Dot Leap 28
An earthquake relief effort with DOT/KSM, Ethereum accounts supported in Polkadot JS extension, Rococo V1 launched, 2020's Polkadot stats, FRAME v2 launched, and more!
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We cover Polkadot, Kusama, Substrate, and all related Web 3.0 projects! Want your content featured? Tweet at the author!
Pay it Forward
Between December 29th and December 31st, Croatia’s central region got hit by several dozen earthquakes, some of them lethal. The strongest one was 6.4 and killed at least 7 people, with rubble still being cleared out and many people having lost their homes.
The Croatian self-regulating NGO UBIK.hr collaborated with Red Cross to accept donations in crypto currencies. If you’re feeling generous in this nascent bull run and want to pass some of that good karma along, please help out - every little bit helps. If you can’t donate, please spread the word by sharing this newsletter or forwarding the email or link to people you know!
Donate here: https://quakeaid.ubik.hr
Interviews with Councilors
PolkaWorld published their series of interviews with Council members on both Polkadot and Kusama.
Polkadot (v0.8.26-1)
2020 in Review:
18 runtime upgrades;
23 treasury proposals approved by the Council;
118k DOTS in funding for teams in the ecosystem, mainly focusing on infrastructure deployment, ecosystem provisions, marketing activities and community events (stats can be found here);
almost 300 validators and more than 7k nominators securing the network;
61 closed tips;
1 new spending mechanism: bounties;
9 referenda passed by the community;
👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇
Rococo V1 has been merged into Cumulus! A new parachain experiment has begun!
Polkadot Governance
🔥 Ever participated in governance? Please fill out this feedback form so we know how we need to improve the Polkadot Council! 🔥
The Litentry team published a proposal for feedback to build a native Governance-focused Mobile App for all Substrate-based networks. The proposal is to be developed with support from both Polkadot and Kusama treasuries. Find more information in the post. The proposal has passed.
PromoTeam has published a new proposal for council feedback: A series of 7 news Videos – HOT DOT NEWS + Reviews of Polkadot Functions and use cases. The roadmap topics include: Identity, Social recovery, Voting, Tips, Staking, among others. You can find a description of costs and milestones in the Polkassembly post.
OnFinality published a proposal for council review covering the first milestone of a high performance public infrastructure plan to scale and improve their platform in order to provide a level of service and resiliency for production ready applications.
A bounty proposal to update the Polkadot brand. The proposer, Koto Studio, was one of many agencies approached by W3F with the challenge to evolve Polkadot’s brand to meet the needs of its growing network. They decided to use the network in the process as an approach to spark imagination of how business can be conducted on a decentralized internet. The curator, yet to be decided by a second motion, is needed to direct and review the developments of the immersion phase for further use in the design.
Proposal 231 seeks to fund the development of Elara 0.3, an Infura-like service for Polkadot.
Vote for a better tomorrow!
I’m running for Council Member on both Polkadot and Kusama! Read more about why and what I can bring to the table in this post or click the banner below - the post also explains how to vote in screenshots. Remember, voting costs nothing but a transaction fee - and can be done with locked and staked funds - but has the potential to change the landscape forever!
Kusama (v0.8.26-1)
2020 in review:
40 treasury proposals approved by the Kusama Council;
More than 60k KSM in funding for teams in the ecosystem, focusing on infrastructure deployment, software development, marketing activities and community events (stats here);
Up to 780 validators, helping us reach the goal of 1000 validators;
Approx. 3000 nominators;
153 closed tips;
70 referenda by the community passed, including 18 runtime upgrades.
🏛 Kusama Governance
🔥 Ever participated in governance? Please fill out this feedback form so we know how we need to improve the Kusama Council! 🔥
Dan from Polkadot Comics published a discussion around a proposal to fund the consistent development of new comics related to Kusama and Polkadot terminology and stats.
After a successful integration to Polkadot, the Ramp team has published a new proposal to integrate KSM to their platform: the goal is to provide Kusama users and developers with a battle-tested alternative to a centralized exchange: an on-ramp that easy to implement. Read it here. The proposal has been approved and is underway as motion 249.
There are 2 new public proposals in proposals queue: 39 and 40 - pre-images were not submitted yet: it would be good if the authors of these proposals could specify their goal to be considered by the community.
🔩 Core Stack
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
FRAME is changing - V2 is nigh. Shawn opened a discussion on Github to report bugs, request features, and showcase development!
( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)
The Council will now be able to slash invalid tips and prevent tip spam.
🐛 Proxies will no longer be able to set themselves as proxies, thereby locking up funds for ever.
Ethereum Compatibility
As Moonbeam and Parity’s Frontier mature, I believe it’s worth having a separate section discussing Ethereum compatibility with Substrate and Polkadot in general. The potential for collaboration between the two ecosystems is immense.
Moonbeam types have been extracted into their own package for easier construction of the API primitive when working with Polkadot’s API.
🛠 Tools
The Polkadot JS browser extension now support importing of Ethereum accounts from JSON files. This is a big deal for not only Moonbeam, but also for Web3 on the Ethereum side in general - we might be getting a light-weight alternative to MetaMask soon!
Polkadot JS Apps is at 0.73, among other things adding a basic bounty UI, allowing URL-based sharing of custom type definitions, and a swap to Webpack 5, introducing advanced tree shaking and better compilation.
🤝 Ecosystem
Fear wallet integrates with Ramp for easy on and off ramping into Polkadot and Kusama.
Polkadot in 2020 by the Numbers - a post about 2020’s stats for Polkadot and Kusama.
Substrate Stencil is a node template that starts out with BABE and Grandpa instead of Aura.
📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars
Don’t forget to vote!
Your vote only costs a TX fee (a few cents) but it can change the protocol (both Kusama and Polkadot - depending where you vote for me!) for ever - good governance is responsible governance! Click the banner to learn about my candidacy!
Note: your tokens will be locked in democracy, but are still usable for staking, referendum voting, etc. If you want to transfer them, just cancel the vote and they’re free, no strings attached.
That's it for this week - I hope this was as useful for you to read as it was for me to write! Many thanks to Bill Laboon for his daily digest, which helps me not miss some important updates!
The Dot Leap is put together by Bruno Škvorc. Got any links for me for the next edition? Find me on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at bruno@bitfalls.com.