Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

current staking rate 57.1% // ideal staking rate 75%

• Polkadot 0.9.12 is out now - this is a medium priority upgrade due to some client bugs being resolved, a new transaction priority mechanism, and improvements in block production speed for some edge cases.
• Polkadot 0.9.12-1 has been released. Note that this is a RUNTIME-ONLY release; node operators do not need to update their node software.

🔴 🏛 Governance

• The DotSama Experience team has a post looking for feedback on a potential Treasury Proposal for "A Virtual Journey Through the Kusama & Polkadot Networks". 
• Polkassembly now has a section for Council members to add information about themselves. This can help you make an informed choice when voting for Council members.
• The first iteration of the Polkadot rebrand has been released with two distinct directions available for the community to choose from. Cast your vote and be a part of the historic Polkadot rebrand powered by on-chain governance and community participation.

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - 11.5mil KSM || staking - 43.6% || parachains - 20.3%

• Kusama 0.9.12 is out now - this is a medium priority upgrade due to some client bugs being resolved, a new transaction priority mechanism, and improvements in block production speed for some edge cases.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• There is a proposal to cancel one of the current crowdloans. Created by Yung Beef, the proposal seeks to cancel the Integritee crowdloan because the team ‘misled’ the community by announcing a sale on KSM Starter (an IDO platform despised by the DotSama community). Read the proposal and add your thoughts to the conversation. Second the vote if you agree with the proposal.
• Motion 385, a request from Calamari to upgrade their chain to a new runtime, has been passed and executed. Note this is normally not necessary; see post for details. 
• There is a post on Polkassembly seeking feedback for lowering the deposit to open an HRMP channel. 
• Referendum 145, proposing to add an additional 100 validators to the active set, is currently passing with three days left to vote.
• Polkassembly now has a section for Council members to add information about themselves. This can help you make an informed choice when voting for Council members.
• Referendum 147, to upgrade Statemine to v504, is up for a vote.
• Referendum 148, to upgrade Kusama to v9122, is up for a vote. This has been fast-tracked by the Technical Committee, thus voting will end after one day.

⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others

projects connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains

• Statemine v504 (Polkadot v0.9.11) is out, most notably bringing the ability to pay transaction fees in assets, and an RPC for transaction fees which was needed for multi-sig to work in the Polkadot Apps UI.
• The first-ever cross-parachain token listing in the Kusama Network and Polkadot ecosystem is now live on Karura Swap as Bifrost Finance launches its BNC/kUSD pool and liquidity mining program.
• Crust Network integrates with MoonriverNW to Bring Web3 IPFS Storage to the Kusama Ecosystem. More.
• The Graph’s hosted service is now supporting Moonriver, expanding further into the Polkadot & Kusama Network ecosystem.
• SubQuery teamed up with Khala for Khala’s new Ethereum-Kusama chain bridge, the first official parachain-Ethereum bridge on the Substrate ecosystem which allows the Khala community to easily transfer PHA between Ethereum and the Khala chain in a decentralized way.
• Bifrost is supporting Bit.Country’s Pioneer in Kusama slot auctions through the SALP protocol.

🔗 Candidate Parachains, dApps, and others

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

• The Moonbeam crowdloan pre-registration is now open. Get started & pre-register here. Allocation and rewards details have been announced.
• Cere Network announced a partnership with Convergence Finance to further bridge cryptocurrency with real-world asset investments. 
• Equilibrium introduced fluid xDOT staking. Users will be able to stake DOT for Polkadot parachain and get xDOT, which are DOT wrappers on GenshiroDeFi — Equilibrium’s canary. xDOT wrappers can be used as liquidity on liquidity pools to start earning yield.
• Composable Finance integrates Fantom into its Mosaic PoC Bridge.
• OnFinality partners with Polkadex to provide one-click node deployment. 
• Zenlink integrates the AnySwap cross-chain bridge to provide users with more efficient and convenient cross-chain services for their assets.

⚙ Core Stack

• Going forward, the `--dev` flag passed into Substrate nodes will imply `--tmp` if a `--base-path` is not explicitly provided, meaning all dev chains are now temporary chains by default. To persist a dev chain’s database, pass in the base-path parameter.
• Block production speed has been improved for some edge cases where transactions to be processed are known to be invalid ahead of time.
• 🐜 There was a bug where the wrong path was used for the parity-db database in Substrate nodes - the same one for RocksDB, meaning an overwrite would happen. This has been fixed.
• Transaction priority has been reworked to favor smaller transactions, plus some other considerations.
• 🐜 There seems to be a bug with multisig transactions in Polkadot’s latest runtimes. Developing…

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• Metasafari's Dino x Dino released a new project on RMRK, opening up a dinosaur-egg pre-sale for certain RMRK Kanaria NFT holders. NFTs with utility taking over the Kusama ecosystem?
• Interested in following XCM development? See this tracking PR. 
• Want to know about awesome projects on and about Substrate? Check here.
• The Polkadot Hackathon, APAC Edition, opening ceremony happened on Friday, 22 Oct. You can watch the replay here.
• Jonas Gehrlein, one of the researchers at Web3 Foundation, has written up an analysis of the second batch of six auctions on Kusama. 
• There are benefits to installing Polkadot{.js} extension to your browser, even if you are not using it to store DOT or KSM. For instance, it blocks any scam sites it knows about automatically. If you find a scam site it doesn't know about, please add it to the list so it blocks the site for others.

🛠 Tools

• The Polkadot JS Apps UI will now show a warning if the recipient of a Treasury Tip has no balance and the tip is less than the existential deposit (meaning the funds would be burned). A bug affecting cancelation of multi-sig calls has been resolved. The apps suite has been updated to version 0.98.
• Ledger imports into the Polkadot JS Extension will now also cater for the 25th word (passphrase), which up until now was not possible.
• Substrate API Sidecar is at version 11, adding an address validation endpoint.
• Polkadot JS API is at 6.5.2, adding fixes for historical `at` queries on top of 6.5.1

🌠 NFT Review

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

• RMRK interview with Moon-Bearer, the creator of the ChaosDAO Apes collection.
• Win RMRK 2.0 NFTs in the RMRK Halloween Extravaganza.
• Unique Network raises $11.3 million in the second round of its pre-sale.

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].