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Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - ~1.21b DOT | staking - 45% | parachains & crowdloans - 10%

• Pendulum and Bittsensor won the most recent parachain lease auctions.

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Referendum 91, increasing the maximum number of nomination pools from 64 to 128, was passed and executed. 

• Referendum 93, proposing a new registrar but including no other contextual information, failed. 

• Referendum 94, proposing to seed the Polkadot Alliance, is currently passing with 97% in favor. 

• Referendum 96, proposing to upgrade the Polkadot runtime to v9340, is currently passing with 99% in favor. 

  Note that assuming this referendum passes, there will be an upgrade on Saturday (14 Jan) to a new runtime. Any multisig transactions that start before the upgrade, but end afterward, will not succeed - complete your multisigs before the upgrade, or wait until the upgrade.

• Referendum 97, proposing to unbrick the Bitgreen parachain, is currently passing with 98% in favor. 

• Referendum 98, proposing to update the genesis Wasm blob for Bittensor to change the para ID, is passing with 99% in favor and 26 days left to vote. 

• Motion 321, to fund the Unit Masters masters program, is up for vote.

• Motion 322, to fund the continued development Subsquare, is up for vote:

• There are also three proposals that can be endorsed in order to be the next Referendum up for vote.

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - ~13.13m KSM | staking - 46.7% | parachains & crowdloans - 2%

• Robonomics and Bittensor have won the last couple parachain lease auctions.

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Referendum 49, aiming to enable fast-unstake on Kusama: this feature is there to allow those that have staked by mistake, or, for whatever reason, are no longer earning rewards, to unstake faster.

• Referendum 50, to upgrade Statemine to runtime v9360, was approved. 

• Referendum 53, aiming to add a Bridge Hub (BH) parachain to Kusama. The BH will be the gateway between Kusama and other networks, like Polkadot and Ethereum. For now, the BH only contains some basic logic, and none of the bridge-specific pallets.

  Note that the two preceding referenda are on the Whitelisted Caller track of the new OpenGov system, and thus are also required to be whitelisted by the Fellowship. 

• Referendum 52, by Subscan to add a new registrar to the system. Because this was a test by the team to develop new features, there is no contextual information on the proposal.

• Referendum 56, aiming to enable pre-checking for runtime upgrade on parachains. With pre-checking enabled, a parachain is only allowed to upgrade their runtime after validators have tried compiling it and they agree it is good, as opposed to just accepting it blindly and then fail when the parachain tries to produce blocks with the new runtime.

• 1 open Referenda (to tip for its guide on how to set up an RPC node) in the OpenGov Small Tipper track.

• 1 open Referenda (to keep Evrloot running for the players after recent gas calculation changes) in the Small Spender track of the OpenGov system.

• 2 open Referenda in the OpenGov Medium Spender track.

• 1 open Referenda (to change genesis WASM for Bittensor) in the OpenGov Root track.

• 1 Referenda (to enact Referendum 35) in the OpenGov Treasurer track.

• 1 Referenda (to fund the Virto team) in the OpenGov Big Spender track.

⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others

projects connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains

• Ajuna published Ajuna Leverages TEEs to Enhance Confidentiality and Speed.

• Astar published Cross-Virtual Machine: Creating a Portal to the Future of Smart Contracts.

  • Astar also published a proposal for dApp Staking V3 designed to incentivize developers & builders.

  • Astar announced integrations with Coinhub Wallet and Celer Network.  

• Bit.Country announced that Kaosland Land Claim is LIVE now for All Crowdloaners.

• Encointer published How to Spread the Word About a New Digital Community Currency.

• HydraDX published Hydrating the Omnipool and launched, reaching a TVL of $322,000 after 3 days.

• InvArch published What needs to happen to have an effective blockchain creator economy?

• Manta published An interview with Oneblock and Shumo Chu (Manta co-founder), 

  • Manta also announced MantaPay Incentivized Testnet v3 and the conclusion of its Record-Breaking Trusted Setup.

• Moonbeam published Understanding XCM on Polkadot and How It Enables Cross-Chain Use Cases.

• OAK published Exploring the Common Good Parachain for On-Chain Collectives.

• OriginTrail reported over 40,000 knowledge assets created since the launch of the Decentralized Knowledge Graph V6. 

• Phala announced the launch of the Phat Contract Closed Beta to allow Polkadot ecosystem builders to experience its software development kit first-hand.

  • Phala also announced a partnership with Subsquid to bring Subsquid’s data processing and API development framework to the Phala App.

  • Phala will host an in-depth discussion on Jan 25th about Web3 Cloud Transformation with ecosystem partners Arweave and Filecoin. Register here.

• Polkadex announced a partnership with Crust for decentralized storage.

• Various projects published 2022 recaps: Astar, Bifrost, Bit.Country, Centrifuge, Crust, Efinity, Litentry, Integritee, Manta, Moonbeam, OAK, Phala, SubWallet, Unique.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• Daniel Schoenberger, CLO of Web3 Foundation, along with Josh Klayman (Linklaters) and Angela Dalton (Signum Growth Capital) was interviewed on Web3 Wednesdays, about DOT morphing. 

• Gavin Wood has published the Polkadot 2022 Roundup. 

• Videos from the 2022 Sub0 Conference are now all available online.

• Watch the latest Polkadot Community Call. 

• Applications for the 6th Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator cohort are now open. Apply before January 17th to join the 6-month program to learn from Polkadot experts, and get support for your project in the Polkadot ecosystem.

• Parachains.info now has a new section on the project page that lets you view open XCM channels.

• Web3 Foundation announced Wave 16 Grant Recipients.

• The Polkadot Hackathon Global Series by Polkadot & AngelHack starts on January 25. Register now to dive into Polkadot and win from a prize pool of $220,000+.

• Polkawatch, an analytics tool designed to measure effective decentralization of Polkadot's validation process, released the Polkadot decentralization report.

• dotinsights published the Polkadot 2022 Wrap-Up & 2023 Moving Forward Video where 23 speakers from the Polkadot ecosystem share their remarkable progress in 2022 and their plans for 2023.

🛠 Tools

• Polkadot-JS Extension v0.44.8 was released.

• Polkadot-JS API v9.11.1 was released.

👷‍♂️ Jobs in Web 3.0

Want your ad here? Buy it on Singular.

• Web3 Foundation is looking for a Technical Educator, Spec Engineer, and Technical Grants Evaluator. Apply here.

That's it for this week - I hope this was as useful for you to read as it was for us to write!

Many thanks to Bill Laboon for his daily digest—which helps us not miss some important updates—and Raul Romanutti for helping us ensure that the governance news is accurate.

DotLeap is put together by Bruno Škvorc and gbaci.

Got any links for Bruno for the next edition? Find Bruno on Riot at @bruno:web3.foundation, on Twitter, or via email at editor@dotleap.com.