Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - ~1.2b DOT | staking - 53.8% | prchns & crwdlns - 11% (~125m DOT)

• Polkadot v0.9.16 has been released with a HIGH upgrade priority. Please upgrade your nodes ASAP! If you do not update your client before the new runtime is enacted, your node will stop handling parachains functionalities properly until you upgrade.
• The XCM-over-bridges PR is almost ready. This would allow XCM to travel between parachains even if they are connected to different relay chains (e.g. token transfer from Polkadot to Kusama parachains). 
• Centrifuge won the 8th Polkadot parachain auction.

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Motion 148 to fund Libwallet, a lightweight library for wallets for Polkadot and Substrate-based chains, was passed and executed. 
• Motion 149, aiming to cover Polkascan’s costs of maintenance and support for the Python libraries, was passed.
• OnFinality posted a Treasury Proposal to reimburse them for running Polkadot, Statemint, and Westend endpoints. 
• Acala Foundation published a proposal requesting a grant from the Treasury to be used as liquidity to help bootstrap some of their instruments on-chain: the tokens will be used to provide liquidity into DOT and DOT-derivative based swap pools. Management of funds, success metrics and other considerations can be found on the post. 
• Treasury-supported wallet Klever has posted on Polkassembly that they have completed all of the milestones including Polkadot, as outlined in their initial Treasury Proposal. Next up is a proposal to cover milestones 3 and 4.

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - ~11.9mil KSM | staking - 42.8% | prchns & crwdlns - ~31%

• Polkadot v0.9.16 has been released with a HIGH upgrade priority. Please upgrade your nodes ASAP! If you do not update your client before the new runtime is enacted, your node will stop handling parachains functionalities properly until you upgrade.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Motion 431, to upgrade the Kusama Runtime to v9160 was passed. Release notes, runtime changes and proposal hash can be found here. This is a high priority release: making it necessary for nodes to be upgraded as soon as possible as well. This is a big upgrade on the runtime side: among some of the changes, a few community requests are included:
  • Child-bounties pallet
  • A cap on treasury bond during submission
  • Add Encointer as a trusted teleporter
  • Add the parameter for minimum commission for validators (set to 0 by default for now)
  This is a response to a discussion started by Paradox, on potentially adding a minimum validator commission. You can read past comments and weigh in here. 
• Litmus has won Kusama’s 23rd parachain slot auction. 
• Motion 429, to open a referendum on creating an HRMP channel between Basilisk and Statemine, was passed and has now become Referendum 172. 
• Motion 430, to reimburse OnFinality for running Kusama and Statemine endpoints, was passed.

⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others

projects connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains

• Parallel Finance released an update on PARA rewards distribution and vesting.
• Astar Network raised $22 million in a strategic round led by Polychain.
• Composable Labs released a beginner’s guide to Picasso, their Kusama parachain. They also released an ecosystem development report for January.
• Subsocial released a review for January 2022.
• Derek Yoo, founder of Moonbeam, sat down with Pranay Mohan & James Prestwich from Nomad, a cross-chain interoperability protocol, to talk about the Past and Future of Bridging.
• Bit Country released a development update for February.
• Composable released a new article titled Introduction to Mosaic Phase 2.
• Coincheck, one of the largest crypto exchanges in Japan, invested in Stake Technologies, the core company behind Astar Network.
• Phala Network released a roadmap for 2022.
• Picasso released a new article on Apollo, their MEV-resistant oracle pallet. Picasso also released Picasso’s Canvas, its ecosystem development report for January
• Acala released an ecosystem update for January 2022.
• KILT released an article on SocialKYC, its recently launched decentralized identity (DiD) product.
• Moonbeam released a development update for January 2021.

🔗 Candidate Parachains, dApps, and others

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

• HydraDX released part 2 of its ‘Omnipool’ series that further explains their recently adopted 2-token model.
• Messari released a report on Centrifuge titled Centrifugal Transparency for Tokenized Assets.
• Ajuna Network, a Swiss-based decentralized gaming platform, announced that it has secured $2 million in seed funding.
• Litentry released the beta version of their mobile app. Users can start interacting with all governance modules and send their feedback to the team for improvements. This project was fully-funded by the Polkadot Treasury.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• Gavin Wood spoke about himself in a recent interview with Rob Schmults titled Getting to Know Gavin Wood.
• The latest issue of Polkadot A-Z, L for Launch, has been published. 
• There will be numerous Polkadot-focused events at ETHDenver (11 - 20 Feb) this year.
• Bill Laboon (Director of Education and Community at Web3 Foundation) and Subquery attended the Polka Häus Twitter Space to discuss education, governance, and the treasury. You can listen to the recording here.
• There is a new Knowledge Base article on using Ledger with Statemine. 
• The questions and answers from Bill Laboon’s last AMA can be found here.
• The Building Better Worlds MetaCon virtual conference will be holding on 15th February.

🛠 Tools

• Polkadot JS API v7.6.1 has been released with a LOW upgrade priority. Recommended for users with long-running scripts and those chains based around the latest Substrate master versions.

🌠 NFT Review

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

• DFG released a report on why Polkadot is set to be the best foundation for the development of the metaverse.
• CryptoSlate published an exclusive on 5 female Singular artists.
• RMRK released an article clarifying the relationship between RMRK and Statemine/Statemint NFTs.
• RMRK broke ground with the use of Kanaria NFTs for boosting DeFi yield on Karura.

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 React, Rust, and Solidity developers, as well as a Marketing Executor. 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].