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As Jimmy from Stakenode comprehensively explained the other day, the Polkadot treasury recently funded Conor Daly in the Indy 500 2024 sponsorship. Conor is a top 20 racer in the Indi 500 from 2023 who, after being dropped by ECR as his contract expired, had to seek out alternative sponsorship.

What this recent proposal means concretely is that Daly's team got 290k DOT (around 2 million USD) to dress him and his car up in Polkadot branding, also allowing them to make and sell Polkadot related race merch.

On one hand - the idealistic one - I feel like this is extremely stupid. There will be absolutely no conversions from this, and brand awareness helps no one.

Even if the Indy 500 audience somehow does decide to google what Polkadot is, and then for some reason this crowd decides they are interested in gambling on the DOT token, they won't be allowed to or will be afraid to try because Indy 500 is a deeply American thing (no one in Europe or Asia cares about cars going around in a circle) and the SEC is still America's daddy in terms of where you're allowed to put your money (where's that second amendment of money, Americans?). And no, DOT "mophing" into "software" will not help. Not a single non-American soul will watch the races, so this exposure will fall on eyes that cannot act on it and that, in my opinion, should not act on it even if they could.

Bruno Skvorc 🦞 | (ѱ,ѱ)

@bitfalls

Resulting in exactly zero adoption across the board, people only laugh at the eco.

What is the end goal? Get civilians to buy DOT? Why? To make number go up? And then subject them to abuse when they sell for profit, or shrug your shoulders saying "DYOR" when they lose 50%?

Filippo Franchini | Web3 Foundation

@filippoweb3

People starting to get that they can use the #Polkadot treasury for great marketing initatives to promote the Polkadot brand to the world

- wrapped taxis (Berlin @CultureDot1)
- racing cars @ConorDaly22
- football teams @InterMiamiCF
- airports
- search engines @brave

50

10:23 • 24 Mar 2024

On the other hand, I think it's really cool that a team sought sponsorship through a decentralized system, outside of the traditional fiat constraints, and had it approved by a community of peers (in a way). This is an incredible demonstration of what this technology could do if it were put to GOOD use, something beneficial for all.

To me personally, this feels like a colossal waste of money - money that could go to teams that really need it and actually help the ecosystem outinnovate its competition. Sure, a cool waste of money, but a waste nonetheless. But hey, if the treasury wants to fund me, I'll wrap my car in a matte gray Jam advertisement for only 100k 🤷‍♂

• Gavin Wood has announced JAM, a potential future path for Polkadot which replaces the current relay chain with a more modular, minimalistic design. You can learn more about JAM by reading the Gray Paper. The W3F is incentivizing the building of this new version with grants.

• Vote for Polkadot's upgrade to 1.2.0 is passing unanimously.

• Great (and very detailed) forum post by Andrew on the design for XCMP (potential replacement for HRMP) - thanks Bill!

• Max pool and max member limits from nomination pools have been removed after this proposal passed.

• Additional base fee increase on Polkadot has been voted in, making every block's processing 0.025 DOT more expensive. Same thing on Kusama.

• BEEFY consensus has passed and executed on Polkadot.

• Kusama parachain validation timeouts have been increased to 2.5s from 2s, making for a smoother async backing experience.

• The Polkadot-Kusama bridge is live, successfully reducing the economic security of Polkadot by allowing canary-net funds to be used in the same environment as value-bearing assets.

• Initialization of Snowbrigde, the Eth-Dot bridge, is up for vote.

• A proposal for integrating Klaster into the Polkadot ecosystem is now live. If executed, this will allow people to execute transactions on any chain - even unrelated EVMs, Cosmos, and others - using DOT and Polkadot-native tokens, and vice versa.

• Polkadot 1.10 has been released. Major updates we covered before, but we recommend reading the changelog for a full list of what's making it into the next runtime vote.

• Coretime region transfers (trading of coretime slots) is merged.

• Pretty big update for asset transfers via XCM. Makes it possible to transfer a foreign asset registered on AssetHub as reserve from Parachain A to Parachain B even if it's original origin is something like Ethereum.

• It will now be easier for parachains to permissionlessly connect to system chains, courtesy of Acala's Bryan Chen.

• cargo-contract v4.1.0 released, adding the storage --version, verify --wasm, and instantiate --chain commands, the latter being used to instantiate prod chains.

• substrate-contracts-node is at 0.40, in sync with Polkadot v1.9.0 branch.

• subxt 0.35.2 fixes a minor decoding issue.

• Polkadot-api Q1 update is out and it's a big one! Will we finally see DX in Polkadot?

• We follow Leemo's shitcoin launching tutorial. Let's see how we do! (spoiler: it's not fun)

• Opengov.watch's Project tracker by Alice und Bob:
  

  

  Alice und Bob

  @alice_und_bob

  

  Wondering what's next for Polkadot core features?
  
  This Fellowship Project Tracker has you covered: opengov.watch/technical_fell…
  
  It's not yet perfect, but we're on the way.

  

  

  GuinnessStache

  @guinnessstache

  

  This is awesome to hear! I kind of wish there was some sort of estimated calendar for things like runtime updates. I know that's kind of a hard thing to do though because the whole thing is such a fast moving machine.
  
  But it would be cool if the community could see estimated…

  60

  9:12 • 7 Apr 2024

• a nice new UI for nomination pools on the Polkadot Staking Dashboard

  

  Filippo Franchini | Web3 Foundation

  @filippoweb3

  

  The #Polkadot staking dashboard updated UI for Nomination Pools
  
  staking.polkadot.network/#/pools

  

  92

  15:04 • 9 Apr 2024

• Leemo's tutorial on making memecoins on HydraDX.

• DED team sent assets to the wrong address. Is there a pilot in this plane?

• Polkadot treasury funds a racecar driver's car stickers and jumpsuit. Great writeup about it by Stakenode. Jimmy is already spinning new plans, like onboarding via Messi.

  

  Filippo Franchini | Web3 Foundation

  @filippoweb3

  

  How a decentralized protocol like #Polkadot sponsored a race car with
  no bank transfer, no letterbox or centralized entity, no written contract
  
  just a trustless protocol and governanceThe traditional world is so behind

  

  Polkadot

  @Polkadot

  

  A decentralized protocol sponsoring an athlete... but how?
  
  It's all possible w/ Polkadot Decentralized Governance
  
  A community member submitted a proposal DOT holders voted to sponsor Conor
  
  No centralized entity
  No middlemen
  Transparent and on-chain

  

  124

  19:50 • 9 Apr 2024

  • Decentralized Futures funds Storagehub. I remain unconvinced of any storage-chain whose sole existence relies on vampire attacking others. This means it has the same weakpoint: being attacked by a new one, with more VC backing to bribe users with.

    

    Web3 Foundation

    @Web3foundation

    

    We're thrilled to announce StorageHub by @moonsonglabs_ as the latest grantee under the Decentralized Futures (DF) program. StorageHub is set to revolutionize decentralized storage on #Polkadot, offering a scalable and efficient solution for file-based storage and large data…

    73

    18:18 • 9 Apr 2024

  • A full list of service providers in the Polkadot ecosystem has been created on the forum. If you need Substrate/Polkadot development, take a look!

• Apillon boasts crazy adoption numbers. I remain skeptical.

  

  Apillon ⧓

  @Apillon

  

  Platform stats:
  
  104,000 developers
  24,000 websites hosted
  229,000 IPFS files uploaded
  17,000 NFT collections deployed
  
  Read more

  

  blog.apillon.io

  Apillon Milestone 1 Proposal Recap — Done and done ✔️

  Despite a heavy load on our plate, nearly all deliverables from Apillon’s Polkadot Treasury Milestone 1 Proposal have been achieved and…

  6

  17:59 • 10 Apr 2024

  • Talisman introduced Quests, a questing and points collecting app. Careful about privacy though!

  

NFT Review's last edition has been published. Absolutely nothing happened in Polkadot NFT space.

Read more in the online edition.

• 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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