Decentralized Alignment? - Newsletter Edition 93
In this week’s edition:
Editorial: DeFing exchanges, Polkadot cohorts, and an approach to mindshare.
Top Story - DOT Cohorts!: insights into the latest Polkadot ecosystem cohorts.
Featured Wag Roundup: news from our Finders Program between March 27th and April 2nd, plus an update on yapping and a take on mindshare.
Extras: credits and anything else.
The full newsletter can be enjoyed via this link.
Editorial
What is up, my friends!
While the broader sentiment has shifted towards reciprocal tariffs, this past week was pretty much business as usual, with building and development ongoing. However, it was somewhat interrupted by a DeFi incident known as HyperJellied, which potentially challenges the values of Web3.
Initially seen as a sophisticated exploit to force a perpetual DeFi platform into bad debt, the situation could have worsened when two major centralized exchanges (CEXs) announced the opening of a futures market on the token in question. In response, an on-chain vote was promptly initiated to delist the illiquid token and artificially settle the position.
Like, Web3 offers freedom, though better safeguards could be in place. Yet the issues remain, in this instance about coordinating on-chain voting, controlled by centralized entities, to counteract the actions of CEXs. Does it align with decentralization values? Moreover, the situation is compounded by an outcome favoring a profitable result, which raises ethical concerns.
Meanwhile, away from the drama surrounding centralized alignment and opportunistic cohorts of sorts, our top story is considerably less controversial. This week, we’ll be covering the recently announced Polkadot ecosystem cohorts. Also, resilience through decentralization is taken seriously, as the metrics suggest. It’s about less trust, more truth.
If you noticed, last week we did a featured roundup, and we'll be repeating this approach to tie in the latest ecosystem news updates with Polkadot yapping and mindshare. That said, WagMedia’s X account is ineligible to participate in yapping, even though we currently share a similar smart engagement philosophy with Kaito. Either way, we keep wagging!
Dodow, Chief Editor
Top Story of the Week - DOT Cohorts!
Written by yay.oi
What’s aping, fools? In a week of discerning fact from April 1st fiction, and Web3 origin stories retold in Ghibli form, the real news to come out of the Polkadot ecosystem was about a wave of new cohorts, in particular the Decentralized Voices (DV) delegates.
Kicking off in early 2024, the DV program was designed to empower some of the more dedicated and insightful governance voters, whose valuable opinions may be drowned out due to their lack of DOT. To some it was seen as a means of equalizing a state of chaos brought about by some unilateral decision-making by very large token holders (as reported in Wag is OpenGov).
This week saw the announcement of the fourth cohort of DV delegates, who will begin their term on April 14th. In the lead-up to the announcement, conversations about the future of the program provided a bit of foreshadowing for what was to come.
With the introduction of a new Governance Coordinator Karam Alhamad, the Web3 Foundation (W3F) now has adequate resources to further iterate the program. For cohort four, this led to the omission of ChaosDAO and Saxemberg, the two longest-serving delegations.
Bill Laboon explained in AAG 218, that while ChaosDAO and Saxemberg were valuable members, W3F is trying to get more people and different DAOs involved. Furthermore, with the additional resources now available to the W3F there are new opportunities to explore other options.
This could include more delegates, smaller allocations, semi-permanent DV positions, or even abolishing DV altogether. So, with the outcome of cohort four potentially shaping the future of the program, let’s take a look at our next batch of delegates....................…….
Check out our full newsletter for the full story.
Featured Wag Roundup - Mindshare?
Written by Dodow
As announced on X, a snapshot of the Polkadot Yapper leaderboard for the first month of awards has been taken, and those in the top 50 will be notified in due course. Polkadot’s foray into the world of yaps likely took CT by surprise, yet it remains just as much a welcomed initiative.
With tweets on Polkadot surging, so did the new voices. However, this was met with some justified backlash over copy-pasta and generic AI content from farmers. Subsequently, Kaito made updates, and it’s no surprise to see many of the existing ecosystem agents topping the leaderboard.
That said, you cannot really fault the genuine mindshare of those who have nothing but love for the ecosystem. In fact, there has been recent drama with individuals being called out by certified yappers from the Kaito community. If you're after a not-so-hot take on the issues, check out this x article written by a top yapper.
In order to preserve yaps from losing value, those who are newer to Polkadot should dig deeper into their research and strengthen their writing foundations. This is exactly what WagMedia’s News Finder Program is all about, and it’s also the approach taken to the next level with top Wag creators like Emil.
With that in mind, here’s a selection of this week’s news found by the community, curated by the community, and backed by OpenGov.
This weeks highlights:
You can now access USDC and USDT on Polkadot through UpHold’s support for Polkadot Asset Hub stablecoins.
Congratulations to Hungarian Polkadot DAO, JAM Implementers DAO, KusDAO, PermanenceDAO, Polkaworld, and Trustless Core on being selected as the next delegates in Cohort 4 of the Delegated Voices program.
Give a warm welcome to Cohort 3 of the Polkadot Social Media Editorial Board! Joining two of our favourite Waggers, Goku and Emil, are Viz Dot, Erin, and Irvin.
Polkadot Deployment Portal (PDP) and Pop have partnered up. Expect easy parachain/rollup builds through templates and the use of the Pop CLI.
The first four projects that have made it through the application process for the inaugural Polimec x Scytale Academy are CognideX, Colb Finance, Joinn Finance, and Roam Network.
Silencio has amplified a momentous milestone of one million users, with over 34.8B noise-level data points collected.
Kilt reveals a defining milestone of 500K on-chain decentralized identifiers (DID).
Mythical’s native token reached an all-time high in daily transaction volume of 83.9M MYTH.
Evrloot Marks your calendar for April 17th to kick start Season 2 of their campaign.
Lending and borrowing on tBTC are now live on Hydration’s money market.
Hydration joins Bifrost’s reward share program and will soon enable vToken minting on its platform, as well as benefit from referrals.
With the proposed increase of validators from 600 to 700, Kusama Referendum 511 is set to adjust the number of usable cores to 140.
All appears well, as Moonwell has tabled a governance proposal on Moonbeam to extend liquidity incentives by 9 months.
Members of Mythical, Unique, DotPlay, Papillon, Gavun Wud, ChessOnChain, and KodaDot joined a spaces to discuss Polkadot Gaming, hosted by Coin Reference on March 28th.
On April 1st, Polkaworld brought together a round table featuring Max (Harbour Capital), Richard (Xcavate), Tyrone (Bifrost), Gianluigi and Pakman (Kylix Finance) to discuss the JAM Tour, DV, and OpenGov.
Check out the full newsletter for a roundup of all of the news from 27th March to 2nd April.
Extras
Awesome cover art created by SKULLZ.
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