Polkadot Updates

Please fill this 2-question form to help shape the future of a Polkadot Book aimed at beginners.

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

It appears that there’s nothing to see here.

That’s a good thing because it means there are no new problems 😁

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Helikon published a part of the first milestone output of SubVT (Substrate Validator Toolkit - formerly named Subvalt): initial set of user story and feature documentation is available for viewing and feedback in the top-level project repository here.
• Motion 94, a treasury proposal to write a Polkadot book for blockchain beginners, did not reach a majority; there is a plan to re-submit it in the future.

  If you would like this book to exist (or not), please fill this 2-question form to make your voice heard and help shape the future.

• Motion 95, to fund the Polkadotters community's Treasury Proposal, has been passed by the Council.
• Motion 96, a treasury proposal covering extra feature milestones 2 to 6 on DotScanner.com, passed.
• Motion 97 covering Cloudflare Enterprise Plan for Subscan from August 2021 to October 2021, has been approved by the Council.
• Motion 99 has been approved by the Council and has now become Referendum 30: the motion proposes an upgrade of the Polkadot Runtime to v9080 - Release notes, runtime changes, and proposal hash can be found here. This release introduces a new host function: As such, node operators should upgrade if they have not done so before the next runtime upgrade in order to continue being able to sync.
• Referendum 29 to increase the number of validators in the active set from 297 to 399, is currently failing, with 46_161 in favor and 177_261 against.
• Motion 100 has been approved and enacted: The proposal uses a feature added in a recent substrate PR to ensure that the staking system maintains a certain level of quality in terms of backing scores. This is an additional security measure to the staking system being put into place, as the signed submissions are opening up in the 9080 runtime upgrade. With this motion, all staking solutions provided to the chain (either by off-chain workers or signed miners) will need to attain at least the score that is specified in this motion. These numbers are obtained by taking the average score of Polkadot/Kusama election for the last 50 eras, and taking their average, then multiplied by 50% to take into account network variability.
• Motion 101 is now up for a vote. The treasury proposal by OneBlock aims to fund the Summer Polkadot Hackathon by OneBlock in Hangzhou, China - for operations and winners prizes. The hackathon was a success: with 28 teams building on Substrate. This summer hackathon, along with the entire Substrate hackathon program of 2021, aims to:
  • Attract more Substrate enthusiasts to learn about the framework and participate in the Polkadot community,
  • Influence developers with ambitions to deliver more high-quality Substrate-based projects and 3) build and grow a robust, diversified, and healthy Substrate and Polkadot ecosystem.
  The budget, prizes to be covered, and metrics can be found on the Polkassembly post.
• The Amara Finance team submitted a proposal for the development and operation of decentralized cross-chain protocol “MaraLink”, which allows anyone to send assets to applications on any blockchain. Details in the Polkassembly post.

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

• The staking rate has remained remarkably consistent recently, at 48.3 - 48.4%.
• An additional security feature, allowing a minimum backing score for election solutions, was added in Runtime 9080. Motion 337 was voted on and executed, meaning that solutions must now only include validators with 847.4 KDOT allocated.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Motion 335 for the 2nd milestone of the Open-Source DApp API by SubQuery/OnFinality and Fearless has passed. The roadmap, budget, and reasoning behind the proposal can be found in the post.
• Motion 336 by Patract Labs for Ask! v0.3 (AssemblyScript Contract) has passed. This proposal covers the features of v0.3. These, along with budget, milestones and roadmap can be reviewed on the Polkassembly post.
• Ethworks has submitted a new post on Polkassembly seeking feedback for a Treasury Proposal for an improved Statemine assets UI. Ethworks is also seeking feedback on another post to help streamline the use of Statemine assets in dApps on other parachains.
• There is a new post on Polkassembly seeking feedback for a Treasury Proposal to back a /r/Kusama moderator on Reddit. In order for this to be viable, the Sub-Bounties extension must first be completed.
• Following the passing and execution of Referendum 126, the Kusama runtime was upgraded to Runtime 9080. Please note that this upgrade includes a new Host function and thus (unlike most runtime upgrades) node operators must upgrade to continue to sync the chain.
• Motion 338, a treasury proposal by Fearless Wallet to develop an improved multi-asset support on its mobile wallet, was approved.

⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others

• Astar and Kylin have taken XCMP to the next level. ​​XCMP is normally a one-way message, essentially the chain sending an XCMP message cannot await a response. Kylin and Astar have worked around that limitation by implementing a queuing system for requests. Read more here.
• The Subscan block explorer now supports Statemine. Subscan now also supports Bifrost mainnet query. Users can query the data of Bifrost Finance mainnet and the token status through bifrost.subscan.io, or apply to call Bifrost’s data API.
• Bware Labs joins Astar ecosystem as one of their go-to service partners for future developers. Bware Labs provides a solution for bringing together node providers and end-users in a decentralized, user-friendly platform.
• Moonriver has completed another phase of its launch process to Kusama Network! In phase two, on-chain governance will be enabled to give participants full autonomy in the future of Moonriver, the community-led network. Read more here.
• dTrade (a DEX for perpetual swaps and options powered by Substrate) will be deployed on Moonbeam’s smart contract and runtime pallets.
• Kylin Network will reward anyone willing to run the Kylin collator on Chachacha with 500 $KYL per month a collator has run continuously. 
• ChainX released a brief explanation of their research into EVM and its applicability to Substrate based blockchains. 
• OnFinality, a leading blockchain IaaS (infrastructure as a service) platform, is now providing a reliable and scalable infrastructure to Astar. The Astar community can now build applications on high-performance RPC archive nodes in the Shiden Network (and future Astar Network) for free.
• The Khala Ethereum Bridge (on Phala Network’s pre-mainnet, Khala Network) has passed an audit by CertiK, the world’s top blockchain security company.
• The Phala tech team has carefully reviewed possible risks on Khala, is prepared for rapid response, and has summarized their findings and preparations in a risk report, Expect Chaos! Read it here.
• Zeitgeist launch a new seer program to expand its community.

🛠 Tools

• Polkadot JS Api is at version 5.3 with an upgrade priority of “Low”, recommended for users of the `api.at` functionality.
• Polkadot JS Apps UI is at version 0.95. Mainly minor bug fixes and changes, nothing notable compared to last version.
• Substrate API Sidecar 9.1.2 is out with a bugfix for the global package binary.

🌎 Ecosystem

• If you are interested in presenting your Substrate project at the next Sub0, there are only a few days left to submit your talk. The deadline is August 8th.
• The Web3 Foundation grants program has changed a bit recently. See the wiki for the latest updates.
• Parity developer Keith describes several improvements he has been working on for Substrate runtime engineers in the Substrate Seminar. Watch a recording.

🌠 NFT Review

A weekly newsletter keeping up with the evolution of NFTs in the Dotsama ecosystem.

• RMRK release a demo of some RMRK 2.0 functionality.
• Reinventing NFTs with Polkadot panel holds at the Open Metaverse Conference.
• Singular enables Simpleswap for easy onboarding into KSM from any other cryptocurrency without KYC. Read these and more

👷‍♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0

Want your ad here? Email the editor.

• OAK Network is hiring for Sr. Rust Engineer, Research Scientist (PhD in C.S., Math or a related field), and Executive Assistant.
• RMRK is looking for Developer Advocates and Documentation writers. Please get in touch if you feel like you fit!

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 him on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at [email protected].