Featured Roundup - May 22nd to May 28th
Newsworthy Milestones
Written by Dodow
We’ve reached our 100th newsletter edition! To celebrate, we’ll briefly recap our wonderful journey of delivering you a steady stream of Wagtastic stories and news. Our journey began not long after the inception of WagMedia, when legendary wagger Csaint took on the task of compiling all the top news, content, and alpha we find each week to post only on Subsocial.
NOTE: Unfortunately, Subsocial no longer seems to be accessible, so some of the links via the embeds might not function. Technically, the data for our historic newsletter editions that were minted should remain preserved on-chain, but it is currently not retrievable.
With the sheer volume of Polkadot ecosystem news and content, it was inevitable that a writing team would eventually form to keep things on point. Led by Dodow (obsessive news finder), it included the established voices of Pnin (The Kus writer and reporter), JB (Astar’s Master Scholar), and Csaint (honorary DOT bullposter).
The team reported on numerous breaking stories, including unfortunate hacks, exciting roadmaps, and happening events, as well as dressing up for trick-or-treat and giving thanks. As with most fabulous groups, things did come to an end, with the newsletter shutting down in 2023 as the Wag mission separated into individually maintained and funded units.
Thankfully, Wag is Back and with its return in early 2024, the newsletter became even more ingrained in the news finders program. In addition to the democratising of news being found by the community, those who took this task seriously and showed promise could be elevated to directly writing segments of the newsletter.
Writers so far include Sanchez and Yay, who, along with Dodow, have written insightful ecosystem stories. These explore narratives around gaming, bridging, memecoins, wallets, governance, and DeFi, along with community themes like events, yapping, and cohorts.
They even took on mind-blowing gray matters, and much more. Key contributions also come from Skullz for awesome cover art, and from Turing and Aemonk for managing things on X.
Our ecosystem’s projects have also been put in the spotlight, including Mythical Games, Laos, Apillon, Moonbeam, Hydration, Ajuna, Bifrost, Peaq, Polimec, Evrloot, and Gavun Wud. The spotlight also extended to our WagMedia Creator Economy – here’s the latest in April’s WAG.
Things have evolved over time, from incorporating Substack for email notification to greater accessibility through X articles. Please be sure to sign up, like, and retweet to show your support. Furthermore, we have experimented with investigative journalism, supported regional missions, provided user guidance, fulfilled our role as an official media partner, and more.
We look forward to reporting news and stories as more exciting things are expected on the horizon. In the meantime, please remember to post your content and ecosystem news in our Discord. News found by the community. Curated by the community. Backed by OpenGov.
DOT Ecosystem News & Events
Written by yay.oi
Thanks to the work of the Marketing Bounty in collaboration with DotLake, Polkadot is now listed on GasFeesNow. Users can compare the transfer costs of USDT across nine major chains.
Kusama and its parachains are now supported on Chainspect, offering metrics such as real-time TPS and total transactions.
Asphere, with the help of the Web3 Foundation, is launching a no-code rollup deployment solution for the Polkadot ecosystem.
Mimir has now deployed Safe contracts on PolkaVM, making the industry-standard multisig service available natively on Polkadot.
Ink! v6, which supports RISC-V, PolkaVM, and pallet-revive, is now available on the Pop Network testnet.
Thanks to the backing of the Polkadot Assurance Legion, Scout, a static analysis tool that helps developers find vulnerabilities in their code, now supports Substrate.
Mubert Protocol, in collaboration with the Web3 Foundation and Magenta Labs, is building a chain on Polkadot to facilitate the ownership, licensing, and monetization of creative assets.
The Acurast token sale on Coinlist ended on May 22nd and was significantly oversubscribed. It raised $5.4M, making up 6% of the ACU token supply at the price of 9 cents. The token generation event is scheduled for Q3 2025.
To bootstrap liquidity in the Machine Economy, Peaq is listing $500K of tokens in a Vested Emission Offering on Lucid Labs. Participants will be able to purchase tokens at a discount of up to 25%, vested for 30 days.
A massive milestone is just around the corner. Users of Peaq EV charging DePIN Charge have now collected over 19K data points through their charger reviews.
The Vortex LATAM and European on/off ramp, which is assisted by Pendulum infrastructure, is celebrating the milestone of $1M volume.
Better late than never. SALP contributors to the Energy Web crowdloan, who missed out on the first rewards distribution in March 2024, will receive their rewards at the beginning of July.
Keeping its cores safe from the pesky Baron, Bifrost has successfully enabled coretime auto-renewal on Kusama.
Wormhole is winding up its support of Acala. All Wormhole-wrapped tokens on Karura and Acala, including those in liquidity pools, will need to be bridged back to their original chains by June 18th.
If you notice a sudden surge in transactions on Moonbeam, don't be alarmed. RT3600, a tool for the migration to EVM-native assets, is deploying this week.
Let’s welcome our new delegates to the Moonbeam Governance Guild. For their six-month term, Moonbeam delegates will be allocated 5M GLMR of voting power, while Moonriver delegates will receive 50K MOVR.
In Polkadot Referendum 1580, Blockdeep Labs is requesting 246.33K USDC to fund the open-sourcing of Epico, a tool that provides seamless interfacing between Polkadot SDK chains and Ethereum wallets.
Hydration Referendum 89, if passed, will maintain all existing incentives in Polkadot Hydration farms for one more month. This would be the final distribution from the 1M DOT funded by Polkadot Referendum 561.
An Aventus governance proposal is now open for voting. If passed, Dwellir will integrate a high-performance Aventus node into its API platform. Dwellir has initiated this proposal as a result of a customer request for Aventus access.
Gavun Wud’s WUD Universe landing page is now live. Stay tuned for your opportunity to get your own customizable NFT lumburjak cabin that dynamically evolves with on-chain activity.
The Flap Off, Gavun Wud’s first Flappy Wud tournament on N3mus, is now live. The top 20 scorers will share in a prize pool of $500.
After a brief hiatus to exorcise some ghouls from the system, Evrloot is back online. Missions, crafting, and the marketplace have been re-enabled. Expeditions will return after the skeletons have been stress-tested to their bone-breaking point.
Age of Chronos, a futuristic dungeon crawler built on Moonbeam by SFY Labs, is now live. Enhanced by RMRK modular NFTs, it’s free-to-mint and free-to-play. According to a little wudpecker, you might want to keep an eye out for some ax-elent Polkadot ecosystem integrations.
On May 22nd, Neurotica, a generative art collection by Arkain, dropped on Koda, and minted out in one hour.
Unique Network has unlocked a massive milestone, minting 1 million NFTs.
On May 22nd, Oneblock+ hosted Ben (Hydration) and Tyrone (Bifrost) for a deep dive into how GigaDOT aims to take Polkadot liquidity to new depths.
Hydration hosted an AMA on May 23rd for Referendum 1542, the 5M DOT GIGAHydration incentives proposal.
On May 23rd, DaGama hosted Alex (PromoTeam DAO), Bren (Cere), and John (Hydration) for some Polkadot ecosystem updates that included Hydration, Nova Wallet, Gavun Wud, and JAM.
In this week’s episode of The Ambassador Fellowship Meets on May 27th, Lucy Coulden hosted members of the Technical Fellowship, including Clara (Snowbridge), Kian, Dónal, and Oliver (Parity).
The Tie hosted John Goldschmidt (Magenta Labs), Wilhelm Roth (265Dots), and Max Rebol (Harbour Industrial Capital) on May 27th for a webinar on Polkadot’s strategic role in the future of Web3.
On May 27th, ET (Polkadot) hosted WebZero to hear all about what they’ve got planned for the Blockspäti at Berlin Blockchain Week.
Moonbeam hosted James Lawton for a workshop on May 27th, covering how Sequence can enhance and simplify gamer onboarding and distribution of rewards.
Pakman (Kylix Finance), Seun (Hyperbridge), and Michael (Mandala Chain) held an X Space discussion on May 28th about building on Polkadot.
Polkadot is a Community Channel sponsor for the ETH Belgrade Hackathon starting on June 3rd. A prize pool of $7.5K is being offered for Polkadot smart-contract development bounties.