DOT’s Decoded! (July 7th to July 13th)
While crypto Twitter has been recovering from the previous week's drama of the Polkadot Treasury arguably being robbed, news broke out that folks within the industry were literally getting robbed in the streets of Brussels, where this year hosts the important Ethereum Community Conference. For Dotsama natives, it also serves as the location for Polkadot Decoded 2024.
Given all the exciting news coming from these events, this week we are doing a double feature on Decoded for our top story. We aim to provide a recap of the sights, sounds and messages from the events, as well as the important announcements.
WagMedia creators have also been following events at Brussels intently due to time sensitive bounties, which were also available to non-Anglo creators. Bounty 28 from the Bounty Hub covered quick reflections from Decoded, and Bounty 30 was a tl;dr of Gav’s presentation at ETH CC.
Finally, our current WagMedia funding (Referendum 365) has reached week 20 out of 26. The Wag Management team will soon be preparing for future funding. Therefore, we are now welcoming feedback from those who have participated in the WagMedia initiative.
The full newsletter can be enjoyed via this link.
Dodow, Chief Editor
Top Story of the Week Part 1 - Decoded coverage
Written by yay.oi
While Sub0 is a developer-centered event, Polkadot Decoded caters more broadly to the entire community. This is reflected in the democratic approach taken to curate the events. In the past, the community was even able to vote on which nominees they would like to present. This year they took a slightly different approach.
Initially, the community was invited to share their opinions on the agenda and speakers which shaped the way the request for submissions was formed. A range of presentation formats was decided, each targeting specific groups, from potential token holders to business decision makers. The community also made the strategic decision to hold Decoded in Brussels at the same time as EthCC.
While EthCC attendees were offered free entry, food, and beer at Decoded, Gavin Wood was given the honor of warming up the EthCC crowd immediately before Vitalik Buterin’s keynote. His talk was an exploration of the real meaning of Web3, beyond the strict definitions of technical protocols.
To Gavin, Web3 is first and foremost about building resilient digital systems and services. A technical protocol on its own is not enough to provide true resilience. To be able to adapt and evolve, Web3 protocols rely on people. A resilient Web3 protocol nurtures and utilizes its experts and has a governance mechanism where changes can be agreed and enacted by them........….
Check out our full newsletter for the full story
Top Story of the Week Part 2 - Decoded announcements
Written by Sanchez
Polkadot Decoded, the premier event for all things Polkadot, once again served as the platform for major tech updates and partnerships. This year was no different with huge updates from different teams across the ecosystem.
The event kicked off with Parity CEO, Bjorn Wagner, highlighting Polkadot's achievements over the past year and admitting the continued efforts to make the use and onboarding of users to Polkadot as easy and seamless as possible.
This need culminated in the building of the new Polkadot app expected in H2 of 2024. Developed by Novasama Technologies, this app aims to simplify the onboarding process for new users, making it easy for first-time users to easily onboard, transfer tokens through links and get to understand the Polkadot ecosystem.
The app features one-click staking and simple usernames that serve as addresses for all parachains, eliminating the need for fragmented addresses. It also removes the hassle of seed phrases by using Apple and Google cloud storage, making it easier to send DOT.
A novel feature of the new app, Polkadot Pay, aims to simplify on/off-ramping and enhance crypto usage in daily activities. Enabled byRaise, Polkadot Pay allows payments from your non-custodial wallet in over a million stores and websites across the United States while receiving a 20% cashback on purchases sponsored by the stores........….
Check out our full newsletter for the full story
News from the Finders Program
Written by Sanchez
Peaq Network has set out its roadmap for its mainnet launch. With the pre-launch network live, the team is working on wallet integrations, on/off-ramps, EVM Smart contract pallets and more before the eventual launch of the mainnet, proposed for weeks 37/38.
Scytale announces a new Polkadot ecosystem fund in collaboration with the Web3 Foundation, to invest in innovative startup projects on Polkadot. The ecosystem fund will launch on October 1st 2025.
Bjorn Wagner, the CEO of Parity Technologies has announced the Polkadot App, a self-custodial wallet intentioned at making the onboarding of users on Polkadot seamless. The app will feature one-click staking, Apple or Google Passkeys instead of seedphrases, simpler address formats, sending tokens through links and Polkadot Pay which enables the use of crypto for purchases in over 33 countries.
Novawallet has in partnership with Mercuryo, launched a debit card enabled by Mastercard. This debit card enables the spending of cryptocurrencies in your wallet as it mirrors the value of tokens in the wallet. This will be supported in all stores and outlets that accept Mastercard for payments.
Houdini Swap integrates Moonbeam enabling transfer and swapping from any chain and token to Moonbeam.
Bifrost has released the report of their technical investigation into the abnormal movement of BNC which occurred on July 6th. While the on-chain code and the security of its assets were unaffected, the security of the off-chain script code was overlooked resulting in the incident. The team has so far recovered over 3 million BNC, initiated buy backs and have followed due process to prevent reoccurrence of the incident.
Polimec has proposed the Polkadot Growth Initiative, an on-chain bounty which will provide a fixed investment in upcoming projects on Polkadot using the Polimec fundraising infrastructure. PGI will provide a 10% investment of a project’s funding goal to incentivize the building of more innovative products on Polkadot.
DOT Play have submitted a new proposal with a lower ask of 400k DOT from the initial 1 million DOT. DOT Play aims to create a comprehensive and engaging platform that will attract and support game developers looking to leverage Polkadot’s cutting-edge technology.
Events from the Finders Program
Written by yay.oi
On July 9th, WebZero hosted the Polkadot Builder's Day at the Blockspace Hacker Café in Brussels, featuring presentations, panels, and workshops by Ezio Rojas and Blockya (Polkadot Head Ambassadors), Radha Dasari (Web3 Foundation), Seun Lanlege (Polytope Labs), Clara van Staden (Snowbridge), Alberto Viera (Paper Moon).
Polkadot hosted Bill Laboon and Leemo for a live tutorial on how to submit a treasury proposal on July 10th.
Also on July 10th, PoKe shared their plans to integrate large enterprises and government entities into the Polkadot ecosystem at the Blockspace Hacker Café in Brussels.
First up on the Polkadot Decoded Impact Stage on July 11th, was Polkassembly CTO Nikhil Ranjan who guided us through some of the latest changes to governance, such as Collectives and how identities and reputation will become more important in the future.
Also on the Polkadot Decoded Impact stage, Kim Schneider, Senior Manager of Web3 at Deloitte, discussed the regulatory challenges of corporations engaging with DAOs in the constantly evolving Web3 landscape on July 11th.
In the evening of July 11th, Gavin Wood continued his JAM Gray Paper World Tour at the Blockspace Hacker Café in Brussels.
Decoded may have wrapped, but WebZero kept things going at the Blockspace Hacker Café on July 13th. The main event was a Polkadot DeFi panel featuring Hydration, Stellaswap, and Bifrost that discussed unique usecases, innovations, and onboarding capital.
Extras
Awesome cover art created by Dodow.
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