Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

current staking rate 61.7% // ideal staking rate 75%

• The first two batches of Parachain Auctions on Polkadot were announced to great fanfare. At some point, #Polkadot was trending on Twitter—talk about community excitement. If you wish to participate in the crowdloans, now is the time to unstake your DOT as unstaking takes 28 days on Polkadot.
• There have been several questions about staking rewards recently. If you are not receiving staking rewards, please read this article for possible issues.
• Polkadot Gifts was launched yesterday at Sub0. This lets you send DOT to anyone, even if they don’t have a Polkadot account. You can try it here.
• Going forward, Polkadot runtime upgrades will be using compressed runtimes. Until now, they had been using uncompressed versions which, due to being a waste of on-chain space, also caused a recent upgrade to fail due to the runtime file being too big.

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Referendum 37, upgrading the Polkadot runtime to v9110, was fast-tracked by the Technical Committee and voted by all DOT holders. 
• PinkNode has a post on Polkassembly seeking feedback for an improved dashboard for infrastructure monitoring. 
• Motion 118, which proposes the first parachain auctions on Polkadot to start on November 11th, 2021, has become Referendum 39.

A Hackathon on the World’s Most Advanced NFT Protocol

The RMRK Association - stewards and main developers of RMRK - launched the RMRK Hackathon with a prize pool of $50,000 plus valuable NFTs for both developers and non-developers. Below are the available categories:

• Data Cruncher sponsored by D1 Ventures and Subsquid - Recognize and visualize trends and patterns, spot outliers, build inspection tools. Help collectors scour the world of RMRK with advanced filters.
• Tools and Apps sponsored by Phala and Signum Capital - Build applications and middleware that leverage RMRK.
• RMRK Rewrite sponsored by Illusionist Group and AMPnet - Rewrite RMRK code into pallets, Solidity smart contracts, and more.
• Kanaria sponsored by PAKA and 1PAR - Build tools, UIs, games, and more for Kanaria.
• Free-for-All sponsored by PoCoCo and ChaosDAO - Build anything that doesn’t belong in the above categories.
• Non-Technical - Write wikis, design Kanaria items, create a Kanaria comic book, create a social media campaign, and more.

Join the Hackathon

…

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

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - 11.5729mil KSM || staking - 42.9% || parachains - 20.44%

(there was an error in last week’s parachains figure of 21.2%)

• Kintsugi won parachain slot 11. This means that Bitcoin is coming to Kusama soon.
• • Going forward, Kusama runtime upgrades will be using compressed runtimes. Until now, they had been using uncompressed versions which, due to being a waste of on-chain space, also caused a recent upgrade to fail due to the runtime file being too big.
• Kusama Gifts was launched yesterday at Sub0. This lets you send KSM to anyone, even if they don’t have a Polkadot account. You can try it here.
• Currently, there is an issue on the Kusama-ledger app that was caused by a recent network update. The team at Zondax is working with the Ledger team to solve the issue. You can follow any updates here.
• Statemine v5 is in progress and almost ready to merge. Along with some bug fixes introduced by V4, this update will allow Statemine to use XCM to talk to other parachains, which paves the way to adding Statemine tokens to a DEX like Karura.
• Polkadot 0.9.11 has been released and executed, with upgrade priority MEDIUM. This release introduces a database migration; you will not be able to revert to 0.9.10 without resyncing the chain. This also introduces multiple vesting schedules, which means you can now vest several balances per account, rather than needing a new account for every vesting schedule.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Statescan is seeking feedback for a potential Treasury Proposal to increase the functionality of their Substrate assets chain explorer.
• Referendum 139, to upgrade Statemine runtime to v4, was passed. The new version includes support for features that allow passing assets to other parachains.
• The Metrika proposal, to provide a publicly available dashboard that exposes deeper operational KPIs and insights, is still up for discussion and feedback. More info in the post and comments.
• Motion 370, to fix an issue with Relay-Chain-to-Statemine asset transports caused by the v9111 runtime upgrade, passed Council vote and has become Referendum 140.

⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others

projects connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains

• Sota Watanabe (Shiden/Astar founder) posted a proposal to list SDN (Shiden Network native token) on Karura Network Swap and open SDN/kUSD pair. Here.
• Shiden launched dApp staking to Shibuya (Shiden Network parachain testnet) for the community to test and projects to see the huge potential for building in the Astar Network ecosystem. Read more.
• DAOLaunch (an innovative IDO platform that bridges the gap between investors and startups) joins Astar/Shiden Builders Program. More information.
• Ocean Protocol and Band Protocol are now live on Moonriver.
• The Khala mining analytics board was launched and the Khala transfer function is now open.
• Step 2 (State migration) of the Altair Network launch process has started. Balances & accounts from the CFG snapshot will be migrated onto the Altair parachain, including proxied and vesting accounts.
• SubQuery released an update covering all the progress made in September. Notable highlights include:
  • A $9m Series A funding
  • New multilanguage blogs and documentation
  • New projects on SubQuery--Parallel Finance and DotMarketCap
• Kintsugi has released its launch roadmap.

🔗 Candidate Parachains, dApps, and others

projects that are not yet connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains

• Acala introduced Acala Quests in preparation for the yet-to-announced Polkadot crowdloans. Users that complete ALL of the program’s quests will receive an extra 2% ACA bonus on their crowdloan contributions, an Acala NFT, and their own referral code, which entitles them to an additional 5% ACA bonus on any referee contributions or an additional 10% ACA bonus by using their own referral code.
• Moonbeam and KYVE Network team up to bring permanent data availability to Moonbeam and Moonriver. This integration will allow Moonbeam developers to easily store their data permanently, enabling higher scalability.
• HydraDX hosted a meetup in Lisbon to discuss the future of HydraDX, Basilisk, and Angular Finance. Now it’s up on YouTube for all Hydraheads to enjoy!
• The New Vision StaFi forum has been launched. Interested users are welcome to participate in the DAO governance of StaFi: Experience & Guide.
• Interlay, the team behind Kintsugi, has released a new dev and ecosystem update.
• After passing a third-party code audit, the Crust Mainnet finished development and was officially launched in the 217th Era. 
• Phala released a new report. Most notable highlights include:
  • Khala transfers enabled
  • 13,000+ workers online
  • Dev and ecosystem updates across Phala and Khala

⚙ Core Stack

• ERC20-like traits have been added to Substrate, supporting information like approvals, total supply, and other information on the assets pallet, making integration with other code more intuitive.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• Watch Gavin Wood's interview with Protocol about the journey from Ethereum to Polkadot, his vision for the third iteration of the web, as well as why crypto and blockchain technology will prevail.
• Gavin Wood spoke at Mainnet 2021 in NY end of September, you can watch his interview with Ryan Selkis here.
• Are you interested in following the latest Substrate news? You can subscribe to the Substrate newsletter here. 
• The Substrate Seminar has a new URL for their crowdcasts - please update your bookmarks.
• The first hackathon from the Polkadot Hackathon is happening on October 22nd. With $30k in prizes don’t miss your chance to participate, this would be a great opportunity to learn how to build substrate-based chains running on Kusama and Polkadot.
• The Web3 Foundation has released the information on Wave 11 grant recipients.
• The Polkadot Hackathon Global series starts with Asia Pacific (APAC) on October 22. This also includes a "Docathon" for tutorial, documentation, and explainers.

🛠 Tools

• Substrate API Sidecar is at a new major version: V10. This is a breaking change due to new metadata formats, and should be added by any consumer of the sidecar tool.
• Polkadot JS Apps UI will now show you multiple vesting schedules per account, if available.

🌠 NFT Review

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

• An epic tweet thread that explains all the awesomeness that is RMRK.
• Kodadot introduced Series Insights to their NFT marketplace.
• Unique Network partnered with SupraOracles.
• Kanaria (home of NFT 2.0) has netted over 18,962 KSM (~ $6.4m) in sales volume over the last month.
• RMRK pays out 175 KSM (~ $60,000) to revenue-bearing gem holders.

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 and Emre Surmeli for the Polkadot 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].