Polkadot is winning the rollup game 🔥
2024 Treasury report, new Discord vibe, W3F CEO departs, and others
🐂 boolish - top news
10 of the top 20 rollups by transaction volume are on Polkadot.
Per the report from WagMedia’s new financial analysis series, the total number of on-chain transactions on Polkadot (relay chain and parachains combined) increased from 17.7 million in 2022 to 70.8 million in 2024.
The SEC received not one, but two filings for DOT ETFs from Tuttle Capital and 21 Shares.
OpenGov.Watch published the 2024 Polkadot Treasury Report.
Kraken has relaunched DOT staking for eligible US clients in 37 states and two territories.
Multix now allows multisigs created on any system chain to be used on any other system chain (e.g. relay chain, asset hub, coretime chain).
DOT ETP making ground in Europe.
⭕️ ecosystem
The Polkadot Discord has been revamped and updated with new features. You can check it out here.
Parallel Finance is still under attack. Despite passing, Referendum 1339 failed to regain control of the Parallel Finance parachain from its attacker. Moments before execution, the attacker added itself as a proxy and froze all available PARA tokens, leaving the newly created sudo account unable to send transactions. The attacker proceeded to unbond the remaining 200K DOT on Parallel, which is expected to complete by the end of the month.
Nectar Protocol, a platform for anonymously and securely sharing sensitive health data between research teams, has launched on Moonbeam.
Bifrost is now connected to the Hyperbridge mainnet.
Hyperbridge has integrated with the Soneium mainnet, offering users secure and trustless bridging to all of its supported chains.
KILT announced the establishment of the KILT Foundation.
Sunset Labs, a business development team focused on expanding Polkadot in Brazil, is the latest recipient of a Web3 Foundation Decentralized Futures grant.
Robonomics has initiated Snowbridge integration, which it hopes to use to bridge its ERC-20 XRT token to Polkadot.
Karim Jedda’s (Parity’s Director of Product Engineering) generative art collection Attractors is minting for free now on KodaDot. Only the luckiest mints will result in a stable and colourful design.
Brenzi from Integritee has outlined a way to potentially vote privately on Polkadot using Incognitee.
Web3 Foundation announced the transition of Fabian Gompf from CEO to an adviser.
⛓️ technical
Polkadot stable2412-1 was released. This is a patch upgrade for the latest stable release (stable2412).
Gavin Wood released version 0.6 of the JAM Gray Paper. This milestone implements a freeze on additional features as the project moves towards the testing and optimization phase.
💰 opportunities
Mandala is now accepting applications to expand its ambassador program.
peaq announced a $100M campaign incentivising real people to create real-world value via DePins built on peaq.
Web3 Foundation is hiring for several positions, including Support Specialist, Growth Operations Manager, Research Scientist Intern, and Investor Relations Manager.
The Open Source Developer Grants Bounty (funded by Ref 1080) has begun. For details, see here.
Interested in helping the Polkadot community grow by hosting meetups? Polkadot Roots is accepting applications.
🏛️ governance
confirming
Ref 1377, funding the creation of OG Rust Bounties (designed to incentivize Rust engineers to carry out developer tasks that have been requested under OpenGov, or by some reputable authority such as the Fellowship), is passing with 99.3%.
Ref 1381, ratifying the payout approved by Ref. 1346, is passing almost unanimously.
Ref 1383, funding Ideal Labs to develop the randomness layer for Polkadot, is passing with 99.7%.
Ref 1391, retroactively funding Novasama for 9 months of work on various features, is passing unanimously.
Ref 1395, topping up the Polkadot System Parachains Collator Bounty, is passing unanimously.
deciding
Ref 1388, sponsoring Team Vitality for 2 years as official blockchain partner, is failing unanimously.
Ref 1389, sponsoring the Conor Daly 2025 Polkadot Motorsports 2.0 Program with $3.5m, is passing with 72% in favor.
Ref 1390, funding Talisman mobile wallet, is passing with 74.8% in favor.
Ref 1392, funding Polkadot Music Events Initiative to produce 4 {Bash} events with a KPI of bringing 1M+ minimum user wallets in 2025, is passing with 81.7% in favor.
Ref 1399, retroactively funding WebZero for representing Polkadot at Consensus, is passing with 99.9% in favor.
Ref 1407, setting 4 curators for the Legal Bounty, is passing with 99% in favor.
Ref 1410, funding RegionX for phase 1 deployment of the Coretime marketplace, is passing unanimously.
Ref 1411, funding Spanish Bounty V3, is currently failing with less than 200k DOT voter turnout.
Ref 1412, funding the integration of Polkadot into Brave Wallet, is failing unanimously with less than 250k DOT voter turnout.
Ref 1413, retroactively funding the JAM graypaper reader, is passing unanimously.
Ref 1417, closing the technical support bounty, is passing unanimously.
Ref 488, proposing to modify the schedulerParams.lookAhead parameter from 2 to 3. 🦅
approved
Ref 1368, closing Bounty #27.
Ref 1371, funding Interstellar for the development of Next-Gen Smart Account Features.
Ref 1374 by Easy A, funding the fast-grants programme for early-stage builders on Polkadot.
Ref 488, proposing to modify the schedulerParams.lookAhead parameter from 2 to 3. 🦅
📺 what to watch and listen to
Josep discusses the Polkadot API (PAPI), a successor to Polkadot.js on the latest Space Monkeys podcast.
ET, Moon-Bearer, and Grizzly got together on February 3rd to discuss the relaunch of the Polkadot Discord server, which is incentivizing community engagement with new earnable statuses and special gifts from TOD.
Regulatory Rewind is a new weekly broadcast from The Kus. In Episode 1, Parity legal team members Chrissy, Jamiul, and Eva give a rundown of the latest developments in global crypto regulation.
📖 what to read
Polkadot Unwrapped: A road to Hub by Parity pre-sales lead Alex Dimes. ‼️
Goku’s moderately bullish megathread on the past and future of Polkadot compared to Ethereum and Solana, using Gav’s 5 factors that makes or breaks a blockchain.
Ravi’s Key Insights on Polkadot’s activity in January 2025 with latest updates on OpenGov, GitHub developer engagement, Coretime, Staking, etc.
Trustless Bridges via Random Sampling, a paper by W3F researchers led by Bhargav Bhatt.
Polkadot’s JAM Upgrade Simplified by JAMman. Most noob-friendly description of JAM I’ve read so far. Another interesting read is How Polkadot’s JAM Upgrade Will Allow for 5-50ms Transaction Latency.
2025 January OpenGov Digest by jeeper.
State of Polkadot Q4 2024 by Messari.
WagMedia’s weekly newsletter with some interesting editorial pieces.
The Future of Web3 - Polkadot Cloud, slides by Shawn Tabrizi from his latest talk at the BUIDL HERE conference in Puerto Rico.
📅 events
Polkadot Blockchain Academy hosted alumnus Daniel (Jamixir), whose team recently became the first to deploy a JAM node. He shared his own experiences with PBA Campus, which kicks off again in March
Polkadot Africa held its latest meetup in Kigali, Rwanda on January 24th. Attendees were given an introduction to the Polkadot ecosystem, which included setting up a wallet and minting their first POAP.
The JAM World Tour kicks off again in Cambridge on February 10th.
DotNaija’s new X Space DotTalk Nigeria kicked off on Tuesday, 4th February. Tune in weekly for all of the latest Polkadot ecosystem insights.
NFT Paris, sponsored by Polkadot, commences on February 13th. More than 15 ecosystem teams will be in attendance, including Mythical, KodaDot, and Unique Network.
Polkadot, via Polkadot Africa, is sponsoring ETHiopa, which is running from January 21st to February 21st. The event includes a month-long education campaign, five-day hackathon, and Ethiopia’s first-ever Ethereum conference.
Thank you for taking the Dot Leap!