Dot Leap 39
Parachains are here - Statemint's shell is live. Polkadot Decoded wrapped up with some awesome announcements, and Kusama finally has a good public NFT minting and trading UI.
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Singular: Kusama-native NFTs for everyone
Kusama now has a canonical place for minting and trading NFTs publishable by any KSM holder: Singular.
Looking to learn how to use it? This post holds all the tutorials you might need.
Polkadot (v0.9.2)
Parachains are almost here.
Gavin has written a good intro on what’s next for Polkadot and Kusama in terms of parachains.
Polkadot Decoded
Started and finished in style, with awesome talks by Gavin, Joe Petrowski, Unique Network’s Aleks Mitrovich, and so many more. The replay is coming soon to Polkadot’s Youtube channel - subscribe to be up to date!
Polkadot Governance
The Polkadot Treasury currently has 14.7 million DOT and 147,042 will be burnt in ~ 2 days.
Kusama (v0.9.2)
🚨🚨🚨 0.9.2 is out with parachain, crowdloan, and auction support and some bug fixes.
With the 50x fee reduction active, Kusama’s existential deposit is now only 33 microKSM 😲
Parachains are here.
Gavin has written a good intro on what’s next for Polkadot and Kusama in terms of parachains.
Optimal Staking Ratio
Right now, the optimal staking ratio is still at 75%, meaning rewards to validators are maximized when 75% of all KSM is in the staking system. With the advent of parachains, this begins to change: it will go down by 0.5% per auctioned slot up to a maximum of 60 slots, which would put it at 45%.
⚠ Updates
🏛 Kusama Governance
Opensquare published a design proposal for council members and token holders to grade treasury proposal deliveries, as part of their work on M3. Roles credit building is the main task of milestone 3, and used on treasury proposal deliverables as well: the team is looking for feedback on their initial design, to incorporate any changes. You can check the design HERE, please leave your questions and comments on the post!
KodaDot published their next treasury proposal for discussion: KodaDot NFT eXtended Reality - webXR: This project will extend KodaDot NFT explorer with the ability to showcase, render and interact with NFTs in extended reality. The main idea is to leverage existing technology to show NFT items in AR/VR.
Fast-tracked Referendum 107 upgraded Kusama’s runtime to version 9010.
Motion 293 fixed an issue found with collators on Westend and Kusama: blocks were not being included every 6 sec to the relay chain. This issue was caused due to Westend not having secondary VRF slots enabled, therefore non-primary blocks didn't have randomness available.
Referendum 108, forcing recovery of an account, failed. The proposer has written up some details in Polkassembly.
There was a new proposal in the public queue to reduce the number of validators on Kusama from 900 to 400. See Polkassembly for details and rationale. This turned out to be unnecessary due to the 0.9.1 release of the nodes.
Motion 295, cancelling the slashes of 115 validators which occurred due to CPU spikes not allowing imOnline messages to be sent during the 9010 runtime upgrade, has been passed and executed.
The Encointer team has shared their plan to apply for a common good parachain slot on Kusama Network (system-parachain). The project offers a sybil defense mechanism and a basis for democracy for the whole ecosystem and is a unique identity system that enables every human to maintain a unique proof of personhood (uPoP) through pseudonym key-signing parties.
Motion 297 - Klever Wallet’ proposal to integrate Kusama into their wallet passed. Klever is a multi-crypto wallet looking into including the Polkadot ecosystem to their existing application, starting with Kusama.
Motion 298, approved by Council and fast tracked, increased WASM heap pages to prevent memory errors.
🔩 Core Stack
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0.9.2 is out with a critical fix for Validator / Collator connectivity needed for better parachain performance!
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Significant progress has been made in making ink! testable in an off-chain environment.
Statemint will now be able to teleport assets into and out of Kusama.
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.
🛠 Tools
Substrate API Sidecar is at 6.2.0, adding support for assets endpoints from the Statemint parachain and fixing a critical bug related to data fetching from after the recent Kusama runtime upgrade.
Polkadot JS API is at 4.11.2., breaking compatibility with Contracts V2 and only supporting V3 and newer. It also introduces some bug fixes related to the recent Kusama runtime upgrade.
Polkadot JS Apps UI is at 0.91.2, adding Statemint and Parachain functionality.
Polkadot JS Apps UI will now show the ideal staked percentage on the staking overview screen:
👨🎓 Education
Confused about the legitimacy of projects in the Polkadot ecosystem? You’re not alone. We just published a guide which should help you score them 👏
🤝 Ecosystem
An excellent explainer by Gilbert Bassey about Polkadot’s governance system and another on Crowdloans.
Among other partnerships, RMRK and Zeitgeist team up to bring prediction markets to NFTs and vice versa!
👷♀️ Jobs in the Web3 Ecosystem
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.