Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - 1.1466b DOT || staking - 53.7% || parachains - 8.6% (~99m DOT)

• Congratulations to Astar for winning the third parachain slot auction; Parallel for winning the fourth auction; and Clover for winning the fifth. The next set of parachain auctions will begin on 23 December.
• With Parachains going are live! Polkadot Launch is Now Complete
• Polkadot 0.9.13 was released with HIGH upgrade priority. 
• Polkadot 0.9.14 was released afterwards. This is a runtime-only release - you do not need to update your nodes.
• Kian has issued the November update for the changes being made to the staking system to reduce the minimum nomination amount and increase the number of nominators.

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Motion 133, to fund independent research on the ecosystem by Messari Hub’s qualified contributing analysts, was passed.
• Irina, Polkadot ambassador, published a proposal to celebrate the Polkadot's Ambassador Programme and its contributions to the ecosystem: The Badges for Polkadot Ambassadors for PolkaOscar. This proposal aims to award each ambassador for the relevant work done which has made Polkadot a success. Budget and tasks to complete can be found on the post.
• StableNode published a proposal to "help facilitate the growth in the upcoming Polkadot DeFi ecosystem while launching DAI in a meaningful way". The team aims to push and create demand for DAI on Polkadot: to achieve this, they request the allocation to bridge over and build up liquidity, helping to foster a strong DeFi community on Polkadot. Budget, milestone and reasoning behind the proposal can be found on the post.
• Although passing during its entire voting period, Referendum 43 (to increase the number of validators in active set to 400) ended up failing due to last minute "Nay" votes.
• Referendum 46, to upgrade the Shell parachain to Statemint, passed and was executed.
• Motion 129, to fund the third phase of Encode’s work—to pay hackathon prizes— was approved.
• Motion 132 by Patract Labs, to fund the maintenance costs for all related Polkadot projects for the year 2021, was passed.

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - 11.79m KSM || staking - 41.6% || parachains - 23.72% (~2.8m KSM)

• Validators on Kusama should upgrade to Polkadot 0.9.13 as soon as possible. This version should ameliorate the recent finality lags seen on Kusama. See this and this for details.
• Subsocial won Kusama's 16th parachain slot auction while Zeitgeist won the 17th.
• 18 slashable offences occurred during Era 3089. They will be applied after 84 eras (21 days).

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Referendum 158, proposing to add Encointer as a common good parachain, was passed.
• Motion 408, to upgrade Statemine to runtime v600, was approved by the Kusama Council. It became Referendum 159 and passed community vote.
• Following the successful passage of Referendum 160, Kusama was upgraded to runtime v9130. 
• There is a post seeking feedback for a potential HRMP channel (bi- or uni-directional) between Statemine and Karura.
• Bright Inventions has posted their new application to streamline interactions with the Polkadot and Kusama Treasuries.
• Composable Finance published a proposal to bootstrap liquidity in the Kusama ecosystem using the treasury.
• Motion 410 has passed Council vote: the proposal aims to fund further development for Nova Wallet.
• Dwellir published their report covering development of past submissions for an RPC-node service on Kusama. The team encountered some performance issues during M2 (now fixed), and is ready to continue development with an updated proposal to improve their service. Their new proposal passed as Motion 413.
• OnFinality shared their report on RPC node usage.
• Motion 412, to fund the maintenance of polkashots.io, was approved.
• by Patract Labs, to fund the maintenance costs for all related Polkadot projects for the year 2021, was passed.

⚙Core

• Contracts pallet is getting storage deposits. This is an alternative to storage rent which was removed months ago.
• The preimage pallet has been added to the runtimes of Parity-run chains, making it possible for other pallets to reference the hash of a previously stored preimage.
• Polkadot-JS Apps UI version X is out, finally fixing the style bug in the asset dropdown.

⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others

projects connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains

• Khala released an introduction to their new product Fat Contracts.
• Acala released a new ecosystem update for November. Also, co-founder Bette Chen spoke about Hybrid Finance (TradFi + DeFi) at Blockdown and released an overview of Acala’s launch process.
• RMRK co-founder Bruno Škvorc spoke about RMRK and the Kanaria Metaverse at Blockdown. He also published a detailed article about it.
• Basilisk released a crowdloan incentive update.
• Subsocial founder Alex Siman spoke about Social Finance and Subsocial at Blockdown.

🔗 Candidate Parachains, dApps, and others

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

• SubQuery announced a partnership with OneBlock+ to promote the SubQuery Academy’s Hero Course in China.
• Darwinia posted an article explaining some interesting details of GameFi, using recent project crashes to show how a P2E (play-to-earn) ecosystem should be designed.
• Automata has successfully completed its first milestone after being accepted into the Substrate Builders Program.
• Compossable introduced Mural, a cross-layer NFT transfer protocol.
• Centrifuge posted an article explaining what their upcoming Real World Asset Market in partnership with Aave means.
• The HydraDX community voted to triple the token balances of every tokenholder except the team and the protocol treasury. This was a measure proposed by the team in a bid to lower their total market capitalization.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• Bill Laboon held an AMA on Reddit on the topic of the Polkadot-JS App. 
• Interested in building in the Polkadot ecosystem, but not sure what needs to be built? There are several RFPs from the W3F Grants team. 
• Gavin Wood discussed decentralized data with Edward Snowden at Blockdown Conference.
• If you are interested in seeing a Substrate-focused StackExchange, see this tweet with information on how you can help make it happen. 
• You can win Polkadot swag by producing a commercial for one of the Polkadot parachain slot auction winners. Details here.
• Gavin Wood spoke with the Mayor of Miami about decentralization and Polkadot.
• Polkadot released a new article — The Parachain Advantage: Exploring Polkadot's Next-Generation Model.

🌠 NFT Review

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

• New RMRK Artist Spotlight with co-creator of Kusama Kings.
• RMRK co-founder Bruno Škvorc was on Mad Crypto MX’s youtube show.
• Unique Network announced a token sale.
• The November Njordson report is out.

Read these and more

👷‍♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0

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• RMRK.app, home of the most advanced NFTs in the world, is looking for Solidity 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 us to write!

Many thanks to Bill Laboon for his daily digest—which helps us not miss some important updates—and Raul Romanutti for helping us ensure that the governance news is accurate.

DotLeap is put together by Bruno Škvorc and gbaci.

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