Written by Dodow
We may be seeing a familiar pattern to April’s WAG in the growth of the WagMedia creator economy. Last month, there were a lot of content submissions with around 126, yet only 88 were eligible for rewards, with an underwhelming total of ~619 DOT distributed. The average was well below our historic benchmark of 15 DOT, and this time, 8 creators made the mark.
Before getting into the standouts for May, it might be worth recognising that we have taken a stricter stance on the top-earning participants from the Polkadot Yapper campaign. We won’t be rewarding submissions from them. It’s about fairness and potential double tipping. In any case, yapping rewards are already pretty decent.
Unfortunately, this meant our beloved Emil was unable to defend his title of top wagger of the month. Furthermore, new to WagMedia, Fabs is also excluded. Even so, we appreciate them still posting their content to help inspire others. If you’ve not seen it, Emil provided a fantastic overview of Quake running on CoreVM, while Fabs nicely covers Moonbeam’s 2025 roadmap.
The top creator for the month goes to Gbaci, who seems to have refrained from yapping. Instead, we have witnessed a good amount of experimental submissions and even as one of few Tier1 creators within WagMedia, he is very much receptive to feedback. The Great Coretime Heist of 2025 and The Parallel Finance Saga covered recent drama, receiving 18 and 20 DOT.
His standout submission was the comprehensive notes from Gav’s recent talk at ETH Prague and was awarded 28 DOT. Such pieces are often much appreciated by the community. What’s also appreciated are his insights on JAM and CoreVM, Hydration’s TVL, Asset Hub migration, and a blockchain resilience scorecard, which earned between 15 and 17 DOT.
With 30 DOT awarded, Jesse got the top spot for highest-valued submission last month for his comparison between Polkadot and Cosmos. The engagement was strong, though Goku gave feedback that it could do with a fresher approach. Things were similar for the submission about Polkadot building Web3 and not chasing narratives, which received 20 DOT.
As for the creators who achieved April’s highest award of 45 DOT, neither performed as well. Still, Mark impressed with a thread on Elastic Scaling and received 20 DOT. Pieky also received 20 DOT, covering Peer3 who recently received a Polkadot grant. Unfortunately it appears he’s taking a break from creating as his content is no longer visible.
While some creators might be taking time off, LV has returned with a creative interview of someone who reps for the eco and earned 16.5 DOT. Those of you on the Wag Discord may have noticed him being tasked to provide feedback on video content. If you’re not aware, LV has expertise in this as well as a reputable history of nurturing it in the Spanish community.
One awesome recipient of the feedback and guidance offered by LV is Fardeem. Under his AwesomeDOT YouTube and podcast brand, he received 15 DOT for his interview with Kamil Salakhiev about Kagome, a Polkadot Host implementation written in C++.
Speaking of hosts, N3mus has been ramping up the users over on Moonbeam with weekly tournaments. This is where guides or tutorials can certainly help, and as such, the onboarding guide created by Mikewill is worth the 18 DOT reward.
As users grow, then some folks may wonder how things are gonna scale. Well, Ravi has you covered, earning 19 DOT as he goes through the features of Polkadot runtime v1.5. Notably, this is when Elastic Scaling goes live.
So, that stretches things out for the standouts last month. During the month, Goku posted on the Wag Discord with the observation that many creators have heavily shifted to recycling single-source materials through GPT and repackaging it to fit the Twitter format. Currently, aside from Tier1 creators and builders (with on-chain pow), tech talk content will not be rewarded.
We are still open to rewarding content where the creator showcases a direct benefit they’ve experienced from using ecosystem products. That said, it must be real, and if the pattern of relying heavily on GPT continues, we’ll unfortunately have to part ways with those creators. As always, it’s important for creators to scale their content.