Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

• After Referendum 28 was executed, there is now a nominating minimum of 40 DOT and a maximum total number of 22,500 nominators.

This change also included a bugfix, allowing nominators to change their validator preferences when the number of nominators is equal to or greater than the maximum allowed. It also restricts the use of chill_other, so that if the number of nominators is not near the nominator limits, the chill_other extrinsic cannot be called on other accounts.

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Referendum 26, to increase the number of validators in the active set from 297 to 499, is currently failing, 150,086.55DOT against to 5.61DOT in favor.
• A treasury proposal by DotLeap contributor Gilbert Bassey for a book about Polkadot for blockchain beginners is under discussion.
• Winkcrypto’s treasury proposal to boost the brand recognition of Polkadot to a broader audience in the Asia Pacific region is under discussion.
• The treasury proposal to reward all the activity by the Polkadotters community is under discussion.

Kusama Updates

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

• Around June 30th, Karura, Moonriver, and Statemine parachains, stopped producing blocks. The reason was a big extrinsic used on the final day of RMRK’s NFT sale. These extrinsics are used for emoting on NFTs, a feature so popular it has “broken” the chain twice now.

It seems Kusama is going through its own CryptoKitties phase, and it couldn’t have come at a better time!

• Sidecar v8.0.0 was released with HIGH upgrade priority for users involved in Kusama crowdloans and auctions.
• There are now over 961,656 KSM (~ 8.55%) of total KSM issuance, locked in crowdloans.
• Shiden Network wins the third parachain slot action.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• OpenSquare's proposal for StateScan: a Statemine fungible asset explorer, has passed a council vote. Development has started already and you can check features, timelines and budget on the post.
• The Helikon Team published a proposal aiming to build Subvalt (Substrate Validator Toolkit) for iOS and Android: a native mobile application for iOS and Android devices that provides node operators with tools helping them in running their validators on any Substrate-based blockchain network. It includes configurable notifications about the on and off-chain events, node monitoring features, and validator performance reports.
• Motion 321 is now up for vote! The CryptoLab Team submitted their proposal with the goal of helping non-technical nominators build a stable portfolio and manage it via a well-designed UI (the CryptoLab staking website) and including other tools as well. The platform will integrate both Kusama and Polkadot networks: the first milestone is to be covered by Kusama. Budget, milestones and timelines can be found on the Polkassembly post.
• There is a new Polkassembly discussion about adding an NFT registrar for verifying the originality of certain artists/minters.

⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others

• DeFi platform Acala partners with Gauntlet, a financial modelling platform for crypto. This partnership will see Gauntlet provide automated financial risk management for Acala and Karura.
• Multi-chain dApp hub Plasm Network rebrands to ASTAR Network.
• Equilibrium have created and implemented the first ever Binance Smart Chain bridge on Kusama that enables bi-directional asset transfers between BSC and Substrate-based networks, Polkadot and Kusama. The Bridge is now live on their testnet.
• Moonbeam (and Moonriver) will have its first NFT Minting Game called ZOOMBIES built by Cardinal Entertainment!
• MathChain partners with Manta Network to integrate its privacy-preserving layer into Math Wallet and MathChain’s substrate-based wallet.
• The Initial Collectible Offering for RMRK, Kusama’s chaos bringer, closed on June 30th. The project also announced extra rewards for its art contest participants.
• Kylin Network partners with Avsa Labs to co-develop custom oracle scripting parameters that will be useful to Avsa’s architecture.
• PINT, an index token representing a diversified basket of Polkadot ecosystem projects, released it second community update.

🛠 Tools

• The new at() method on API instances of PolkadotJS API lets you look up information in the past with a direct accessor. This and more in the 4.17 release.

* Substrate API Sidecar has a new breaking release out - 8.0.1: “Update /experimental/paras/auctions/current to correctly reflect the newly added AuctionStatus enum in polkadot. The phase field within the response will now return either startPeriod, endPeriod, or vrfDelay”

🌎 Ecosystem

• Jonas Gehrlein, a research scientist at the Web3 Foundation, has written a good overview of nominating and validator selection and the rationale behind it.
• Equilibrium & Genshiro CEO Alex Melikhov wrote an excellent article that dissects the data behind the first 3 parachain auctions on Kusama.

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