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Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

Thankfully, the relay chain has been steady for the past week so there are no new developments to report. All focus is on Kusama, Statemine, and Parachain auctions.

🔴 🏛 Governance

Because governance is slower on Polkadot, we have nothing of note to report from last week.

🔴 ⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others

• Phala Network partners with Amara Finance to develop Maralink, a multi-signature threshold technology chain bridge based on TEE trusted computing that ensures both security and privacy.
• Darwinia’s network data is now available for free on SubQuery. The Darwinia team recently released two new SubQuery projects, one for their mainnet and the other for Crab, Darwinia’s canary network.
• Crust Network partners with CryptoTycoon for the gaming platform’s NFT storage. Crust will provide CryptoTycoon with decentralized storage services to solve the problem of massive NFT retrieve rates on Binance Smart Chain users on CryptoTycoon platform.

Kusama Updates

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

• Over May 30th and May 31st, Kusama nodes across the world had trouble staying alive due to a swamped transaction queue. Long story short, RMRK’s project Kanaria had a contest going which rewards the most emoted NFTs (the protocol allows people to send emoticons to NFTs). Some people took this seriously enough to write emoting scripts which then spammed the network due to no longer being economically prevented from doing so, as Kusama lowered its TX fees by 50x the week before. This is being fixed in this PR.
• The decentralization of Statemine has started. Permissionless asset creation is coming!

🦅 🏛 Governance

• 📃 Motion 304 upgraded the Shell parachain to Statemine, Kusama’s first parachain.
• 📃 Motion 305 changed some on-chain parameters to ensure that the amount of assignments by validators to parachains is at a maximum in order to reduce the possibility of a network issue.
• 📃 Motion 306 added two-way teleportation to Statemine/Kusama, by implementing Runtime v9040.
• 🗳 Referendum 117 upgrading Kusama Runtime to v9040 passed community vote and was executed in block #7,812,476.
• 🗳 The contextual information for Referendum 119, which was not provided before, can be found here. This proposal fixed the total issuance on Kusama related to any funds sent to Statemine before 2-way teleporting on Kusama-Statemine was included. More information about the voting and execution process can be found on the post, including why the Council acted in a speedy manner. The Apps team will re-enable teleport in the UI once we have ascertained everything is working as expected.
• 🗳 Referendum 119 and v9040 runtime upgrade executed, teleport now works in both directions. The UI functionality should be available shortly.

🦅 ⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others

• ChainX launches a new 2+1 testnet for SherpaX, their canary network on Kusama. Users are incentivized to test the project’s cross-chain functionality which currently supports BTC, ETH, BNB, USDT, DOT, KSM, DOGE, and BCH.

🔩 Core Stack

• Named reserves are getting closer to finished. This will allow an implementer to set any custom reserve amount on a balance, paving the way to dApp-level staking like that planned by RMRK and more.
• The Uniques pallet has been merged. This pallet offers basic NFT functionality - essentially NFT balance keeping - on the coming Statemine chain on Kusama. The PR to add it to Statemine is here.
• Patract Labs has finished version 0.2 of ask! (ink! in AssemblyScript). See their report here.

🛠 Tools

• Staking payouts v1.2.0 is out with support for payouts per nominator address and an ls command to list pending payouts.
• Polkadot JS API v4.13.1 is out with medium upgrade priority. Required for users connecting to Statemine and future Kusama upgrades.
• A big UI improvement for multisig users as Multisig call data is now transformed into human-readable format before you press the "approve" button on Polkadot-JS (a big UI improvement if you handle multisigs often)
• Polkascan has submitted their May report for maintenance on the Python library for interfacing with Substrate
• Ledger is not currently working correctly with Polkadot-JS using Chrome 91. For details and a workaround, see this post.

🤝 Community News and Articles

• Gossamer allows you to create your own Polkadot-compatible chain in Go (similar to Substrate). Elizabeth Binks shows you how here.
• The Polkadot Ecology Research Institute has issued the latest report on their Polkadot Treasury-funded content production.
• Patract Labs has submitted a report for milestone 0.4 of Redspot (Wasm contract scaffold) for which they received Treasury funding.

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