polkadot treasury to work by organizing a real marketing effort around the meme, which spawned technical, promotional, and content-related proposals around the theme, resulting in the iconic design too.
One example is the recently passed Lunar proposal for marketing $DED - Giotto even bet 10000 DOT on the successful outcome of this campaign. It is quite fascinating to see these almost opposite efforts emerge at the same time.
In my opinion, $PINK - despite a strong start - certainly has its work cut out for it without treasury support. As we all know… what is $DED may never die.
On a more serious and honest note, I have to say that these shenanigans make me very disappointed as all it once again shows is Polkadot playing catch up with other ecos (with a significant delay) rather than trailblazing.
Polkadot and Kusama Updates
If you’ve never read “An Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations”, it’s a perfect way to get a deep understanding of Polkadot. Thanks, Bill!
Snowbridge, the trustless Ethereum bridge, has executed a successful asset transfer from Ethereum Sepolia testnet to the Rococo Asset Hub and back. Thanks, Bill!
Agile coretime allocation has been activated on the Rococo testnet. For details on how agile coretime works, please read the Polkadot Wiki page or if you really wish to go into detail, you can read the RFC. Thanks, Bill!
Oldie but goldie at this point, but Gav’s roundup writeup is worth a read as usual.
Kusama and its recently added async backing experiences a hiccup. Originally though to be due to validators not having rotated their session keys to activate BEEFY, it was actually due to some subsystems being brought online mid-session. A fix which should prevent this from happening in the future is already in the works.
Novasama (team behind Nova wallet) took over maintenance of the Polkadot Vault app (previously Signer).
V and VI Dan Polkadot Fellowship ranks have been approved by a referendum. Feels a bit Obama-memey, but actually signals a good healthy start of the expert level tier of the fellowship. Now let’s see it maintained and defended.
"Approval-Based Committee Voting in Practice: A Case Study of (over-)Representation in the Polkadot Blockchain," which has two W3F co-authors (Jonas Gehrlein and Alfonso Cevallos) has been accepted by the AAAI. Thanks, Bill!
Huge optimizations to the validation protocol are coming in v1.6 of Polkadot, and validators will be expected to update their nodes to trigger those. The upgrade is backwards compatible, but the optimizations can only activate when validators upgrade.
Development
I always say if you don’t use the stuff you’re building, you should not be the one building it. Just so happens dogfooding is the most valuable habit you can get into. Recently, during the $DED distribution, it became clear that Assets on AssetHub should be mintable even if frozen so that you can do a distribution of an asset that is not yet “live”. This resulted in the linked PR which, when merged, will make AssetHub much more useful.
Collators that are hooked into a node which isn’t also a validator will soon be much more efficient. It turns out they had been running some unnecessary subsystems which will no longer be active after this PR is merged.
The addition of XCM delivery fees last year (which was enacted in a recent runtime upgrade to Kusama) has broken some things. Alberto from Moonbeam chimes in, listing examples where cross chain asset transfers got stuck because of this. Unfortunately, it looks like this DX gaffe won’t be resolved until H2 2024.
sp-std is slowly being phased out. Parachain dev teams, take note!
Governance
The Polkadot community is currently voting on a new update to the network's runtime (v1.1.0) via Referendum 416. You can find the specifications of this update in the release notes.
Referendum 366 passed, paying out 325’000 DOT to a third party for adding Polkadot ecosystem data into Dune analytics and other similar services and to build matching dashboards for ecosystem exploration. Giotto is excited.
W3F cancelled their membership to the World Economic Forum for 2024. W3F has returned the relevant portion of DOT from the original Treasury Proposal. I am personally very happy to see W3F distance itself from a supervillain organization such as the WEF!
4 HRMP channels are being opened from AssetHub to another chain and back: Unique Network, Hashed, Invarch, and Polimec.
Unique Network’s Ref 379 executed successfully, granting them 106,700 DOT to research and develop XCM standards for NFT bridging across parachains. I expressed why I don’t think this is necessary in this X space.
Giotto’s controversial proposal to reward people for voting is failing, at his own direction after discussing things with key people from Parity and Polkadot and coming up with a more effective model.
Bifrost is asking for a 500k DOT loan for liquid staking. The proposal is passing.
Check out the other, smaller treasury proposals on Polkassembly!
Dogfood of the Day
In this DOTD, we will take a look at how to launch arbitrary fungible tokens (aka shitcoins) in the Polkadot ecosystem.
To celebrate the launch of DOTD and reward those who go through the effort of following along, we will be accepting donations in your tokens and rewarding senders with 100 $LEAP! Manual DEXing ftw!
Conditions for the drop:
send Cz4RSK8RB9Vu1wXmTx9Uk5HgAScpw35vB3nMrSn8J6JTcrE your original newly created shitcoin. Any amount works.
the token’s creator MUST have a verified identity on Polkadot in order to qualify (anti-botting).
We will reveal future plans regarding $LEAP soon…
⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others
projects connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains
Subsocial introduces active staking, rewarding network users with extra staking rewards.
98.5% of Moonbeam’s transactions are seemingly executed by a single token minter contract. There was a discussion in the forum about it.
Darwinia is planning an EIP1559-like burn mechanism for tokens in an effort to inject value. They also explain how their Helix Bridge works, a fully open source bridge aggregator with liquidity providers in between.
Jur, a standalone substrate chain for DAOs, publishes a treasury transparency report, and talks about the NationX governance application.
Hydra adds referrals. DeFi with referrals? If that doesn’t result in
spamgrowth, I don’t know what will!The Nodle app got a significant UX and feature upgrade in preparation for Smart Missions. It’s a mobile crypto app I actually like using - the UI is smooth, the onboarding process easy and fast. If the submission of these missions can be executed flawlessly, we might have a banger on our hands.
Litentry adds BRC20-based sign-in functionality to identityhub, in another move to add legitimacy to the nonsensical theater of “development” “on” Bitcoin.
OAK network’s 2023 recap is a good read to get up to speed with the project.
Mnet launches Bitavatars, a customizable collection of avatars with equippable NFTs. The NFTs are unfortunately not modular and instead use the more limited 6551 draft EIP to facilitate a backpack of equippables. If you want to try it out, here are some invite codes: 5T1O4c, 6SXe44, XdrXpG, nE144k, 53ypIu, 8NIjCp, hmnWAd.
Zeitgeist has been integrated into Polkassembly so you can now not only vote on proposals, but also predict whether or not they will pass. One step closer to true futarchy!
DeStore attempts to re-invent the term phygital NFT by using Digital Twin instead. It seems to be working, as their inaugural sale of an opal pendant on TV shows.
Zeitgeist releases v 0.5 of their app. Some updates include AMM2, trusted markets, orderbook improvements, court and global disputes on mainnet and more.
Nova wallet releases v7.7. Biggest change: support for proxied accounts.
A new Tanssi testnet environment allows appchain deployment in just 10 minutes flat. Looking to start with Tanssi? This video tutorial might come in handy.
MVP Workshop started working on an AssetHub DEX UI. I am surprised to not see more interest in something like this being developed by existing teams in the eco. It seems like low hanging fruit and fee-collection monopoly if executed well.
🌎 Community & Ecosystem
Polkadot dapps can now be explored on a single page. Head to its new home now to check it out - and apply to have your own dapp featured if it’s not there yet!
Manta unveils a zkApp accelerator supporting, among other things, fully on-chain games.
The global payments app and neobank Revolut uses DOT as a default example currency to invest in, when presenting businesses with the crypto option.
Distractive wins first Decentralized Futures grant. Distractive is a growth and marketing effort spun out of Purestake, who are in turn responsible for Moonbeam and Tanssi.
OLI published the research paper “Design and Evaluation of Architectural Framework for Local Energy Market Model Based on Distributed Ledger Technologies” in the Journal of IET Smart Grids highlighting their innovative energy market architecture model in collaboration with Integritee.
RMRK creates new token contract and begins token migration. The new contract uses Axelar and is bridged to almost all EVMs trustlessly. Bridge here.
Polkadot Blockchain Academy’s next wave is in May in Singapore. Apply now!
Code4rena enters Polkadot with big bounties for bugs and audits.
🌠 NFT Review
A weekly newsletter keeping up with the evolution of NFTs in the Dotsama ecosystem and beyond.
Exiled Racers announces $PINK league.
Mnet launches Bitavatars, a customizable collection of avatars with equippable NFTs.
Kinzoku is a claim portal for Kanaria metal plate posters, for those who have Super and Founder Kanaria bird NFTs.
This and more in the latest edition!
👷♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0
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🗣️ Feedback
This edition was a bit lengthy, so it’s hard to ask for feedback on this hodgepodge. Next edition, we’ll permalink a feedback form in this section, and will reward all those who provide it with $LEAP tokens.
To help us decide what to dogfood next, please vote on this poll.
That's it for this week - I hope this was as useful for you to read as it was for us to write!
Many thanks to Bill Laboon for his daily digest which helps us not miss some important updates.
DotLeap is put together by Bruno Škvorc.
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