DotLeap 50: Freeze the Nominators

Polkadot Updates

In case you haven’t already, please fill this 2-question form to help shape the future of a Polkadot Book aimed at beginners. We promise it won’t take more than a minute.

Here are the results thus far:

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

The number of nominators has reached the configured maximum number of 22,500. For this reason, new nominators are currently forbidden. A proposal has been prepared and submitted to address this and update the configuration. If you're interested in what's being worked on to help allow more nominators, you can follow along on the Github issue here. Here is Kian's somewhat non-technical overview of the problem.

🔴 🏛 Governance

Motion 101 by OneBlock, aiming to fund the Summer Polkadot Hackathon in Hangzhou, has passed a council vote.
Motion 102 has been approved by the Polkadot Council: this proposal is part of the social contract between Polkaworld and Polkadot Network. This Polkaworld submission aims to cover operational costs for Sept, Oct, and Nov 2021. All info can be found in the Polkassembly post.
The Polkadot rebrand bounty report can be found here.
Referendum 30, to upgrade Polkadot to runtime 9080, passed and has been executed. This is a breaking change, and validators MUST upgrade nodes to remain in sync, otherwise, we’ll be seeing some slashes soon!
Referendum 29, to increase the number of validators to 399, is currently failing with ~ 8.8% in favor. Voting ends in under 10 days.
Patract has issued a report after completing treasury proposal 57 (Metis Milestone 1--implementing the MCCI architecture).

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ 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

Motion 338, supporting a Treasury Proposal from Fearless Wallet to support multiple assets and networks, has been approved by the Kusama Council.
Motion 339 passed: The treasury proposal by OpenSquare aims to cover maintenance costs for dotreasury.com. The UI introduces a retrospect mechanism for Kusama/Polkadot treasury activities, and it was developed with treasury funds. The allocation will cover servers and maintenance development, grading, and IPFS storage. More information on roadmap and costs can be found on the Polkassembly post.
After Statemine’s launch, ethworks has proposed two proposals for developing a standard and easy to use UI for interacting with the chain: read here and this.
Voxel Bridge, a contemporary art augmented-reality installation featuring RMRK-based NFTs originally founded by the Kusama Treasury is now live, with a new report submitted here. Also featured in CoinTelegraph, whose editorial office sadly forgot they wrote two articles about RMRK in the not-so-distant past and failed to cross-link the post.

⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others

Moonbeam entered Phase 3 of launching progress (removing sudo) and released a new community announcement, including a redenomination of GLMR, Moonriver’s token. They also announced their integration with Covalent to bring accessible, reliable, high-quality data, and improve the user experience of developers building on Moonriver.
Astar (formerly Plasm) announced that Trezor and Ledger will be integrated into Astar and Shiden's Polkadot.js soon!
KaruraSwap’s TVL (total value locked) is now $35.65M and rising. This impressive growth has been spurred by the launch of kUSD minting and KAR liquidity mining. Thus far, $4.16M in kUSD has been minted using KSM as collateral. Dan Reecer, Acala/Karura’s VP of growth, held a 14 minutes Intro to Karura webinar. Watch it to learn about Karura Swap, kUSD stablecoin, Liquid KSM staking (LKSM), KAR governance token, and the Karura Treasury.
Equilibrium adds Ledger support and implements a bridge to Binance Smart Chain.
Khala has implemented the first decentralized bridge linking Ethereum to Kusama.
ChainX, the Bitcoin layer 2 expansion protocol, released an overview of their project, going into details on all they are building and how it fits together.
Crust Network partners with X Protocol to foster a greater decentralized data storage ecosystem.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

Community member Paradox has created a survey to help validators provide better service for nominators. You can fill it out here.
The latest Relay Chain podcast covers Statemint/Statemine - what are the benefits of an assets parachain and how does it work?
Polkadot Base Camp accelerator is receiving applications until Aug 25 (3 weeks from Aug 4). Read more and apply here.
Voxel Bridge, a contemporary art augmented-reality installation featuring RMRK-based NFTs is now live, with a new report submitted here. Also featured in CoinTelegraph, whose editorial office sadly forgot they wrote two articles about RMRK in the not-so-distant past and failed to cross-link the post.

🛠 Tools

A new community staking analysis app is coming along nicely, letting you see some stats about a validator you’re interested in.
Crunch is a new tool for automatic staking payouts on the command line. It is also a matrix bot so you can call it from chat.
Statescan (Statemine’s explorer) now supports teleport information.
Polkadot JS API is at version 5.4, finally adding in a fix that lets you iterate through entries on NMaps. This makes this new type iterable in your client apps, allowing for lists of NFTs and custom assets from Statemine and more.

⚙Core stack

The storage chain PR has been merged in, along with an example and guide. This feature allows you to build “storage chains” which can store arbitrary data on-chain for a period of time determined in the chain’s configuration.

🌠 NFT Review

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

United Nations partners with Unique Network.
RMRK release update on token claiming.
New twitter thread illuminating the possibilities of RMRK by RMRK founder. 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].