DotLeap 47: Good News and Not-so-Good News
Bifrost wins 5th parachain auction, ink! smart-contract chains hit a snag, Karura enables token transfers, Telemetry adds vibrancy to DotSama, and more...
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Polkadot Updates
🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain
Current ideal / actual staking rate = 75% / 62.9%.
Polkadot-JS now displays both the ideal and actual staking rates. The ideal staking rate will decrease as the number of connected parachains increases (since more DOT or KSM will be locked for parachains).
🔴 🏛 Governance
OneBlock is seeking feedback for their treasury proposal for a Summer Polkadot Hackathon in Hangzhou before submission to the council.
DotScanner is seeking feedback for their treasury proposal for milestones 2 - 6 of their Kusama integration.
Wei Tang, a core dev at Parity, has proposed a new governance model for Substrate-based chains called Voluntary Council. You can read the details about it here.
Subscan shared their plans to include Cloudflare Enterprise Plan from August 2021 to October 2021, as a way to prevent DDoS attacks. The extra item is to be added to their recurring payments proposals from Aug 2021. The reasoning behind this plan and budget can be found on the post
Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ
🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain
Current ideal / actual staking rate = 72.5% / 47.4%.
Bifrost Finance has won the fifth parachain slot auction and has onboarded as a parachain.
There will be no parachain auctions for some time. The purpose of this is to watch the network performance and ensure its stability and smooth functioning with 6 parachains before the next series of parachain auctions are conducted.
If you were hoping to see ink! smart-contract chains as parachains soon, we’ve got some bad news. Any chain trying to make this happen will have hit a wall now due to some performance issues that currently prevent running
pallet_contractschains as parachains. There is an ongoing discussion about a fix in this thread.
EDIT: Correction to the above:
There are actually no performance issues with ink right now. Instead, ink is not happening because sandbox functionality has been removed by the parachains team, and it is not known when it’s coming back (relevant issues are 99 and 1269. Ink is in fact performing quite alright. Thanks to Alexander Theißen for clarifying!
🦅 🏛 Governance
Patract Labs just submitted proposal post 766 for Ask! v0.3 (AssemblyScript Contract). One month ago, Ask! had completed the development of v0.2, and here is the Development Report, External Review Form, and Review Report for the previous version. After v0.3, they will release Ask! v1.0 as the first production-level version for public testing.
After the successful creation of NFT classes on Statemine by Motion 329, the team realized that Parity Signer currently cannot be used on Statemine Network: Signer was the wallet used to generate the keys for the parties on the multi-sig. Therefore, Motion 330 will change the NFT class owner address.
Subscan has submitted a Polkassembly post seeking feedback on modifying their contract to include Cloudflare services to prevent DDoS attacks.
There are currently 35 tips awaiting approval by the Kusama Council.
⚙ Core Stack
A very interesting discussion on optimizing signature checks in Polkadot. Everything from why BLS aggregation like the one seen in Ethereum 2 won’t work to using GPUs to speed things up, and the pros and cons of this approach.
⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others
Crowdloan rewards (KAR) have been distributed as token transfers are now live on Karura Network. Read this post to learn how to make transfers from Kusama to Karura. If you participated in the crowdloan, here’s a guide on how to check and claim KAR.
But that’s not all. Karura’s first DEX, Karura Swap is gearing up for its launch in the coming hours (approx 21st July @ 7 pm UTC). With this launch, Karura introduces a cool new liquidity bootstrapping feature that ensures that a new trading pair isn’t created unless certain conditions are met.
Astar Network (formerly Plasm) joined the Crypto Climate Accord — an initiative to decarbonize crypto by powering blockchain with 100% renewable energy.
Shiden Network published the Shiden Patch2, an update that enables identity and utility pallets while also decreases transaction fees dramatically.
Kylin Network and Centrifuge’s developer teams form a technical partnership to:
Assist other teams who need help deploying their parachains
Work through core aspects of XCMP in an effort to extend the initial work done by Robert Habermier et al
The teams will be working through Chachacha, a Rococo-based relay chain testnet configured and supported by Centrifuge.
🌎 Ecosystem
NFTs for Polkadot, the latest panel by Outlier Ventures for #DiffusionDigital will hold on 28th July. It will feature RMRK, Unique Network, and Bit.country’s CEOs. Register for the event here.
The Telemetry UI visualizes validators on Polkadot, Kusama, and other Substrate blockchains on a world map, showing you where in the world a project’s validators are. You can check it out here.
Why are auctions better run on-chain than off-chain and why a candle auction is used? Learn from the new Research Update: The Case for Candle Auctions by Samuel Häfner, Web3 Foundation Research Scientist.
Radha from the technical education team at Web3 Foundation explains how to easily query on-chain data using PolkadotJS.
Alice und Bob published a good resource on how to become a part of the DotSama ecosystem.
The Encore Polkadot Club, a nine-month program in partnership with @encodeclub and funded by the Polkadot Treasury, released Intro to Polkadot video and slides.
RMRK founder Bruno Škvorc hosted a crowdcast titled ‘Introduction to RMRK’s NFTs and the Singular Platform’. A replay can be found here.
Next Top Blockchain Startup, a global virtual hackathon & accelerator program, is hosting a DotSama parachain hackathon.
CryptoPotato interviewed Peter Mauric, Parity Technologies’ head of public affairs, who spoke about DotSama’s strengths and its relationship to the rest of Crypto, particularly Ethereum.
🛠 Tools
Alas! nothing to see here 🧐
👷♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0
Want your ad here? Email the editor.
RMRK is looking for an Artist Advocate [remote], Community Manager [remote], Marketing Master [remote], Rust developers [remote]. Interested? Email us.
Phala Network is hiring for Developer Advocate, Rust Blockchain Engineer, and a Community Manager.
Acala Network is looking for a Senior Solidity Engineer, Full-Stack Engineer, Senior Substrate Developer, Software Engineer, Growth Marketing Officer, and a lot more. You can find out all the available roles and apply here.
Subsocial Network, an open platform for decentralized social networks and marketplaces, is looking for a UX designer and a Flutter developer. If you’re interested, send them a DM on Twitter.
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 DotLeap is put together by Bruno Škvorc and gbaci.
Got any links for Bruno for the next edition? Find him on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at bruno@bitfalls.com.