DotLeap 51: Approaching History

Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

Current ideal / actual staking rate = 75% / 59.5%

As the time for Polkadot’s auctions draws closer, a new network stability report was compiled by Parity to analyze the shortcomings identified on Kusama and get them squashed before it’s time to upgrade Polkadot itself. The full report is available here.

🔴 🏛 Governance

Lumos Labs shared a treasury proposal for feedback and discussion: the Polkadot India Incubator launch. The proposal focuses on the development of an incubator for the Indian community, including engagement, education, and deployment phases for the projects participating and the hire of an “India Polkadot Evangelist” to act as an advocate for Polkadot and to help teams in the process of building their ideas.
Please note the proposal covers a 6-months long plan, and this document gives the overall vision of the idea. However, each phase will be treated as a separate on-chain submission. After a successful Inaugural India Hackathon: Polkadot Buildathon, the Lumos Labs team is excited to explore the next phase in the development of the Polkadot ecosystem in the region.
You can find the proposal HERE.
Referendum 29, to increase the number of validators to 399, looks like it’s about to fail with 0.37% turnout.
Referendum 31, which would increase the minimum nomination amount to 80 DOT, passed.
Following up on the 1st milestone's report, Encode published the proposal for their 2nd milestone: "Encode Club - university engagement programme - Phase 2": aiming to fund the subsequent part of their University Engagement Programme to cover the cost of the hackathon where 500 of the students attending the sessions on the 1st phase will develop their idea into a Polkadot project. Milestones, costs, and the overall roadmap of the 2nd phase can be found on the Polkassembly post. This is up for vote as motion 104 now.
A follow-up on Bounty 0: Polkadot Brand Update Immersion Phase: a little over a week ago, the bounty curators shared their final report regarding phase 1 for a Polkadot brand update. The curators have today rewarded the bounty and the status is now Pending Payout. Once this bounty is closed, Koto will progress to Phase 2 and take all of the insights from the Polkadot community to power their creative development work. This will contribute to an updated Polkadot brand identity to address the brand’s challenges outlined in the original bounty proposal. Ultimately, all of this work will converge to an on-chain vote that is put to the DOT holders who will participate in steering the brand’s future.

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

Current ideal / actual staking rate= 72.5% / 47.3%

There’s nothing else to see here. This is good because it means there are no new problems 😁

🦅 🏛 Governance

Discussion for Encointer to obtain a slot as a common-good parachain has re-opened by the Kusama Council. Details on what this would mean and the discussion itself are on Polkassembly.
Motion 340 for Voxel Bridge's 3rd and final milestone has been voted on, approved, and passed. After announcing the opening of the piece at the Vancouver Biennale and sharing the 2nd milestone report last week, Jessica Angel submitted the final installment to create video documentation of the piece, which will be available for the Kusama community to explore by the end of September 2021, at the request of the Council.
Ethworks has two posts on Polkassembly seeking feedback on a Treasury Proposal. The first is for the development of a simpler UI for asset creation and transfer on Statemine. The second is to develop tools to help streamline the use of assets created on Statemine on other parachains.

⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others

Moonbeam announced the deployment of its Meter Passport bridge on Moonriver. The bridge will connect the Moonriver parachain and Kusama to ETH, BSC, Polygon, and Meter, allowing the free movement of assets across the independent networks. Moonbeam also announced the “Take Flight” community token event. The event aims to allocate GLMR tokens (8% of the initial supply) to loyal supporters.
MathChain partners with Coinversation on dApp cross-chain deployment.
Acala announced Build Acala #2, a network ownership event to grow their treasury prior to parachain auctions. It got over 50k entries in less than two hours. On the Kusama side, risk managers Gauntlet unveiled the risk management dashboard for Karura.
On August 12th, the Crust mainnet entered the public access phase. Nodes are now allowed to join, and $CRU transfers are enabled. Crust mainnet is expected to be launching at the beginning of September, and will open more functions at that time.
88.3 million reserved ERC20-PHA have been transferred to Khala Network through the Ethereum-Khala Bridge by the Phala team. More details in G.Sheet
Subsocial is still using a manual faucet while they solve the problem with the automated faucet. If you are new to Subsocial and would like some tokens so you can play around on the platform, please fill out this short form. The project also opened its ambassador program.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

You can now find all Encode session links (medium posts and youtube videos) on their team's latest report for the completion of Encode Club - university engagement programme - Phase 1. The target metrics were 8 events, 50 universities participating and 1000-2000 students attending. The team has comfortably hit all metrics.
Web3 Foundation Grants Program reaches 300 projects milestone. Also, the Foundation's General Grants and Open Grants have merged, providing a simplified mechanism for applying for grants to build in the Polkadot ecosystem. More details here.
All of the completed Treasury-funded Encode Polkadot Club recordings are now publicly available on Youtube. Topics include intro to blockchain, Substrate, and parachains. The link also includes Eventbrite links for future events.
August 31st don’t miss Polkadot Web3 Talks on all things DAOs. Register now to hear Acala’s @bettechentt, Edgeware’s @dillchen, and Nodle’s @EliottTeiss discuss the challenges DAOs face and their practical experiences using DAOs in the Polkadot ecosystem.

🛠 Tools

Polkadot JS API 5.5 is out as a low priority upgrade for users of TypeScript (changes to Bigint across the board).

🌠 NFT Review

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

Reinventing NFTs with Polkadot discussion released on Youtube.
History of Kusama to come alive on the Vancouver bridge
Unique Network for the #digitalart4climate art contest.
Bit.Country release first screenshots of their slice of the Metaverse.
RMRK launches Stage 1 of RMRK 2.0 NFTs: Kanaria genesis items, the first of their kind - multi resource NFTs with different assets per single NFT.

Read these and more

👷‍♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0

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OAK Network is hiring for Sr. Rust Engineer, Research Scientist (Ph.D. 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].