Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

• Polkadot version 0.9.7 has been released to fix the auction and crowdloan bugs. Upgrade priority is LOW for both Polkadot and Kusama.
• There have been some changes to the staking mechanism on Polkadot. Specifically, a minimum of 20 DOT to nominate has been added and a total of 20_000 accounts can nominate.
• Polkadot-JS now displays both the active number of nominators (those actively nominating validators) and the total number of nominators. The 20_000 limit applies to total, not active, nominators.

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Motion 89 is up for vote: The Polkadot Ecology Research Institute submitted a treasury proposal to cover operational costs for the months of June, July and August 2021. OKRs, timelines and budget can be found on the motion link.
• Motion 90 passed and was fast-tracked into Referendum 27 which promptly passed. The proposal sets a limit on the maximum number of validators, namely 1200, and leaves the rest of the parameters unchanged (20000/20DOTs) for nominators.

The validator community should be aware that the discussion around the minimum DOT stake limit for validators (similar to what was imposed recently on nominators) has already begun in the Polkadot Direction channel, and will be proposed later as soon as discussion reaches consensus. Similar to the nominator limits, these limits are for the safety of the network and will grow as the network grows.

• MIDL.dev, published a proposal aiming to cover the costs of providing usable snapshots for the Polkadot community to the benefit of node operators (including new snapshots at least once per day available on IPFS to quickly spin up or restore their infrastructure). Budget, timelines and ops costs for the maintenance can be found on the post.
• Patract's proposal for Metis (ink! and Ask! Standard Library) is up for discussion: Metis will be the Wasm contract standard library developed by Patract Labs, and will implement a series of common components, similar to the Openzeppelin-contracts development library: Budget, timelines, and milestones can be found in the Polkassembly post.
• Sslyuwink from Winkcrypto published a proposal along ChainNews, aiming to offer a customized service package to improve the overall Polkadot brand, increase media exposure, and broaden community awareness. OKRs, budget and tasks for the proposal, to last for 2021, can be found on the post link.

Kusama Updates

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

• The Parity team found two issues related to the Auction system as Kusama was transitioning to the second auction.

The first issue was found during the VRF delay at the end of the first auction: a few token holders made contributions to Karura crowdloan after the auction had ended, but before a winner was selected (during this VRF delay). Because we do not know which crowdloan could win during this VRF period, the solution is to stop contributions from all crowdloans only during the VRF period: This is introduced with PR 3346. The second issue relates to the ongoing auction: we noticed PolkadotJS Apps kept showing Karura as winning the current auction and confirmed this by checking the winners for the block on-chain state. It seems Karura crowdloan, although completed, started bidding on the second auction, and the bid was accepted. The normal pallet behavior would have been not to accept the bid, given the tokens are already locked for the first slot. This issue is solved with PR 3361, introducing a check from the Auctions pallet that does not accept any bids from any users where the ParaId already claimed one of the potential lease periods. These issues have been fixed with Referendum 121 and were included in release 0.9.7., with the second fix in Motion 316 which passed.

• A new Technical Explainer video was released, an updated version of How to Stake on Polkadot and Kusama.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Motion 314 was published and proposed for acceptance, but failed to reach majority and returned to the Treasury queue. This motion by SubQuery/OnFinality and Fearless aims to finance development of an Open-Source DApp API and publish learning material and tutorials to use it. Budget, timelines and deliverables for the first milestone can be found on the Polkassembly post.
• The CryptoLab Team published a proposal for feedback, aiming to help non-technical nominators build a stable portfolio and manage it via a well-designed UI, The CryptoLab staking website, and other financial tools. The platform will integrate both Kusama and Polkadot networks: the first milestone is to be covered by Kusama. Budget, milestones and timelines can be found on the Polkassembly post.
• Motion 317 has passed council vote and has become a referendum.

The proposal sets a limit on the maximum number of validators, namely 4000, and leaves the rest of the parameters unchanged (20000/0.1KSM) for nominators. This proposal started as an external motion, meaning that if the Council approves it, the community needs to vote on referenda queue to be enacted. It is a similar proposal to what was enacted on Polkadot in the last days. The validator community should be aware that the discussion around minimum stake limit for validators (similar to what was imposed recently on nominators) has already begun in several channels and will be proposed as soon as discussion reaches consensus. Similar to the nominator limits, these limits are for the safety of the network and will grow as the network grows. The preimage of this proposal can be found HERE.

⛓ Parachains, dApps, and others

• Bit.Country has been accepted to attend the CDL Blockchain Bootcamp at Creative Destruction Lab — a nonprofit organization that delivers an objectives-based program for massively scalable, seed-stage, science-and technology-based companies.
• Oraichain, the world’s first AI-powered oracle and ecosystem for blockchains, has partnered with Plasm Network to integrate key products, data, and services.
• Zeitgeist presented its specialized AMM model developed for prediction markets. The “Rikiddo” Scoring Rule is a Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule that is both dynamic & liquidity sensitive.
• Darwinia Network, the decentralized cross-chain bridge, partners with Glitch Finance to facilitate efficient multi-chain circulation of Glitch ecosystem assets across Polkadot, Kusama, and other various well-known blockchains.
• Reef Finance partners with Shield Protocol to allow users to save their 2FA credentials on Reef Chain.
• RMRK has revealed renders of their generated Kanaria bird NFTs.

🛠 Tools

• srtool 0.9.14 has been released with compressed runtimes, rust stable, subwasm integration, customizable templating.
• Polkadot JS API 4.16.2 is out with types for Uniques, Statemine’s NFTs, and with types needed for Polkadot after runtime 9050 - a low priority upgrade.
• Polkadot JS apps UI 0.94 is out. Contains new endpoints, chain logos, randomization of parachain API endpoints, some filters and fixes for auction and crowdloan views and other non-essential changes.
• Substrate API sidecar is at 7.0.5. with a decoding fix for electionProviderMultiPhase.

👷‍♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0

Want your ad here? Email the editor.

• RMRK is looking for an Artist Advocate [remote], Community Manager [remote], Marketing Master [remote], Rust developers [remote]. Interested? Email us.

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 Gilbert Bassey. Got any links for Bruno for the next edition? Find me on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at [email protected].