Finality hiccups on Kusama 🚧

May 10, 2025

Elastic scaling landed on Kusama, leading to issues with finality caused by nodes running old validator client versions (1.16 and older).
fractl partnered with Polkadot and Scytale to help match 10 projects with the right investors.
The PaperMoon team has successfully run Uniswap V2 on PolkaVM and passed all test cases, confirming full compatibility with complex Solidity contracts designed for EVM.
Lucy Coulden published the final report for the first incubation phase of the Polkadot Ambassador Fellowship, detailing highlights, initiatives, and strategic gaps.
PBA-X, an online course teaching the fundamentals of Polkadot and Web3, is kicking off its third wave on June 23. Registration is now open.
Snowbridge-wrapped USDC and USDT are now sufficient assets on Asset Hub. Users can now bridge a minimum of 0.01c to their Polkadot address without requiring an existential deposit of DOT or another compatible asset.
Daniel Cukier posted a thread with snippets from the 2-day JAM Experience, featuring Gavin Wood and other builders from Parity and the JAM developer community.
The first piece of the new proof-of-personhood mechanism has been merged into the Polkadot SDK. For more information, see the Forum post.
Hydration crossed $190,000,000 in TVL.

Radha Dasari (tech ed lead at W3F) posted about the events Web3 Foundation is participating in “outside the blockchain bubble”.
New Messari report is bullish on peaq.
Birdo has released some updates about the Polkadot Mobile App on the Polkadot Forum.
The new Polkadot Wiki information architecture is live.
Umanitek launched Guardian AI Agent, powered by OriginTrail. It lets trusted parties search for harmful content using natural language while protecting privacy through need-to-know access.
Bifrost is the first parachain to use the new coretime auto-renewal feature.
The Graph is now integrated with peaq, offering DePIN developers streamlined access to blockchain data for building and analytics.
Acurast surpasses 60,000 mobile devices.
vDOT minted on Bifrost has surged past the 10M DOT milestone spurred by the GIGADOT launch.
The new Gavun Wud website is live, showcasing live prices, stats, partner integrations, NFT utilities, and more.
- Gavun Wud partnered with Unique Network to release dynamic NFTs. Each WUD Universe NFT includes a virtual log cabin that evolves with on-chain activity and can be customized with earned, bought, or airdropped items.
Monthly reports: RingDAO (formerly Darwinia), Integritee, Astar.

Ink! v6.0.0-alpha is now live. Wasm and pallet-contracts have been deprecated in favor of RISC-V, PolkaVM, and pallet-revive, paving the way for the JAM era.
Jonas Gehrlein (researcher at W3F) has put together a simulator for his proposed coretime sales mechanism (detailed in RFC 15). He would also like to discuss his new coretime market redesign proposal with any coretime purchasers.
A new coretime renewal guide was published to help teams avoid the issue that plagued Xcavate and Mythical last week.
Pop CLI would like to hear your thoughts on the development process and how they can help.
There is now a Technical Fellowship calendar which shows things like upcoming runtime upgrades and Technical Fellowship calls.
JAM Matrix chats have been archived, for those people who aren’t in the Matrix rooms (or just want to easily look at the history).

For more information on Polkadot governance statistics, check out the Polkadot Dune governance dashboard.

👍🏾 passing

Ref 1526: Retroactively funding Subsquid for indexing infrastructure
Ref 1531: Funding the Polkadot Ecology Research Institute
Ref 1538: Giving Bifrost a 1-year loan of 1M DOT for vDOT liquidity
Ref 1542: Funding the Polkadot GIGAHydration campaign
Ref 1546: Upgrading the Polkadot relay chain to runtime 1.5.0
Ref 1557: Funding the integration of a certification system that ensures the authenticity and immutability of proposal documents
Ref 1559: Funding the a kick-start campaign for RISC-V smart home devices, secured by Polkadot
Ref 519: Upgrading the Kusama relay chain to runtime 1.5.0
Ref 521: Setting a DOT/KSM asset conversion rate

👎🏾 failing

Ref 1535: Funding a 6 months extension for the PoKe Berlin team
Ref 1539: Funding the JAM China academy educational roadshow
Ref 1533: Funding a meta-proposal combining 7 initiatives to strengthen the Polkadot Hivemind and enhance outward-facing projects
Ref 1540: Funding the continuous operations of the Spanish BD Team (now IBERLABS) for one year
Ref 1541: Funding Eiger for phase 3 development of the Polkadot-native storage solution
Ref 1543: Funding the development of a Substrate Asset Game Engine
Ref 1544: Retroactively funding Polkabiz’s BD/Mentorship efforts
Ref 1545: Funding the operations of AIWeb3 Chinese Unit
Ref 1549: Funding the development of KAGOME, the C++ implementation of the Polkadot host
Ref 1553: Providing additional funding to maintain and expand Polkadot’s representation within the Texas Blockchain Council
Ref 1555: Funding Volmex’s integration with the Polkadot DEX ecosystem
Ref 1558: Funding Weever’s campaign to onboard Web2 developers in LATAM and beyond to Polkadot Hub

✅ approved

Ref 1513: Ratify payout for Talisman Mobile Wallet approved by Ref 1390
Ref 1516: Further funding for the Infrastructure Builders Program
Ref 1518: Retroactively funding Integritee for developing Incognitee
Ref 1529: Setting Snowbridge-wrapped USDC & USDT as sufficient assets, their ED to $0.01, and their metadata on Asset Hub
Ref 1530: Rewarding Amfroc for their work on The Spammening

❌ rejected

Ref 1517: Funding the production of Guestlist+1 live panel podcast series
Ref 1523: Funding development of the Polkadot Humanoid SDK at Cyberpunk Labs

WebZero will host a Polkadot hackathon at Consensus 2025 with $20,000 in prizes on May 13-16.
The Polkadot Fast Grants bounty program is offering up to $10K in funding to early-stage builders with a 3-day approval window.
Web3 Foundation is hiring for several positions, including Technical Educator, Senior Investor Relations Manager, and Senior Software Engineer.
Think you’ve got what it takes to be a real-world asset to the Xcavate ecosystem? Applications are now open for the Ultra Ambassadorship Program.
In the first week of play on Olderfall, an NFT warrior battler built on Moonbeam, more than 300 free Fallen NFTs were minted and almost 24,000 battles fought. Weekly gaming tournaments are ongoing on N3mus, each with a $500 prize pool.

Gavin Wood is taking JAM to Protocol Berg in Berlin (June 12-13).
Erin from Parity will lead a workshop on building test infrastructure from the ground up at Protocol Berg in Berlin.
Polkadot is sponsoring the Third Annual Blockchain Technology Conference at the University of Miami, May 30-31.

Thank you for taking the DOT leap!

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