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Polkadot Updates

🔴 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - ~1.28b DOT | staking - 47.6% | parachains & crowdloans - 10%

🔴 🏛 Governance

• Referendum 101, approving a Wasm smart contracts bounty, is passing with 99.1% in favor and less than 10 days left to vote. 

• Referendum 103, a public proposal to unbrick the Zeitgeist parachain, is failing with 71% in favor. Note that the Zeitgeist team has asked people to vote against this Referendum and support Referendum 104 instead: aiming to enact the same call in a faster way

• Referendum 105, proposing to update system parachains to runtime v9370, is passing almost unanimously with less than 12 days left to vote. 

  Note that Referenda 104 and 105 were fast-tracked by the Technical Committee. If passed, they will execute shortly afterwards. 

• Motion 345, approving a Treasury Proposal to cover costs of Polkadot-related participation at Token2049 in Singapore, has passed Council vote. 

• Motion 348, adding a new batch of HRMP channels (for HydraDX, Kapex, Ajuna, Pendulum, and Litentry) has passed Council vote and will soon become a Referendum for vote by all DOT holders. 

• Motion 349, to continue funding the development, operations, and expansion of Polkawatch for a period of 9 months is under consideration. Part of the expansion efforts include bringing decentralisation analytics for staking pools to Polkadot (already rolled out on Kusama), multi-wallet integration, and assisting ecosystem teams with the integration of decentralisation analytics. Please note that the analytic tool is designed to measure the effective decentralisation of the Polkadot validation process.

• Motion 350, proposing to approve a Treasury Proposal for 1TRIBE Radio, is under consideration by the Polkadot Council.

• Motion 351, to create tools for Substrate developers, is under consideration. After their first proposal that created 13 Swift & Kotlin repos, this one seeks to make the Kotlin libraries fully in Kotlin, create an SDK interface to popular block explorers, combine interface in Swift libraries, develop a client manager, and other tools.

Kusama Updates ₑₓₚₑcₜ cₕₐₒₛ

🦅 ⭕️ Relay Chain

total supply - ~13.26m KSM | staking - 47.3% | parachains & crowdloans - 2%

• Turing Network won the most recent parachain lease auction. 

🦅 🏛 Governance

• Referendum 100, proposing curators for the Spanish language content bounty, is currently up for vote. 

• Referendum 101, proposing the Kusama parachain lease auction schedule for the rest of 2023, is up for vote. 

• Referendum 95, to perform a lease swap between 2000 (Karura) and 2233, as well as 2110 (Mangata) and 2256, was approved.

• Referendum 96, to set the next parachain auction schedule on Kusama, was approved.

• Referendum 97, proposing to clean up the Tips queue in several ways, is currently up for vote.

• Referendum 98 (which will require whitelisting by the Fellowship), to upgrade Kusama system parachains to runtime v9370, was approved. 

• Referendum 99, to use Treasury funds for customized Kusama chocolate bars, is now up for vote. 

• Referendum 264, to replace the current runtime code with the text “test how to proposal”, is failing with 1% in favor.

  Please note that this proposal was submitred under Gov1 model. The Kusama community requests proposers to submit their proposals using Polkadot OpenGov model now - more information can be found here.

⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others

projects connected to the DOT and KSM relay chains

• Ajuna has raised $5 million in a new private funding round.

• Astar announced a partnership with AirLyft, a platform for engaging Web3 communities with decentralized rewards.

  • Astar announced a Web3 Incubation Program with Sony.

• Crust published Why Crust is an Ideal Solution for Decentralized Storage in Web3.

• DAM Finance announced that it's officially live on the Moonbeam.

• Equilibrium announced an integration with Crust, enabling developers to pay Crust storage fees with EQD stablecoin.

• Interlay published a new whitepaper that proposes an expansion to a Bitcoin DeFi Hub.

• Moonbeam announced that, with 25M+ transactions and an average of 14,608 daily active accounts last month, it has hit 2M total addresses on the network.

  • Moonbeam announced that the first implementation of OpenGov is live on Moonriver.

• OriginTrail announced that its community can now use its parachain explorer developed in partnership with Subscan.

• Phala launched the Phala Builders Program, providing funding, technical guidance, and marketing support to innovative projects seeking to build on Phala’s decentralized, trustless compute cloud using Phat Contract.

• Subsocial announced an integration with Polkassembly, a unified platform for the Polkadot ecosystem governance discussions.

• Pendulum published a new launch roadmap.

• Zeitgeist announced that its parachain will migrate from Kusama to Polkadot.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• Radha, Lead Technical Educator at W3F, gave a talk at Messari Mainnet on the new OpenGov system coming to Polkadot (and already live on Kusama). 

• Polkadot Blog published Polkadot Staking Review: Impressive Stats, What’s New & What’s Coming.

• After 5 weeks of lectures and workshops designed to help speed up Web3 adoption, the second wave of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy has come to an end.

• The next Polkadot Community Call will take place on February 22nd at 4pm CET. Set a reminder here.

• Watch the DeFi in Polkadot Panel at the Polkadot Summit.

🛠 Tools

• Brushfam published an article on using Typechain-Polkadot, a comprehensive toolkit for ink! smart contract development. 

• SubWallet announced the next version of the wallet, featuring support of RMRK ’s new NFT endpoint, improved connection to Astar EVM, and more.

• Polkadot-JS API v9.14.1 was released.

🌠 NFT Review

A weekly newsletter keeping up with the evolution of NFTs in the Dotsama ecosystem.

• Singular published a January recap, a new set of verified NFT collections, and a report on its visit to Brigada.

• Efinity (NFT-focused parachain on Polkadot) published a new development update.

• Bit.Country (metaverse parachain) announced upcoming features its community should expect, which include a new game.

Read more

👷‍♂️ 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.