Dot Leap 25

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Network-wide staking returns and inflation now shown in the Polkadot UI, a staking calculator, first NFTs on RMRK now displayed with Kodadot, calendar export of on-chain events, and more!

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Polkadot (v 0.8.26-1)

Polkadot Governance

• A new proposal by Cryptonauts is up for discussion. Their plan is to make a comprehensive and high quality introduction video for Polkadot.

• Patract Labs submitted their proposal for Megaclite for introducing basic zero-knowledge proof support for the Polkadot ecosystem. It has been approved by the council and a payout of 5430 DOT is pending.

• Motion 43 is up for vote, aiming to reimburse Council candidates slashed due to a bug.

• A whopping 18 pending tips are waiting for Council votes. If you’d like to see a more active Council, vote for me and remove your vote for a sleeping councilor. Only by clearing out the members who are just occupying slots can we help the chain grow! Remember, voting costs nothing but a transaction fee - and can be done with locked and staked funds - but has the potential to change the landscape forever!

Kusama (v 0.8.26-1)

KodaDot added support for RMRK NFTs! Explorer coming soon! https://twitter.com/KodaDot/status/1331657696508932097

🙏 We've hacked working rmrk.app spec by @bitfalls into @KodaDot. 🙌 We plan to have end-user NFT explorer in the future for @kusamanetwork 📸 @obxium

Validator Ranking List

The Validator Ranking, to be used by nominators to elect the best set of validators based on their preferences is now integrated to Kusama website! By the community, for the community & funded 100 % on-chain by the Treasury!

🏛 Kusama Governance

• Motion 238 for increasing the number of validators by 1 for 200 eras is now Referendum 93 and being voted on.

• Motion 239 to pay back council candidates who got slashed by a bug has passed and is now in the external referendum queue, waiting for a preimage upload.

• Community member Maria Clara proposed a new bounty for Portugese and Spanish translations of parts of the wiki, the whitepaper, and some other content.

• Treasury Proposal 56 is for building Subbooster - a remote-compilation SaaS to help speed up Substrate-based-chain compilation times. It is up for vote as Motion 241.

🔩 Core Stack

• Work on the Participation Lottery pallet is progressing. Soon enough you might be entered into a random draw to get some DOT when just participating in democracy! Original writeup.

• 🐛 Light clients weren't running some Aura-specific block validation logic. This oversight has been fixed.

• Kian brings up the topic of fully custom proxies - proxies where you can explicitly define which modules and which functions in those modules a proxy can use. This would lead to super-secure extremely fine-grained proxies on a native level.

• Substrate is now on libp2p 0.31.

Ethereum Compatibility

As Moonbeam and Parity’s Frontier mature, I believe it’s worth having a separate section discussing Ethereum compatibility with Substrate and Polkadot in general. The potential for collaboration between the two ecosystems is immense.

• Moonbeam launches Ambassador program.

🛠 Tools

• Want to flood your Substrate chain with transactions to benchmark how it can hold up? Use sub-flood.

• Polkadot JS Apps UI is at version 0.68.

• The Polkadot JS Extension will now warn you if you have Caps Lock on, and will contain more verbose errors when you mistype a password.

• Polkadot JS Apps UI now has a calendar button next to each Calendar entry, letting you export on-chain events into your local calendar by way of an ICS file.

  

• Endpoints hosted by OnFinality are now added to Polkadot JS Apps, meaning you have access to them from the network selector.

• Demo for a safe and effective custodial hot wallet using anon proxies. (Crowdcast about hot wallets here).

• A staking rewards calculator from W3F - not ripe for production use yet, but collecting feedback.

• Nomination and validation actions on Polkadot Apps will now use batchAll instead of batch on chains which support batchAll. BatchAll makes a batch of extrinsic submissions atomic, i.e. they either all fail or all succeed.

• Polkadot JS UI will soon display inflation percentage and network-wide APY gains in the staking screen.

  
  

Don’t forget to vote!

Your vote only costs a TX fee (a few cents) but it can change the protocol (both Kusama and Polkadot - depending where you vote for me!) for ever - good governance is responsible governance! Click the banner to learn about my candidacy!

Note: your tokens will be locked in democracy, but are still usable for staking, referendum voting, etc. If you want to transfer them, just cancel the vote and they’re free, no strings attached.

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. Got any links for me for the next edition? Find me on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at [email protected].