Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

current staking rate 64% // ideal staking rate 75%

• Kian’s monthly staking progress report is out. This report will be kept up to date on a month-by-month basis and we’ll let you know when a change has been made.

  In this month’s update, Kian explains that multi-block elections are being developed and a sorted list of nominators which, when implemented, will allow for a significant increase in the number of nominators allowed in the system due to elections not having to be expressly shoehorned into a single block. Additionally, the following quote is particularly interesting:

  Furthermore, in the long term future something like an NPoS election parachains could enable virtually unbounded nominator participation as all blocks could be used to process elections.)

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Polkadot has been upgraded to runtime 9090 in Referendum 33.
• Motion 107 by the Polkadot Ecology Research institute to seek support from the Treasury to cover operating costs from Sept 2021 to Feb 2022, has passed Council vote.
• 2 Polkadot Ambassadors, Hernan and Lorena, published a proposal to develop a Polkadot Educational Hub for the Polkadot Spanish speaking community: to organize an integrated, compiled, and organized information system for this community. More info on the proposal can be found on the Polkassembly post.

This newsletter is made possible thanks to Pontem Network!

Pontem Network is an upcoming Kusama and Polkadot project aiming to make it easy for teams to build Diem (prev. Libra) compatible projects. Having developed the Move VM for Substrate, Pontem makes it possible to use the Move language to write smart contracts on Substrate chains 🤯

By deploying on Pontem for Kusama, development teams can make sure their Move apps work in the broader Polkadot ecosystem. Teams can start building on the testnet now. Then, by migrating to Pontem on Polkadot, teams will make sure they meet the regulatory requirements of Diem, and will simultaneously tap into the greater DeFi ecosystem of Polkadot. Finally, with a bridge to Diem, teams can host infrastructure on either Polkadot or Diem and build use cases across the two systems.

Projects like Pontem are essential for the expansion of the Polkadot universe, and we’re proud to welcome Pontem as Dot Leap supporters!

Join Pontem’s Telegram channel for updates on mainnet launch!

…

Want to sponsor a future issue of Dot Leap? Buy the slot as an NFT!

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

current staking rate 42.8% // ideal staking rate 72.5%

• Kilt has won the sixth parachain auction, becoming the seventh parachain to connect to Kusama.
• Currently, 569,901 KSM (~5% of total issuance) have been locked up via crowdloans for this batch of auctions. Between the current and previous parachain auctions, 1.7m KSM (almost 15% of total issuance) are currently locked for parachain slots/crowdloans.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Dwellir published their proposal for the development of new RPC nodes service and to cover the maintenance costs of it for the next three months. Please note the team has already opened a PR to include their nodes in Apps: merged. The proposal includes two milestones: the first one aims for the improvement of the current service (deployment automation (JuJu Charm) and using multiple DNS registrars), the second one covers the current maintenance costs for the running nodes. The budget and roadmap can be found on the proposal: please leave your comments and questions. The team is here to answer any questions!
• After Encointer's request for a common good parachain slot, and given various council members have signaled a common good slot is suitable for the project sometime between the 12th and the 22nd slot auctions, the team published a proposal for pre-launch maintenance to cover deployment, Westend testing, and operations, aiming to get a slot sometime around that period: please review before on-chain submission, this is a discussion we have had for quite some time now,** and we are still looking for the best way for the council to signal their intention to give a common good slot to a project**.
• NibbleBits published a proposal to develop an educational music video of Polkadot and Kusama Networks protocols and dynamics. This project aims to provide one of the possible visual interpretations of the dynamics behind Polkadot and its elements. Link to previous tests and pre-production, budget and planned milestones can be found HERE.
• Motion 349, submitted by KodaDot and extending their universal NFT explorer/marketplace UI to support non-fungible tokens on Statemine, has passed Council vote.
• Referendum 132, proposing to increase HRMP open request TTL from 2 to 72 sessions, has passed and executed. This was fast-tracked by the Technical Committee.
• Referendum 133, by Bifrost, aims to undo the effects of Referendum 129, where the ump_service_total_weight was accidentally reduced to 5_000_000_000 from 100_000_000_000.

  This proposal replaces Referendum 129, that aimed to increase UMP weight from 4_000_000_000 to 5_000_000_000. When r129 passed, the proposer team realised during their testing that the value was originally 100_000_000_000 to begin with. So whereas they thought they were increasing the weight, they are actually decreasing it.

  The team requested the Technical Committee to cancel this proposal. TC believes no danger to the network will appear if the UMP weight decreases to the one in the proposal. The TC checked with all parachain teams and no current parachain is using weight more than 5_000_000_000. Therefore, TC has decided not to act.

  However, the Bitfrost team submitted a new proposal: this one, to increase the value back to 100_000_000_000 with a normal democracy procedure.

⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others

• Karura has launched Liquid Staking for KSM, users can now mint LKSM on up to 3k KSM. LKSM allows users to stake KSM to receive a liquid ‘receipt’ token in LKSM at a 1:1 ratio. LKSM continues to earn staking returns while being free to use across Karura & Kusama-based DeFi for earning additional yield.
• Acala accepted Tree from the NUTS Finance team as the inaugural Acala Ecosystem Grant recipient. Tree is a synthetic asset protocol designed for optimizing liquidity fragmentation to increase asset usability in the Polkadot ecosystem.  💰 Learn more about Acala Grants’ mission, guidelines, committee, and application process.
• Trading is now live on Kanaria, the most advanced NFT playground in crypto. Bird holders can now list, buy, and sell their birds and items on-chain. Read more about this update here. There has been over $300,000 in trading volume has since trading went live 3 days ago.
• SDN token transfers have been enabled on Shiden Network. The smart contract features will be enabled soon, allowing developers to deploy both Ethereum smart contracts (EVM) and WASM on Shiden Network.
• Shiden/Astar announced the launch of a $30M Astar/Shiden Ecosystem Growth Fund to help build the premier dApp hub on Kusama and Polkadot.
• Zenlink completed a Series A funding round led by Alameda Research.
• Cere Network released a project update.
• Nsure has completed Milestone 1 of its Web3 Foundation grant, moving the project closer to its goal of building a cross-blockchain open insurance marketplace for open finance.
• The Decentralized Cloud Foundation has launched the “Node 100” program to improve the quality of nodes and strengthen the security of the Crust network.
• Polkadex has been accepted into the Creative Destruction Lab program at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto!
• Subscan introduced its new multi-signature wallet tool that is designed to help others in the Polkadot ecosystem create and manage multi-signature accounts and transactions. It is supported by the Web3 Foundation Grants Program and provides convenient multi-signature wallet management services for multiple networks based in Polkadot.
• Moonriver upgraded their runtime to 501, fixing issues with the max nominators per collator (increased from 10 to 100), and an unbonding issue that affected a few people. 
• Anyswap released their bridge UI for moving assets from Ethereum and BSC to Moonriver.

⚙ Core Stack

• State Rent is being removed from contracts due to usability considerations. Without this, it would be very difficult to convince existing devs and their audience to move to Substrate, as in the eyes of new users this is just an adoption barrier. Good call!

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• Bill Laboon did an AMA on Reddit focusing on the topic "Polkadot for Beginners" - post is here.
• Sub0, the Substrate Developer Conference, is taking place on 13-14 October this year. 
• Gavin Wood has written up a primer on XCM, the cross-consensus messaging format.

🛠 Tools

• Scale info 1.0 is finally out, which enables rich type descriptions for RPC SCALE outputs from nodes.

🌠 NFT Review

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

• Unique Network unveiled winners for #DigitalArt4Climate designathon.
• Bit.Country introduced their Kusama parachain candidate.
• Unique Network paid out 50% of their NFT marketplace revenue as rewards to accounts holding at least one Substrapunk and one Chelobrick.

Read these and more

👷‍♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0

Want your ad here? Buy it on Singular.

• RMRK.app, home of the most advanced NFTs in the world, is looking for React developers and Rust developers. Get in touch!

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].