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RMRK grows up

The Kusama-native NFT protocol RMRK is growing up with its own full time team and a clear roadmap for ecosystem expansion. If you’re confused as to what RMRK is, and how it can possibly give Kusama native NFTs without smart contracts, this video should explain it and if you’re up for a longer read, the explainer paper is here.

Polkadot (v0.8.30)

• A call about publishing the first BTC bridge as a common-good chain happened this week. The debrief along with the video recording is here. This was for Kusama but it involves a coordinated effort from both councils.

• A new testnet, Wococo (Rococo's Evil Twin), is being planned to try out BEEFY and MMRs. BEEFY allows more efficient bridging to external (non-Substrate) chains by adding a secondary protocol on top of GRANDPA.

  MMR (Merkle Mountain Ranges) are a modification to Merkle trees to make them append-only, and allow faster updating.

• Any parachain with ID less than 1000 is considered a system parachain and has elevated privileges.

• The minimum amount of vestable token balance has been reduced 100x. You can now send as little as 1 DOT in vested format, but the one-vested-balance-per-account limit remains - this is due in the next runtime upgrade (see below).

• Motion 78 upgrading Polkadot Runtime to v30 is up for vote. Release notes, runtime changes and hash can be found HERE.

Polkadot Governance

• ✅ Motion 76 has been approved: The ZKV team submitted their proposal for a Privacy Focussed Event for Polkadot: The event aims to raise awareness on the importance of privacy in the digital era, attract new privacy projects to Polkadot and help existing ones show their work to a wider audience: the team will give the stage to the privacy-focused projects on the Polkadot ecosystem and explore the latest developments.

• ✅ Motion 74 for the Governance-focused Mobile App M2 development has passed. A detailed breakdown with estimates can be found here.

• ❔ Encode published a new proposal for discussion: a 12 months Encode Club Program focusing on Polkadot Network. The program includes 3 phases: Education series and curriculum, a dedicated hackathon and a dedicated accelerator - The first submission will cover phase 1 of the 3: schedule, targets and budget can be found on the post.

• ✅ Motion 75 has been approved: Patract’s proposal for Redspot v0.4 (Wasm contract scaffold). Redspot is one of Patract's Wasm contract development tool suite. The goal is to standardize the contract development process, hide the underlying compilation details of the contract and combine sandbox, library, API, SDK and other plugins to create a one-stop smooth contract development process.

• ✅ Referendum 19, canceling proposal 10 (for using a wrong method for submission and invalid in any case due to address format issues) has passed community vote.

• ❔ Motion 77 is now up for vote, for high performance public infrastructure by OnFinality. This proposal covers ongoing running costs of two pools of Polkadot nodes for Q2 2021 (April, May, June) - this will be proposed again every three months and was just was approved by Kusama as well.

• ❔ Motion 78 upgrading Polkadot Runtime to v30 is up for vote. Release notes, runtime changes and hash can be found HERE.

Kusama (v0.8.30)

⚠ Updates

• A call about publishing the first BTC bridge as a common-good chain happened this week. The debrief along with the video recording is here. This was for Kusama but it involves a coordinated effort from both councils.

• ⚠ A new issue for tracking the parachain launch has been created on Github. Comments have been disabled due to too many wen moons.

🏛 Kusama Governance

• ✅ Motion 285 aiming to upgrade Kusama’s runtime to v2030 was quickly voted in by the Council and fast tracked by the Technical Committee.

• ✅ Motion 288 by Cryptolocally, has been approved by the Council. Cryptolocally will now add KSM as the currency to buy and sell on their platform.

• ✅ Motion 289 by OnFinality to cover ongoing running costs of two pools of Kusama nodes for Q2 2021 has been approved by the Council.

🔩 Core Stack

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)

All hands on deck for the parachain functionality - lots of tiny upgrades there in hundreds of PRs too short and isolated to explain here.

To follow along with Parachain progress, please track this issue.

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)

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.

• A new grant proposal has been submitted for an NFT bridge from Ethereum to Polkadot and back. If approved, this will likely end up competing with the bridges the RMRK team is planning to build with Unique network.

🛠 Tools

• Polkadot JS API 4.6 is out. Mainly parachain compatbility, recommended for Rococo, and types for the Statemint public good chain.

• Substrate API Sidecar 4.0.6 is out, mainly following along with Polkadot JS API.

• Polkadot JS Apps UI is at 0.88. New types and chains added.

• Substrate API Sidecar has been updated to 4.0.8 to adapt to the new Kusama runtime and with crowdloan endpoint support.

• Yieldscan fixed a bug where you couldn’t stake vested funds. You now can.

👨‍🎓 Education

• Having problems connecting to polkadot.js.org/apps UI? A node might be down. Here’s a short video guide on how to switch them, or if you prefer a written copy a support article here.

  Double click to interact

🤝 Ecosystem

• Subsocial announced their plan to become a parachain for Kusama!

• RMRK and Unifty teamed up to bring Kusama NFTs to a multi-chain UI even before parachains!

• Gossamer, ChainSafe's Go implementation of the Polkadot Host, is now fully syncing with both Polkadot and Kusama networks. 

👷‍♀️ Jobs in the Web3 Ecosystem

• Web3 Foundation is looking for a bunch of new colleagues: from community managers to back end engineers or support. Want to work on the forefront of new tech? Join us!

• Purestake (behind Moonbeam) needs community and marketing people!

• RMRK is looking for someone to handle social media. Get in touch via [email protected] if you have what it takes. You have to be passionate about NFTs and blockchain, and fluent in English at a native level. Can also be paid in crypto.

📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars

• April 27th - Moonbeam’s Illuminate event will present a wide variety of actors deploying and building on Moonbeam, celebrating a multi-chain future.

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].