WAG 2025! - Newsletter Edition 80
In this week’s edition:
Editorial: New Years vibes, reflections on 2024, this week’s storyline up, consider a new years resolution and goal.
Top Story - Recap Dotcember: The main insights from the Polkadot ecosystem during December.
Featured Update - Growth of the WagMedia Creator Economy: An update on the WagMedia content and creator scene.
Wag Roundup: News from our Finders Program between December 24th and December 31st.
Extras: Credits and anything else.
The full newsletter can be enjoyed via this link.
Editorial
What is up, my friends!
Happy New Year! Your weekly dose of wagtasitc stories is back. While we WAG in 2025, which is anticipated to be bullish for Web3, let’s not forget how 2024 has shaped things up with ETFs, US election results, progress in regulation, new narratives, and, of course, plenty of innovation.
Similar themes were reflected in the Polkadot ecosystem, with OpenGov driving significant changes within the world’s largest DAO. Notably, this included the definition and progress of Polkadot 2.0, as well as adjustments in inflation. Additionally, our ecosystem saw a reset on the events scene, a new conceptual framework with Cloud and Hub, the launch of trustless bridging, innovation with JAM, and much more.
Fair to say, our weekly stories and news roundups have managed to capture all of these developments, and we hope to continue providing readers with valuable insights in 2025. On that note, it’s still worthwhile to take the time to read through the 2024 roundup from our Chief Architect.
Given that our newsletter has been on hiatus during December, our top story this week recaps Dotcember, which witnessed a hated rally. We will also provide a featured update on the growth of the WagMedia Creator Economy.
As many of us start the new year with resolutions and a goal or two, how about joining us to report news or create content.
Dodow, Chief Editor
Top Story of the Week - Recap DOTcember
Written by yay.oi
Welcome back fam! While we may not all celebrate Christmas, it seems that many of you have accumulated a stocking full of loot this December. Despite a brief hiatus from our weekly newsletter, our WagMedia weekly Polkadot ecosystem roundups have kept on rolling in. You can catch up with everything you’ve missed over on our GrillApp. In the meantime, allow me to brief you on some of December’s highlights.
To get the festive season rolling, Bitwise Asset Management filed an SEC application to convert its $1.442B Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund (BITW) into an exchange-traded fund. As of December 27th 2024, the fund holds approximately $5.5M DOT making it the eighth largest holding.
Meanwhile, the discovery of an entity named 21SHARES POLKADOT TRUST listed in Delaware, as reported by CryptoSlate, has fuelled speculation about a potential pure DOT ETF in the US. Swiss-based 21Shares already offers BTC and ETH ETFs in the US, and has submitted an application for a Solana ETF.
However, as we reported back in May, the SEC’s approval of BTC and ETH ETFs came about due to the data available from the CME's market surveillance system. DOT is not presently benefitting from that kind of rigorous scrutiny, so our best chance of approval may come from a potential change of SEC leadership in 2025.
Such hurdles have not hindered the flow of venture capital into the Polkadot ecosystem with three projects receiving notable funding in December. Evrloot announced a pre-seed raise of $500k, with key contributors including Moonbeam, Arrington Capital, andDerek Yoo(Moonsong Labs). Mandala Chain,as reported by Chainwire, received $1M in its pre-seed raise, led by Harbour Industrial Capital......…….
Check out our full newsletter for the full story
Featured Update - Growth of the WagMedia Creator Economy
Written by Dodow
Sound storytelling, paired with smart engagement, connects with intelligent audiences, offering insights that educate, inspire, and highlight the latest developments. As Web3 evolves, you’ll find many of its top founders occasionally writing a line or two. Such is the power of content: did you know that before co-founding a Turing-complete decentralized blockchain, Vitalik Buterin explored content creation as the lead writer for Bitcoin Magazine?
Consistent storytelling helps maximise this power, with the community stepping in. This has given rise to the WagMedia Creator Economy, where WagMedia’s mission is to help tell Polkadot’s story, one creator at a time, via feedback and incentives.
Since our last featured update on the content generated through WagMedia, we have witnessed improvement in some individuals and an increased number of quality submissions. We’ve also seen the onboarding of more creators, as well as sufficient creative mindshare among a larger pool of creators to ensure that none of the key Polkadot developments get missed.
The Spammening was a compelling development, largely because, by stress testing Kusama, it showcases the vanity metric of TPS, which is often seen as the key selling point of blockchain networks. The buildup to the event was covered by The White Rabbit with some smart video work, and a quick overview came from gbaci. They were rewarded 14.5 and 14 DOT, respectively.
As for the aftermath of the Spammening, which ended up with two sessions and witnessed back-to-back Web3 TPS records, the coverage was fluid, thanks to the growth of the WagMedia Creator Economy. First, CMOSH received 11.3 DOT for continuing his solid data infographic work by illustrating Kusama leading all blockchains with 82K TPS achieved after the first session..……...
Wag Roundup
Written by yay.oi
Polkadot founder and chief architect Gavin Wood has published his annual Polkadot roundup, highlighting the major achievements of 2024 and giving some hints about what we can expect in 2025.
OriginTrail announces the launch of DKG V8, which brings a 1000x boost to scalability, privacy-preserving DKG Edge Nodes, and batch minting which will facilitate faster Knowledge Asset creation.
Decentralized AI Agent compute network iGam3 is expanding from Arbitrum to Peaq. It will be migrating 50% of its token supply to the Peaq network and plans to leverage Peaq’s modular DePIN functions to optimize its systems.
Evrloot’s v1.0 launch has been a roaring success, attracting more than 2500 players to its free-to-play campaign. Remarkably, 50% of players have already been converted and purchased their first NFT citizen.
Auto pools on Stellaswap, powered by Beefy Finance, are now benefiting from additional rewards thanks to the DOT Incentives campaign.
Pendulum announces PEN Tokenomics 2.0, which will halt new token issuance, burn 162M tokens, cap the maximum total supply to 150M, and divert unused token allocations to the Pendulum treasury. With the treasury coffers boosted to 55.6M PEN, opportunities open up for the community to fund initiatives such as liquidity incentives and development projects.
The first OpenGov referendum on Hydration is open for voting. It proposes to add vDOT to the money market and adjust the risk parameters of several lending pools.
Polkaworld hosted Gianluigi and Pakman on December 30th to hear all about the upcoming Kylix Finance bridgeless cross-chain lending platform. They also discussed what we can expect from them in 2025.
Extras
Awesome cover art created by SKULLZ.
For all you budding creators out there, don't hesitate any longer – join us now! There are plenty of rewards awaiting your creativity.