DotLeap 52: Parachain Auctions, Round 2
Second round of parachain auctions announced, new high-priority upgrade, Statemine v3 released, and more.
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Polkadot Updates
🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain
current staking rate 60.3% // ideal staking rate 75%
Polkadot 0.9.9-1 is out, a high-priority upgrade that fixes bugs released as part of 0.9.9.
0.9.9 was a low-priority upgrade—memory optimizations, XCM stuff, removal of “Aye” default votes with proposal submissions, and more minor things.
🔴 🏛 Governance
Referendum 29, proposing to increase the number of validators in the active set to 399, did not pass.
Referendum 32, proposing to increase the number of validators in the active set to 299 (from 297), is now up for a vote. It is currently failing with a 0.03% turnout.
Lumos Labs shared a treasury proposal for feedback and discussion: the Polkadot India Incubator launch. The proposal focuses on the development of an incubator for the Indian community, including engagement, education and deployment phases for the projects participating and the hire of an “India Polkadot Evangelist” to act as an advocate for Polkadot and to help teams in the process of building their ideas. You can find the proposal HERE.
Miroslav Smeral published a new proposal to fund the SubMentor.Me application: the proposal can be categorised as a UI improvement and aims to develop a platform for token holders to experience Polkadot in a friendly UI manner. A general list of milestones was share on the Polkassembly post seeking feedback from Council.
Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ
🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain
current staking rate 43.7% // ideal staking rate 72.5%
Kusama 0.9.9-1 is out, a high priority upgrade fixing bugs released as part of 0.9.9. 0.9.9 was a low priority upgrade. Memory optimizations, XCM stuff, removal of “Aye” default votes with proposal submissions, and more minor things.
The second batch of Kusama parachain auctions is about to begin. More info available here.
If you have never participated in a candle auction before, we recommend you review the mechanics of it here.
🦅 🏛 Governance
Motion 342, upgrading Kusama Runtime to v9090 has passed Council vote and has become Referendum 128.
There is a second proposal by Ethworks, besides Motion 341 (1st milestone approved last week) for consideration: a proposal to streamline the use of Statemine Assets in dApps on other parachains, an easy way to utilize tokens that “live” on Statemine from other parachains. The budget and milestones can be found here.
Referendum 129 is up for vote: the proposal increases the ump threshold on Kusama.
Justin Wu and his team, the organisers of DeFi Summit, have published a proposal for CHAOS 2021 - a 2-Day Virtual conference event focused on Kusama Network. The conference aims to bring together top parachains, prospects, and builders who are working on the future of Kusama. This is geared to be an educational event for those interested in learning more about what is being built and what the future outlook is.
The proposed agenda, budget, milestones, and general idea can be found on the Polkassembly link!
PolkaStats published their next treasury proposal for maintenance and ops costs for Kusama network from 01.09.2021 to 01.12.2021. The funds are used mainly to cover the cost of servers for the explorer. Context, spending proposal, budget, and previous proposal list can be found on the Polkassembly link.
Motion 343, to upgrade Statemine’s runtime to v3, passed Council vote and is now Referendum 130.
⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others
Statemine V3 was released. Please update if you are running a Statemine node. This version notably does NOT include the multi-sig fix, despite having been merged on time. This means it is still not possible to use multi-signature accounts with Statemine.
The Acala engineering team has configured the custom-built Acala EVM+ to provide a development environment analogous to Ethereum and a fully Ethereum-compatible experience for DeFi users (MetaMask), while still getting the full power, speed, and customizability of Polkadot’s modular blockchain framework, Substrate.
Bifrost Finance announced the third wave of its Ambassador Program, inviting coders, community builders, authors, content producers, translators to help the project grow.
Manta Network and Acala have successfully implemented cross-chain communication on testnet using XCM, a cross-chain message system designed for Polkadot. In this implementation, various steps were taken to prove different functionality:
The teams successfully transmitted Acala assets from the Acala chain to Manta’s chain.
The assets were also successfully privatized on Manta Network.
The private asset was reclaimed back to the original asset on the Acala network.
Moonbeam partnered with BwareLabs. Devs can now create fully-fledged RPC & WSS endpoints on Moonbase Alpha (Moonbeam TestNet).
In order to enhance the product’s user experience and to improve on-chain security, the OAK team launched the “Bug-Bounty” program.
The standard rewards are:
High-risk: $2,500 and above
Medium-risk: $1,000 and above
Low-risk: up to $500
🌎 Community & Ecosystem
Polkadot and Kusama Treasury-funded wallets have been added to the Polkadot Wiki.
"Making History: An Overview of the First Five Parachain Slot Auctions" by Jonas Gehrlein was published on the Polkadot blog.
Information on how crowdloans work and how to safely participate has been posted on the Polkadot blog.
On August 31 at 18.00 CET, there will be a public talk on "Future Normal? DAOs and Decentralized Governance".
Polkadot and Kusama Treasury-funded wallets have been added to the Polkadot Wiki.
Parallel Finance is hosting a Polkadot DeFi Panel Series at 9 PM UTC, on Aug 26. Speakers from Web3 Foundation, Polychain Capital, ParityTech, Parallel Finance, Acala, and Moonbeam are scheduled to be there. Register here.
A Network Stability Report of Kusama with parachains by Robert Habermeier was released.
“The only major issue is the infrequent finality stalls that are experienced by the network. … a solution to remedy this will be proposed prior to parachains launching on Polkadot.”
Making History: An Overview of the First Five Parachain Slot Auctions by Jonas Gehrlein was published on the Polkadot blog.
The Polkadot Encode Club Hackathon is open for submissions! Register by September 9th and get to build new solutions for the Polkadot ecosystem and answer Parachain challenges in the hackathon with over $30,000 to be won in prizes.
Kusama Demo Day is coming, hosted by Equilibrium with media support from Coin Telegraph. The itinerary includes demos of major projects that are already live and a vibrant panel on the parachain auctions.
🛠 Tools
Polkadot JS API 5.5.2 is out with a high priority fix for everyone relying on historical block fetching - there was a type bug in the previous API related to parachain types which crashed the API at a certain block.
Substrate API Sidecar 9.1.4 is out, matching the API above to fix the parachain enum type bug.
🌠 NFT Review
A weekly newsletter keeping up with the evolution of NFTs in the Dotsama ecosystem.
Unique Network CEO revealed more about their UN partnership.
Bit.Country built a bridge to Ethereum.
Boson Protocol interviewed with Bit.Country CEO
PromoTeam release NFTs on Singular in honor of the first 5 parachain auctions.
👷♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0
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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 and gbaci.
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