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Telegram Bots and Wallets

Telegram is currently the world's most popular messaging application. With versatile APIs and a relatively permissionless and free-for-all attitude towards the types of information allowed, Telegram has established itself as the de-facto messaging platform for any serious team. With the addition of threads into channels - albeit not too smoothly - it hammered the final nail into the coffin of the horror of UX that is Discord.

With the launch of its mockchain and the addictive and farmed-to-hell Notcoin, IPO rumors added fuel to the fire and made everyone take a second look at Telegram as the platform. But Telegram has one distinct advantage beyond the others: it's dead easy to build for. Some have taken this concept further, inspired by Telegram's own innovation on their own built-in wallet for the TON token.

Now, aside from the trading bots plaguing the platform and making mad bank, people are making non-custodial proxy wallets, bound to user accounts and executing TXs behind the scenes in a relayed-transaction way. One such case is the amazing Nova Wallet team who recently debuted their own TeleNova Bot. Our dogfooding video of testing it is below!

Could this be the golden ticket to onboarding the masses? Who will do the best job first? Who will have the fabled first mover advantage and take it far enough to leave everyone else in the dust?

Polkadot and Kusama Updates

• Polkadot 1.9.0 is out! Tons of big updates we linked to in previous editions, notably permissioned contract deployments, construct runtime macro v2 is out, claim assets extrinsic for reclaiming assets from failed XCM transfers, and more.

• Agile Coretime FAQ, particularly useful as the upgrade comes to Kusama and basically shuts down parachain auctions, converting existing leases into bulk coretime.

• Gav's Sub0 keynote on JAM, the foundation for Polkadot 2.0. Bryan Chen breaks down an early version of the idea behind it. Polytope's Seun then does a livestream commenting / viewing session to clarify even further.

Development

• A very comprehensive development update from Parity's tech team on the recent changes in the various Github repos and on everything coming in the next release(s).

• Substrate-connect got wallet password UI screens.

• PolkaVM-based executor was added into the SDK and produces blocks in all tests. This paves the way to a new execution engine inside Polkadot slowly but surely.

• ink v5 is out, a major release with massive breaking changes.

• Cargo-contract v4 is out, supporting the new ink v5. Lots of breaking changes you will want to be aware of if you're using ink, so I recommend reading through the changelog. This release was immediately followed by 4.0.1. with some minor e2e test fixes.

• The construct_runtime macro has been almost completely revamped.

• The RPC server will soon have a whitelist option for rate limiting so certain hosts can be allowed non throttled usage.

• An official way to sponsor transaction fees by an agent might be coming to the codebase soon.

• A bug regarding Kusama validators getting 0 backing rewards the first session they enter the active set has been addressed.

Governance

• Polkadot Ambassador Program referendum looks like it's going to pass easily. It's proposing a new on-chain Collective with 21 head ambassadors being paid 120k per year gross to be full time ambassadors + manage those under them.

• Old bounties are getting cleaned up in a separate proposal. Feels like there should be an automatic cleanup based on some params.

• Referendum 507 to open an office in NYC for $3m USD failed. Giotto rejoices.

• The root proposal to initialize Kusama GRANDPA light-client running on Polkadot BridgeHub is passing unanimously. This is stage 2 of 2, with stage 1 having been executed on Kusama. I disagree with this being done because Polkadot then seemingly inherits the economic security of Kusama, diluting its own.

• Hydra's liquidity assistance and user-bribing proposals seem to be passing.

• Giotto's 1m DOT $DED bounty seems to be failing. Not surprised. This memecoin missed the boat big time, EVM and Solana worlds are in the 3rd or so cycle of memecoins down to the bottom of the barrel, while DED is, for some strange reason, still trying to set up a foundation (!!). If this doesn't launch yesterday, it will already have been a more colossal waste of money than putting no-UTM DOT stickers on Berlin taxis for 50k euro.

Dogfood of the Day

• Dogfooding Novawallet's Telegram bot! Once the feature is available, send me a gift of some shitcoins and you get $100 LEAP!

⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others

• Web3 Foundation's identity registrar is being shuttered.

• Syncra is a next generation DAO platform for Substrate chains, launched on Aleph Zero testnet for now.

• Beamswap's new montly recap focuses on $PINK, upgrading their forked Uniswap contracts, and some extra yield oppos.

• Bifrost's Loopstake allows you to single-click leverage-stake up to 4x on your DOT.

🌎 Community & Ecosystem

• Distractive published its first monthly update after being selected by the Decentralized Futures program to be a core marketing contributor for Polkadot. It mainly documents hiring, rebranding, and a roadmap with a focus on the message and events.

• Polkadot Decoded is coming to Brussels this year in July and has opened up pre-registrations.

• Polkadot Alpha program now has a comprehensive Notion about every aspect of the program.

• Polkadot turns its social outreach into a committee affair. This is a positive change for now. Let's hope no woke infection happens.

• The Polkadot Blockchain Academy is piloting a hybrid 'remote yet synchronous' experience for the upcoming Singapore wave which runs from 20th May to 20th June 2024.

🔧 Tools and Releases

• Muharem (Parity dev) documents how to make Treasury proposals that spend any asset the treasury holds, not just the relay chain's native token. The post shows how to make a USDT spending proposals, for stablecoin payouts.

• cargo-contract 4.0.2 is out with better installation instructions for ink linting in IDEs.

• Password encryption has been added to substrate-connect's wallet extension.

• Contracts-UI had its polkadot-js packages updated to support ink v5. ink examples have been updated to version 5 as well now.

• Txwrapper-core 7.3.0 is out with support for foreign assets.

🌠 NFT Review

• Singular releases the Wardrobe function, allowing you to preview equippables before purchasing.

• RMRK’s ERC 7950 proposal has moved into Review phase, meaning there will soon be a standardized way for NFTs to hold fungible tokens in a decentralized way, in arbitrary depth (i.e. your avatar has a backpack which contains a purse which contains 1000 $DOGE)

• Evrl00t introduces expeditions.

• Unique’s Aleksandar Mitrovic stream about gaming and NFTs in Polkadot.

Read more in the online edition.

🗣 Incentivized Feedback

• Leave feedback on this edition on X, here on Paragraph, or by hitting reply if you're reading this in your inbox, and you get 5 $LEAP. Your message must also contain your address which has a verified identity record on Polkadot.

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!

DotLeap is put together by Bruno Škvorc.

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