Ready, Steady, DOT! (July 28th to August 3rd)
“Ready, steady, go” seems to sum up this past week.
Chainalysis is ready to make another attempt at the Polkadot Treasury Reserves. Did you notice Basti demonstrating how fast and steady the performance of Async Backing is? And it’s all systems go as Mythical finally shows us a ton of transactions, Ajuna launches on Polkadot, and there is Head Ambassador drama resulting in the need to go!
“Ready or DOT,” we will provide further details on some of these mentioned Polkadot items and more in our top story of the week. Additionally, with Ajuna launching on Polkadot, we take the opportunity to feature a profile report on our ecosystem’s first gaming-specific rollup, which started out on Kusama.
Being ready to go could be crucial for our WagMedia creators, as we had recently announced a couple of extremely time-sensitive bounties. Less than 48 hrs were given to provide a TL;DR on Alice und Bob’s stream, “End The Grift,” for Bounty 34, and the same timeframe applied to Bounty 36, which relates to Acala’s JitoSOL LST.
The full newsletter can be enjoyed via this link.
Dodow, Chief Editor
Top Story of the Week - Ready or DOT, here we go!
Written by yay.oi
While all eyes are on Paris and some of the coolest silver medalists ever seen, Polkadot has its eyes on gold (targeting Q3 2024). Meanwhile, an old friend is getting ready to make a new proposal, some interesting developments are steadily coming along and going to plan, and others are going down in flames. It’s never a dull moment in the Polkaverse.
So, about that old friend. You may remember in Wag’s Behind da Code? (May 12th to May 18th), we reported on one of the most contentious Polkadot OpenGov referenda ever. Chainalysis requested the equivalent of USD$10M for data, analytics, and compliance solutions to facilitate entry into the institutional market.
After not one, but two rejections from the Polkadot community, our old friend Chainalysis is getting ready to initiate their third referendum with a new and improved proposal. The jury is out on whether these changes will appease the NAYsayers of OpenGov.
The most obvious change is financial, they have reduced their asking price to USDC$6.5M paid in three annual USD$2.16M installments. That said, since the release of the Polkadot H1 Treasury Report, there has been pressure to tighten the purse-strings, so even with a reduction, the price may be seen as too steep for the average voter...........….
Check out our full newsletter for the full story
Featured Report - Ready for Awesome Ajuna!
Written by Sanchez
Recognizing the significant potential of gaming to attract new players and developers, Web3 ecosystems, including Polkadot, are allocating budgets to enhance gaming on their platforms. Polkadot Play is a recent initiative aimed at enhancing the gaming ecosystem. These efforts can strengthen the gaming community and connect them to chains that can offer robust platforms for developers and players.
The Polkadot ecosystem’s first gaming-specific appchain is Ajuna Network, which was implemented through its canary chain, Bajun, on Kusama. It is an excellent choice for game developers and studios, offering a decentralized gaming platform that integrates Unreal and Unity game engines and allows for the incorporation of blockchain-based assets into games.
Furthermore, the Ajuna team also developed the Polkadot Unity SDK, which combines Substrate's functionalities with Unity game development. This provides a foundation for quality blockchain games, benefitting the Polkadot ecosystem and those that choose to adopt it
Ajuna’s focus on gaming extends to tackling latency and privacy issues, which are common challenges in blockchain gaming. They offer a Layer 2 solution using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to manage in-game logic, achieving speeds of 250-300 milliseconds. Additionally, Ajuna Network was the first to activate Asynchronous Backing on both its Kusama and Polkadot parachains...........….
News from the Finders Program Part 1
Written by yay.oi
Decentralized social apps chain Frequency has won Polkadot Parachain Auction 76 with a self-funded bid of 1000 DOT.
Moondance Labs, the team behind Tanssi, has received a Web3 Foundation Decentralized Futures grant to continue their work to grow the Polkadot ecosystem and generate treasury revenue through gas fees.
Peaq welcomes decentralized mobile network coverage analytics DePIN Roam, who will utilize Peaq infrastructure to manage the incentivization of their anonymized mobile signal data collection.
The Polkadot Events Bounty announces the first round of approved events since their relaunch, with funding going towards five events across Asia, Latin America, and the United Kingdom.
The DePIN Association hosted an AMA with its founding members, including Polkadot’s Peaq and Acurast on July 30th.
Polkadot hosted Tommi (OpenGov.Watch), Kian (Polkadot Fellow), Mark (Scytale), Jonas (W3 Foundation), and Filippo (W3 Foundation) to investigate the proposals and weigh the pros and cons of adjusting DOT inflation on July 31st.
On August 2nd, Web3 Foundationtalked Business Development with Decentralized Futures Grants recipients, PoKe and PolkaPort East.
News from the Finders Program Part 2
Written by Dodow
Carbify, a gamified carbon neutrality project, partners with Moonbeam. Its NFTree batch 14 will be available on Moonbeam via the Rariable marketplace and is set to serve as a multichain hub. Each NFTree is a representation of a real word tree from the Amazon rainforest and will provide up to 20 years of rewards in the form of tokenized carbon credits.
Tanssi welcomes BEEFY and Gavun Wud to their testnet. Furthermore, both Polkadot memecoins are set to provide utility through launching their own appchain via Tanssi.
Flappy Wud 1.2 has launched with a new dynamic airdrop feature, where players can earn points for WUD.
Stellaswap removes the xc prefix from Polkadot native assets, making it easier for users to distinguish between bridged assets.
Bifrost’s Astar liquid staking token, vASTR, becomes the second LST after vDOT to enter Hydration’s Omnipool.
Hydration have opened up a governance discussion on their proposed approach to utilize its treasury Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL). At the time of posting, the Hydration POL was valued at $24.5M. The proposal includes using 17.47 WBTC in the money market as possible collateral for their Hollar stablecoin, repurposing equally DOT from the Omnipool to the money market and staking, converting 309.16 MRL ETH to Snowfbridge’s ETH for use in the Omnipool, implementing yield DCA strategies, and more.
After the first round of applications, Spazcoin, Crane, Xupanweb, and Legend Nodes have been accepted into the Bifrost Fellowship.
Calling Darwinia and Crab collators: please upgrade your nodes so that Asynchronous Backing can be enabled.
Extras
Many thanks to the Ajuna team for assisting us with answering some questions for the featured report.
Awesome cover art created by Dodow.
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