Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - ~1.16B DOT | staking - 52.9% | prchns & crwdlns - ~11%

• HydraDX won the 9th Polkadot parachain auction.

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Acala is requesting feedback on their proposal for DOT liquidity. 
• Motion 151, to reduce the amount of scam in the ecosystem, was passed. The status of the proposal is now Waiting for Bounty Funding, and will become active after the current funding period ends. The next step will be to vote on the curator for the bounty.
• Motion 150, to fund OnFinality’s high performance, public infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint, and Westend for Q4 2021, was passed.
• Motion 152, aiming to organise the first Smart Contracts on Polkadot - WASM conference, has been updated after discussions with Council. Supercolony (the proposers) have further clarified budget and committed to share their platform subscription for other teams to use throughout the year.
• After presenting the new UI for treasury proposals and cover maintenance costs for their first period, Bright Inventions published a proposal on their platform for improvements and new features that include further integration with Polkassembly to share contextual info, child bounties implementation, etc.
• A new proposal to schedule auctions for 2022 was published for feedback.

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - ~11.97mil KSM | staking - 42.8% | prchns & crwdlns - ~31%

• SORA Kusama won the 24th parachain slot on Kusama.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Referendum 171, proposing to issue the on-chain remark “1KV rules! Will for president :)”, did not pass.
• Referendum 172, proposing to open an HRMP channel between Statemine and Basilisk, was passed and has been executed.
• The Odyssey team published a proposal to build a 3D home for the Kusama ecosystem called Kusamaverse!
• Motion 431, to upgrade Kusama runtime to v9160, passed Council vote and is now up for community vote as Referendum 173.
• Motion 433, to fund development by Extrinsics.io for a better extrinsics tool on Polkadot and Kusama, was passed.
• Motion 432, to fund an analytical website to help members of the DotSama community view data points on their wallets, was passed.
• Motion 435, to upgrade Statemint/e to v700, was passed and is now Referendum 174. This release includes some significant updates including a storage update to link class owners to NFT classes, making it easier for UI developers visualize creation/minting of NFTs.
• Feedback from the community is requested for a potential minimum commission level for validators. To gain a better perspective on this proposal, read this article by Chill Validation from the Cosmos ecosystem as it makes a terrific argument.
• The team at SubVT has released ChainViz, a 3D visualization of the Kusama blockchain with live block production process, nominator and validator visualization, as well as staking details and network status.

⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others

projects connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains

• Polkascan, a Polkadot and Kusama treasury funded project, released their new UI last week.
• The Acala team had an informational convo about their launch yesterday.  IndexZoo to launch on the Acala EVM+, bringing index and leveraged tokens to the Acala Ecosystem. Acala will be at ETHDenver for an EVM+ workshop during the conference’s much-anticipated #BUIDLWeek. Come meet the team and earn up to $5000 in prizes. Acala enabled a one-way DOT bridge from Polkadot to Acala. Earn an ‘Early Adopter’ NFT by bridging your DOT to Acala for additional DeFi utility. Acala announced a Kickoff Rewards Program with 1mil ACA to be distributed to liquidity providers.
• Capx to launch on Acala EVM+, bringing a suite of products for unlocking vested token liquidity.
• Acala launched aUSD, a decentralized, multi-collateral stablecoin.
• The Composable team released an articles on Understanding Mosaic’s Active Management and A Beginner’s Guide to Composable Finance.
• Picasso released an article on how Cubic sets the standard for vault infrastructure in DotSama.
• Integritee announced a new subsidiary company Securitee to tackle the traditional enterprise market, and its achievement of feature-complete sidechains.
• Altair’s latest runtime upgrade has removed the sudo key, making Altair a community operated chain fully controlled by AIR holders.
• Litentry released a new weekly update.
• Centrifuge and Altair hosted a governance call.
• Basilisk released an update on the progress of its long-awaited Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP).

🔗 Candidate Parachains, dApps, and others

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

• Darwinia accepted MetaRock into its grants program, bringing NFT minting and trading to Crab Network. Darwinia is also running a CRAB + SUB (Subsocial token) airdrop. Read the details here.
• Litentry released a review of its 2021 achievements and 2022 plans.
• OAK Network announced that it has closed a $5.5M Seed round led by Foundation Capital, Greylock, and Hypersphere Ventures.
• Crust released new features for Crust Files and adjusted the reward structure for its Share-and-Earn program. 
• Darwinia released an article on how to develop a Substrate-to-Substrate bridge.
• Phala Network integrated Chainlink price feeds to accelerate its ecosystem development. On Feb 15th, Phala will host a workshop at ETHDenver to present its novel Fat Contracts and talk about the Web3 computing cloud. Phala released a roadmap for 2022 in its new weekly ecosystem update.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• #ExpectLove: Kusama is running a new valentine campaign where users can send valentine NFTs to their loved ones. Please note that these are not Kusama NFTs, but Statemine NFTs. Read this article to understand the difference and why it matters.
• gbaci’s Treasury-funded Polkadot book for beginners is almost ready and is now crowdsourcing ideas for the title of the book. Cast your vote in this tweet or suggest a new title by replying. Here is the current draft of the book.
• A 90-second overview video of Polkadot, to quickly explain the benefits of Polkadot, has been released. 
• The Polkadot Wiki is going through a revamp and we would like to hear about your thoughts. If you have used the wiki and had troubles with information discrepancies we would love to know. You can fill the Typeform and join the conversation on Reddit. 
• The Web3 Foundation and Parity will be at ETHDenver to talk about Polkadot. It is an in-person and online event so if you can’t make it make sure to tune in.
• Polkadot Pioneers Prize is a funding initiative to solve some of the biggest challanges facing the Polkadot ecosystem. With 993286.08 DOT(~ $21.8 million at the time of this post) allocated toward the program, anyone can compete to be a pioneer by solving those challenges.

🛠 Tools

• New primitives for building Polkadot and Kusama’s next-generation governance have been merged into the Substrate code base.
• Polkadot-JS Apps v0.105.1 has been released.
• Polkadot-JS API v7.7.1 has been released with a LOW upgrade priority. Recommended for users with long-running scripts.

🌠 NFT Review

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

• RMRK x hide.me VPN sale of the Blushing Guy Fawkes sold out in a short time.
• Unique Network is hosting a new eco-conscious NFT drop for the DotSama communities via a partnership with Sādu, Sovereign Nature Initiative & many more.
• Kryptos Chain had Bruno Škvorc on their Youtube show to talk about RMRK and the future of NFTs.
• 1,355 Kanaria holders have been selected for the Exosama whitelist.

Read more here

👷‍♂️ 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, 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].