Dot Leap 38: Kusama's first DAO, parachains merged, Kusama fees 50x cheaper, and more!

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0.9.0 Released!

Parachains are almost here - basic functionality has been merged in the 0.9.0 release!

This release merges in the “shell” of a parachain which serves as a placeholder, but participates as a real parachain in the block production.

Polkadot (v0.9.0)

👇👇👇 IMPORTANT 👇👇👇

The “Minimum effective nomination balance” problem has been resolved in the most recent runtime upgrade of Polkadot to V30. You can now get rewards with as low as 1 DOT staked! With this, the number of nominators has increased to >17300!

Bill Laboon’s detailed explanation of why this was possible is in this Reddit thread!

Polkadot Governance

• ✅ Motion 77 is approved, covering quarterly costs for high performance public infrastructure by OnFinality. The running costs cover two pools of Polkadot nodes for Q2 2021 (April, May, June) - this will be proposed again every three months and a similar motion was just was approved by Kusama council as well.

• ✅ The proposal upgrading the Polkadot runtime to v30 has been fast-tracked by the Technical Committee and passed. See the 0.9 release linked in this edition for details.

• ✅ Motion 79, Encode’s treasury proposal, is approved: Encode Club educates, supports and backs the next-generation of university and hacker talent coming into blockchain. The team designed a year-long program to build student involvement in the Polkadot ecosystem, including: an education series and curriculum, a dedicated hackathon and a dedicated accelerator.

  This proposal covers the first part: the education series and curriculum. With this first funding, they aim to achieve the milestone of delivering 8 events, with 50 universities participating and 1000-2000 students attending. Budget, timelines and content can be reviewed here.

• ❔ Wei Tang shared a first proposal plan for a common-good identity parachain for Polkadot and Kusama - As a common-good parachain, this would require Council or democracy's approval: please review the proposal and ask any questions. You can find the proposal here.

• The next referendum 23 is to add a lawyer as a registrar who plans to verify legal names. Over 83% of votes are in favor so far, but it is currently failing.

  This is due to the extremely low turnout - adaptive quorum biasing means that the lower the turnout, the higher the supermajority required to pass a referendum.

• ✅ Motion 80 is approved: Polkaworld submitted their proposal to establish a social contract to cover running costs for their operations. This is an open social contract for a 3 months OKR plan, covering June, July and August 2021. You can find an outline breakdown of all tasks, OKRs and budget for the 3 months in the doc linked to the post.

• 🎉 DotTreasury implemented Polkadot! Here’s their report, published on the very same platform.

• 📫 Patract Labs submitted their treasury proposal for Europa v0.3 (contract and runtime sandbox). The proposal passed as motion 81:

  The team aims to continue with Europa development to promote Wasm contract technology in the Polkadot community. The project is a sandbox environment for running Pallet-Contracts so contract developers can use the executable files compiled by Europa to debug ink! contracts. Europa is also a framework that provides a sandbox environment for Substrate Runtime, so parachain developers can implement a sandbox environment for their specific Runtime.

  Milestone specs, budget and timelines can be found on this link.

• Motion 82 is up for vote: The Polkadot Ecology Research Institute requested funds to the treasury to develop campaigns, distribute information and push marketing materials in several outlets for the community. The request is for the treasury to cover April 2021 operating costs and can be found HERE, along with records of the work done in the last month.

Kusama (v0.9.0)

⚠ Updates

• Parachains are almost here - basic functionality has been merged in the 0.9.0 release!

🏛 Kusama Governance

• ❔ Wei Tang shared a first proposal plan for a common-good identity parachain for Polkadot and Kusama - As a common-good parachain, this would require Council or democracy's approval: please review the proposal and ask any questions. You can find the proposal here.

• The BlockCreateArt team has shared their report for the funded proposal "Virtual Niche". The event attracted approx. 12k attendees and included an art competition inspired on Kusama Blockchain, prizes for the competing artists and a series of workshops on Kusama Blockchain’s NFT capabilities and digital art in general.

• Motion 290 by Stylo Wallet, to cover costs including maintenance, runtime upgrades changes and infrastructure costs, has been approved by the Council.

• ✅ After a successful completion of the last milestones, Mario from PolkaStats published the third and final proposal for the Validators Resource Center. The majority of the work for these milestones has been completed: the team is at the moment finalising details on M10 to continue further development. This proposal covers milestone 6 to 10. You can visit the ranking HERE and check budget, timelines and costs for this final part HERE. The proposal passed.

• Klever Wallet has published a proposal for feedback aiming to integrate Kusama to their wallet. Klever is a crypto wallet ecosystem serving million users worldwide and over 500k monthly active users on Klever App, Klever Swap, and Klever OS. The support by multi-crypto wallets for Polkadot is not as mature as other blockchain projects, so Klever as a multi-crypto wallet would like to add the Polkadot ecosystem to their existing application, starting with Kusama. Among other features, the wallet will support transfers, swap, staking, nominations and ramp, among other things. You can find the development roadmap, budget and timelines on the proposal link.

🚀Dapp World

• In the world of dapps built on Kusama, the Kanaria DAO proposal 1 which was open from April 30th to May 5th saw a turnout of a whopping 17% of individual addresses, with almost 30% of total votes available in the RMRK system! With such a short notice and timeframe, it would have been surprising if it reached 5%, let alone 20% 🎉

🔩 Core Stack

( ͡✧ ͜ʖ ͡✧)

Statemint teleport has been merged in, meaning you will be able to move assets from Rococo to Rococo-Statemint soon! Meanwhile, you have to manually request Statemint ROC if you want to experiment with custom assets!

( ͡✧ ͜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.

• Moonbeam partners up with The Graph.

• Moonbeam partners with Frax for some DeFi boosting.

• Axelar is deploying on Moonbeam, offering additional bridging capabilities to an already connected ecosystem.

🛠 Tools

• Cryptolab released a tool for nominators to track their rewards.

• Polkadot JS Apps UI 0.90 is out. New chain endpoints, including Statemint for Rococo, and some fee calculation and display improvements.

• Polkadot JS Api 4.9.1 is out. Along with the high-prio parachains support, adds support for latest Substrate master with some tidbits like supporting None for Reward Destination during staking (burn reward) etc. Update is mandatory!

• Substrate Sidecar API is now at version 6.0.1. 5.0 was a breaking change due to requiring NodeJS 14+ and 6.0 was due to changes to serialization of ConsensusEngineId in block digest logs.

🤝 Ecosystem

• Monitoring architecture on Polkadot and Kusama by Certhum. A story about how they monitor their stack.

• The RMRK NFT ecosystem now has a free-to-use GraphQL endpoint for wallets, explorers, and other integrations.

• Reddit's /r/DOT subreddit is now deprecated and merged with /r/Polkadot.

• Exponent from Bitfwd shared their report for the event funded by Kusama treasury: Cyberfuture on Parachains. Learn more about the speakers and watch the panels and presentations in the video links on the report.

• Nominumbers: A personal staking returns calculator by a community member!

• The first Kusama-based DAO proposal reached successfully concluded.

🎓Education

• How to mint your own custom fungible tokens on Polkadot / Kusama once parachains launch.

👷‍♀️ Jobs in the Web3 Ecosystem

Want your job ad in here? You will soon be able to buy slots as NFTs. Special discounts for egg holders.

• 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 (community manager). 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. Your application is: write a max 2-paragraph explanation of what Kusama is, in your own words. Bonus points if you attach an original meme.

• Subsocial is looking for a Developer Experience person.

📅 Upcoming Events and Webinars

• Polkadot Decoded is around the corner! Come hear from industry insiders on what’s been cooking, what’s on the stove, and what’s in the recipe books of the near and far future! Exciting!

  

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].