DotLeap 55: Thanks to Darwinia for making this issue possible
Calamari wins 8th parachain slot, second common-good parachain slot up for grabs, Microsoft Japan supports Shiden, and more.
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Polkadot Updates
🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain
current staking rate 64% // ideal staking rate 75%
🔴 🏛 Governance
Subscan published their proposal to cover infrastructure costs from June 2021 to August 2021: Compute Engine, Cloud Logging, and Cloud SQL are the three primary costs, among which Compute Engine alone constitutes around 70% of the total allocation. The proposal has become Motion 110.
Motion 107, seeking funding for a Treasury Proposal for the Polkadot Ecology Research Institute, has passed.
Motion 108, proposing to increase the minimum nomination to 120 DOT, has passed the Polkadot Council. The proposal is now up for a vote as Referendum 34.
A new proposal is up for discussion: anaelleltd, a long-time community member, has been working on tutorials for Polkadot.js for the past months. She received a few tips rewarding this useful resource. Guide to Polkadot-JS provides step-by-step instructions for Polkadot-JS Extension and Apps, but it needs to be redesigned and updated to provide a better browsing and educational experience: This proposal is to request funding for these improvements and maintenance items. Future plans include a tighter integration between these tutorials and the platform.
Motion 109 is up for vote: The treasury proposal aims to develop a Polkadot Educational Hub for the Spanish speaking community to organise an integrated, compiled, and complete information hub on Polkadot. Budget and milestones can be reviewed on the post.
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Darwinia!
Darwinia is a layer 0 “metaprotocol” much like Polkadot, but with a direct focus on bridging other Layer 1s together and, during Darwinia’s parachain phase, into Polkadot and its wider ecosystem. It is what you might call a “bridge hub”.
Where Polkadot is perfect for connecting Substrate-based chains and needs some rejigging to connect existing Layer 1s, Darwinia (and their Kusama counterpart Crab Network) will focus on Layer 1 bridging first and foremost through a core EVM layer and custom bridges, pre-built for compatibility with certain chain targets.
As a demo of their cross-chain friendliness, Darwinia runs Evolution Land, an NFT land game that will soon evolve into a cross-chain battleground. Join their telegram for community and support!
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Want to sponsor a future issue of Dot Leap? Buy the slot as an NFT!
Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ
🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain
current staking rate 42.6% // ideal staking rate 71%
Calamari won the 8th parachain slot. Over 16,000 network stakeholders locked up KSM in favor.
795,698 KSM (~7% of total issuance) are currently locked up for crowdloans; 1.9 million KSM (~ 17% of total issuance) are locked up in total for parachains and crowdloans.
🦅 🏛 Governance
Motion 351, funding a Treasury Proposal for development and maintenance for Dwellir's Kusama RPC node service, has been passed.
Motion 352, funding a Treasury Proposal for integration of Kusama into Klever Wallet, has been passed.
Motion 353 is has passed council vote: The treasury proposal by NibbleBits aims to provide a visual interpretation of the dynamics behind the network and its elements. It should be understood as an experiment for educational purposes, playing with the interpretation of a track rhythm and the design chosen to represent the stages of the Polkadot and Kusama protocols in place, with the goal to understand the networks' architecture. After Council feedback, the team decided to divide the proposal into two on-chain submissions, with council reports and development reviews: This submission covers the first 2 months of work.
DeepDAO has completed the integration of Kusama into its governance dashboard. Kusama is ranked #5 by total treasury AUM and #3 by number of proposals.
Encointer is asking Councillors to vote on whether or not the Councillors are in favor of granting Encointer a common-good parachain slot before Slot 20. Currently, there are six Ayes and zero Nays.
Metrika published a proposal aiming to provide a publicly available dashboard that exposes deeper operational KPIs and insights, allowing community members to analyse network activity, consensus participation, or RPC node performance. These real-time dashboards will be publicly accessible and will be revised and edited from time to time based on the state and priorities of the Kusama community.
They propose to develop three of these dashboards: a Network activity Dashboard, a Consensus and Staking Dashboard, and an RPC Activity Dashboard. Milestones, budget, and overall proposal can be found in the post.
⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others
Nsure has completed milestone one of their Web3 Foundation grant to build a cross-blockchain open insurance marketplace to trade insurance risks, where premiums are determined by a Dynamic Pricing Model.
Shiden deployed solidity contracts on their parachain. Soon, following an audit, users will be able to manage SDN tokens using Metamask.
» PolkaEX, a multi-chain DEX, is coming to Shiden Network. Here’s a demo.
» Microsoft Japan announced support for projects building in the Astar&Shiden ecosystem.
» Standard Protocol has secured the Builder Program grant from Shiden Network with unanimous vote to bring their stablecoin MTR as the first native stablecoin on the ecosystem.
» Sota Watanabe, CEO of Stake Technologies (the company building Astar&Shiden) posted a new article describing Astar & Shiden and why anyone should care, particularly developers.
KILT Protocol partnered with OnFinality to offer RPC Services at launch.
Bifrost upgraded runtime to 0.8.4. It will support bi-directional asset cross-chaining between Kusama, Bifrost, and Karura, allowing KSM to be transferred between them. Subsequent releases will enable bi-directional transfers of BNC/kUSD/KAR.
» Bifrost transitioned to decentralized governance after the referendum to remove SUDO was passed.
Acala is integrating Chainlink oracle pallet for price feeds for the upcoming Acala launch on Polkadot.
Zenlink will launch the 2nd Zenlink Pro beta test on Moonriver. Only 200 people can participate. Successful applicants will be able to experience the first Polkadot-based cross-chain DEX and start the Polkadot DeFi journey.
» Applications are opened for Zenlink’s 2nd community beta testing program.
Robonomics announced that you can now monetize robotics telemetry through integration with Ocean Protocol. For the demo, Robonomics used Spot made by Boston Dynamics.
» The 2nd round of Robonomics grant proposals has begun and will run until early March 2022. The Grant Program invites project proposals on topics including Networked cyber-physical systems, Multi-agent systems, Robot-as-a-Service, and others.
Moonbeam partners with Lido Finance to bring liquid staking for DOT on Moonbeam and KSM on Moonriver.
» Yuser launched its NFT Social App & token on Moonriver.
Crust MainNet is now open for storage. Uniswap, IPFS docs, and Polkadot Apps are now on Crust MainNet.
Fearless Wallet 1.9.4 for iOS has just been released. The update fixes issues from a recent API change. Android update is coming soon.
SubQuery closed a US$9 million Series A funding round co-led by Arrington Capital, DCG, and Stratos Technologies.
🌎 Community & Ecosystem
A Polkadot Berlin event is planned for Sept 27th! To be moderated by Zoe Meckbach, this event will cover parachains, crowdloans, auctions, and all the other currently trendy topics in Polkadot-world. Speakers are Parity devs Santiago Balaguer and Benjamin Weiß.
Codes for claiming NFTs from the Kusama Parachain Launch collection are currently being sent out via email. They are being sent in batches, so if you have not received one yet, there is still time. The NFTs are viewable and sendable in the official RMRK NFT marketplace and UI Singular.
Hey canaries, check your email if you signed up to receive the first NFT minted by Kusama governance on my common good parachain #Statemine. Codes to claim your free NFT will be sent to all the lucky 9,999 winners this week! 🚀
Keep in mind that in order to send a Statemine-based NFT like this one, the recipient needs to have some KSM in their account (anything over 0.005 is enough). RMRK-native NFTs are not subject to this limitation and can be sent to dead accounts.
Bertrand Perez is joining the Web3 Foundation as Chief Operating Officer after resigning from the Facebook-linked Diem in July.
Encode Polkadot Club launched their Polkadot Hackathon on September 9th. Read the summary of the event here.
Gavin Wood has published Part 2 of his series on XCM.
RMRK distributes the $RMRK Statemine token to all Kanaria NFT buyers.
⚙ Core Stack
In one of the biggest updates to date, metadata as exposed by the Substrate nodes will now include rich descriptions for types. This means implementing apps, wallets, and tools will experience much less pain when trying to stay up to date with Polkadot JS API and newly deployed runtimes, because the types will be auto-generated from the metadata of the nodes! It is not known when this will go into the update, but at the latest it will be the one after next, meaning a month or two at the most.
🛠 Tools
Substrate API Sidecar 9.1.9 is out, with some version bumps of the underlying Polkadot JS API. Minor update.
Polkadot JS API 5.9.1 is out, notably with decoding enhancements with narrowing checks for TS plus some other minor stuff for XCM and the 9090 runtime upgrade block.
🌠 NFT Review
A weekly newsletter keeping up with the evolution of NFTs in the Dotsama ecosystem.
RMRK had an interview with Fr.om to talk about his music NFTs on Singular.
RMRK founder Bruno Skvorc hosted a webinar on the Kanaria launch.
Kanaria processed the most NFT expensive sale on Kusama to date.
👷♂️ 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 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 editor@dotleap.com.
Awesome run down