Elastic Moments! - Newsletter Edition 98
In this week’s edition:
Editorial: Market rally, scaling updates, and scaling the creator economy.
Top Story - Scaling Blocks: We take a closer look at Elastic Scaling and other Polkadot ecosystem scaling matters.
Featured Wag Roundup: News from our Finders Program between May 8th and May 14th, plus how creators can scale.
Extras: Credits and anything else.
The full newsletter can be enjoyed via this link.
Editorial
What is up, my friends!
The markets are rallying, with Bitcoin pushing higher and major alts seeing bigger moves, albeit mostly from recent lows. CT seems to be filled with optimism, inflows are increasing, deals look promising, and interest is up as web searches for promising shitcoins rise. Furthermore, a certain coin has reached the S&P 500, with more good news if you deribit longer.
While markets curve up and blobs form, the next update in the Polkadot Ecosystem is stretching our attention. As briefly covered in our top story on DOT Roadmaps last week, Elastic Scaling was planned for this past week. So, in this week’s top story, we shall take a closer look at what went down, as well as other ecosystem scaling matters.
On the topic of scaling, we will also provide a feature that touches on how creators can approach it. This comes off the back of last week’s WAG content report for April, where we covered a drop-off in standards last month. Perhaps more time on expanding knowledge and research is needed. Hence, we’ll combine the feature with our full news roundup.
To ensure you’re up to date, be sure to follow us on X or subscribe to our weekly newsletter!
Dodow, Chief Editor
Top Story of the Week - Scaling Blocks
Written by yay.oi
What’s Stretchin’, Armstrongs? While the broader market has been flexing some serious gains, the Polkadot protocol is limbering up for the marathon ahead. With Async Backing and Agile Coretime already delivered, Elastic Scaling is the final pillar of the Polkadot 2.0 scalability trinity. While there will be some slight delays on Polkadot, this week we finally welcomed Kusama 2.0
Elastic Scaling launched on Kusama last Friday with the deployment of Runtime 1.5.0. With it, comes the ability for parachains to scale resources up or down on demand. Due to Polkadot’s multicore architecture, it allows parachains to dynamically adjust the number of cores they use, from one to twelve, though each configuration comes with some trade-offs.
For use cases where low latency is paramount, 12 cores will provide 500ms blocks and up to 12 MB/s of DA bandwidth. The trade-off is reduced compute power due to only 500ms of processing time per block. In CPU intensive applications, a three-core setup will provide 2-second blocks, 3MB/s of DA bandwidth, and 6 seconds of execution time.
Regardless of trade-offs, the beauty of Elastic Scaling lies in its dynamic adaptability. Parachains can scale up resources in times of high demand without wasting idle resources when usage is lower.
Finally, this dynamic adaptability has landed in a working environment on Kusama, though the launch of Runtime 1.5.0 emphasizes the sister chain’s role as the canary in the coalmine. This is because, shortly after deployment, reports of long delays to block finality began rolling in.
The problem stemmed from an incompatibility with validators running older node software. Runtime 1.5.0 introduced v2 descriptors, replacing the Parachain ID with a core index to facilitate Elastic Scaling. Validators using older node software couldn’t recognize these blocks, triggering adispute storm that disrupted finality.........................…….
Check out our full newsletter for the full story.
Featured Wag Roundup - Scaling Content
Written by Dodow
For those of you who have made it to the Wag Discord, the opportunity to learn, grow, and earn rewards awaits. That said, not all waggers are adjusting accordingly, as last month we received a lot of submissions, but not many made it into April’s WAG. Aside from taking on board the feedback through WagMedia, following are some thoughts on how to scale your content.
Spamming is overrated. Daily content is only really expected when you’re at the professional and recognition level of TheKus. Therefore, do yourself a favour and allow time for your content to settle. Perhaps spend some time working on your brand via engagement.
Remember, your audience's time is precious. This was mentioned by Jay Chrawnna during the early days of WagMedia. You should seriously consider spending time on preparing your script, video, article, thread, etc., to ensure views are not wasted.
Sure, AI might speed things up however smart audiences can often tell when it’s being liberally used. As pointed out by IcoBeast it’s best to avoid AI slop, and this applies whether you’re yapping or wagging.
Furthermore, spend some actual time in the trenches. Try using the protocols, as you tend to find that the audience appreciates the authenticity of your journey. This avoids an awkward moment or two that you might want to keep private.
Actually, there’s a lot more you can learn from yapping, and Goku’s thread is well worth reading. It’s not about the number of followers you have, rather it’s more about who can hold attention. Be mindful of this when creating your next video or thread.
Speaking of considering your next video or thread, folks have been fading guides and tutorials. Regardless of your native language, a quality video tutorial or guide can really help. In fact, there currently isn’t enough video content in crypto!
The sound storytelling of top content typically stems from building up your knowledge. It’s rarely just based on a single source, otherwise you might as well just let the audience read that instead. It might be worth spending time finding it or reading the weekly news found by the community. Curated by the community. Backed by OpenGov.
Acurast is dialing up decentralized compute, powered by mobile devices. Those who got in contact with CoinList before May 15th could connect to an allocation of 60M unvested ACU tokens (6% of supply) at a rate of 9 cents USD. If the signal is strong, availability could double to 120M.
Perhaps we call it the Kusama 2.0 moment. Cypherpunk times await, now that you can build with more throughput on demand as Elastic Scaling went live.
Experimental support for PolkaVM smart contracts becomes available via Pop CLI v0.8.0.
Astar is looking to strengthen its future by revisiting its token model with a new proposal. Tokenomics 3.0, projected to go live in 2026, will transition to a fixed supply of 10.5 billion ASTR. It will also introduce protocol-owned liquidity to ensure sustainability through ecosystem growth and coretime purchases.
You could balance your knowledge in Bali, as the PBA campus, in conjunction with Mandala Chain, opens applications for a three-week course starting on August 24th.
OpenZeppelin has partnered with Polkadot to bring Solidity and Rust contract libraries, along with development tools, to the forthcoming Hub. This collaboration also focuses on the continued advancement of parachain runtimes and pallets.
It’s your last chance to accumulate Marks ahead of Evrloot’s TGE, as their season 2 campaign ends on May 28th.
With gaming tournaments attracting gamers on Moonbeam, N3mus will switch to a fairer distribution of prizes.
Get ready for MACHINEX, the DEX that opens up trading in the Peaq Machine Economy.
Following the failure of Polkadot treasury funding for a Humanoid SDK, Robonomics has put forward Referendum 1559. It seeks 150K USDT to develop, promote, and audit smart home devices built on RISC-V.
Webzero hosted a Hacker House with Polkadot during Consensus Toronto, from May 13th to 16th. The event featured a $20K prize pool and also involved speed pitches.
Check out the full newsletter for a roundup of all of the news from May 8th to May 14th.
Extras
Incredible cover art created by SKULLZ.
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