Dot Leap 2024-4: Project Conviction
Can we avoid a race to the bottom by paying out "desirability incentives" to projects?
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Project Conviction
Recently, our friendly neighborhood whale Giotto presented another idea: optimistic project funding.
We have our first draft for parachains staking 
I think this is going to be a game changer
Credit to: @lolmcshizz
docs.google.com/document/d/1cl…
I think this is going to be a game changer
Credit to: @lolmcshizz
docs.google.com/document/d/1cl…
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The gist of it is very similar to creator staking on Polkaverse, dapp staking on Astar (see our last dogfooding video for how that works), or Optimism Retroactive Public Goods Funding.
projects would apply to be whitelisted, where DOT holders vote them in
DOT holders vote for their favorite projects
projects get the proportional share of an earmarked amount of DOT inflation distributed to them, based on the votes they have, per day or some unit of time
DOT holders can also vote to NOT FUND projects, to discourage or eliminate projects they feel are grifty, malicious, or otherwise undesirable
DOT holders can vote with conviction, and the locks overlap with governance votes. This means Bob voting with 5x conviction for Alice's Wallet, but 6x on Referendum 666 will carry a 6x lock, not an 11x lock.
DOT holders can also vote to remove a project from the whitelist
First and foremost, I simply must suggest a different name. Rather than once again trying to catch up to Ethereum-land even in naming things, I propose renaming the effort to Project Conviction and will refer to it as such going forward.
On its surface, Project Conviction is a pretty cool mechanism, especially as the era of parachains draws to a close and projects will need a different kind of funding. The "Not Fund" vote also seems useful to discourage straight up grifts.
There are, however, two possible problems I see occurring but not directly addressed in the proposal:
Submission process
Race to the bottom
The submission process for the whitelist needs to be thought up really well. It cannot be a simple majority acceptance, because a whale could easily vote a million of his projects in, and then vote for them to get the money with more DOT than anyone else put together, and all we've done is redirected the inflation into a private wallet. The process cannot be democratic, because people are largely uninterested in voting, and cannot be plutocratic for the reason above. It also cannot be oligarchic, like with the Technical Fellowship, because it turns the TF into the gatekeeper of yet another aspect of Polkadot. I do not have a solution other than decaying categorial meritocracy, but this is a can of worms not many are willing to open. At the very least, there need to be deposit lockups, deposit burns, curved voting like it was in Gov1 based on turnout, biased to fail by default and approaching simple majority as turnout approaches 100%, and other failsafes.
The other problem is the race to the bottom. Like in Astar dapp staking (for which I am still not clear how it avoids this problem - please msg me or comment here to clarify if you know) - projects will likely promise kickbacks to those who vote for them. As they all compete with each other for greater relative claim to the inflation bucket, they will inevitably offer bribes to get votes. The voters will vote for money, not utility or project desirability, and in almost no time at all we should be seeing projects keeping but 1% of their Project Conviction income, and giving out 99% to the stakers. Some will undoubtedly further spice up the deal with native tokens, NFT drops, memecoins, and more. The purpose of the program will self-defeat, by preventing the projects from actually making any meaningful amounts of money.
Granted, I may be taking a too cynical view and maybe the people will vote with love and care rather than wallets, but if there's no failsafe built-in, we have to assume failure. Optimists are usually successful, but pessimists are usually right. I wanna be an optimist here, but...
What do you think about this? How can we avoid this? Is this a good idea, or is there another way to incentivize projects to remain involved with the Polkadot ecosystem? Let's discuss!
Polkadot and Kusama Updates
Polkadot 1.7.1 and Polkadot 1.7.2 have been released.
Fixes #3385: Do not stall finality on spam disputes
Fixes #3469: Allow parachain which acquires multiple coretime cores to make progress
Polkadot 1.8 subsequently introduces major and some breaking changes which you should inspect in the release log (most were mentioned in previous Dot Leap editions).
Permissionless withdraw is coming as a default option. This means anyone can trigger a withdraw for your staked amount. This seems practical, but might have some taxable-event implications for those who care about the boomer world of taxes.
BEEFY is live on Kusama. Stakenode's Jimmy explains. BEEFY is a secondary protocol which allows efficient trustless bridging to external consensus systems (i.e., other blockchains).
Square One has merged with Polkadot Alpha, supercharging it into a new project-support program. If you're building on Polkadot, check it out.
Development
Polkadot-JS suite now under new ownership. The one-person bus factor has been removed, and development can become more open and decentralized. Jaco was a powerhouse, but it's time he took a well deserved rest 👏
OpenDev core call is on Youtube if you want to hear straight from the Technical Fellowship
Interested in hearing about upcoming changes to Polkadot on a more technical level? The February Polkadot Technical Fellowship OpenDev core developers call is available here: youtube.com/watch?v=bqLujR…It is now possible to enable/disable batch requests on Polkadot node's RPC server.
substrace-contract-node 0.38.0 is out. No breaking changes.
Pallet-contracts will now expose API Version to let devs know which api are available.
The various options a builder in the Polkadot ecosystem has, and the routes one can take, by Kian Paimani.
FRAME Off-chain workers have been documented some more in the code.
The new claim assets extrinsic allows for simpler claiming of stuck assets from failed XCM transfers.
Parachain nodes with
--sync=warpwill no longer crash after this fix.Soon, nomination poolers will also be able to participate in governance.
A page about gas has been added to ink! docs.
Contract deployment on chains can now be origin-limited. In other words, the chain runtime can define who is allowed to deploy contracts on a chain.
Governance
To fight the Decentralized Voices program, Giotto seemingly organizes a cartel. The first cohort is released by W3F:
We are excited to announce the first round Decentralized Voices delegates, consisting of seven #Polkadot delegates and six #Kusama delegates
medium.comDecentralized Voices: Round 1 Delegates Announced.
Web3 Foundation has created the Decentralized Voices program for Polkadot and Kusama, to allow more people to be significantly involved in…
Decentralized Futures funds Alice_und_Bob's OpenGov.Watch. OGW is meant to analyze the governance process, identify pain points, write guides, and more, making the governance process infinitely smoother and more transparent.
You can now dive deep into each referendum's stats on Polkassembly with the new amazing graphs they just added. Polkassembly now also allows canceling, killing, and creating referenda right from their UI.
Starlay finance attempts a hack-saving referendum in a clumsy way. Seems the team is woefully unfamiliar with how Polkadot really works.
Referendum 552 aims to integrate Polkadot's ecosystem into TokenTerminal for a whopping 171k DOT (1.7m at the time of writing).
Dogfood of the Day
Today we dogfood HydraDX and go through everything it offers. What mysteries lie in wait?
Play Video
⛓ Connected Parachains, dApps, and others
There is a local air pollution network of sensors live in Limassol, Cyprus, powered by the Robonomics Kusama parachain.
Mimir is a new multisig app for Substrate chains, supporting Subsquare and other so-far multisig-inaccessbile interfaces, as well as chains like Kusama, Polkadot, Assethub, Paseo, and others.
Subwallet EVM integration released on Polkassembly. Now you can use your Subwallet EVM accounts to vote on Moonbeam and similar EVM-capable Polkadot chains.
Crust network works with over 150 projects already, providing them with resilient always-up storage.
HydraDX introduces HOLLAR - a new stablecoin for the Polkadot ecosystem and beyond.
ImpulseDAO's Arena is a game for developers. You can launch your character from a template, or fully customize it by writing a custom playing algorithm and uploading it as WASM into your character.
The OAK network Automation HUB now enables users to schedule cross-chain bridging of assets across Turing Network, Moonriver, and Shiden.
Content staking and reward splitting - two more ways to make bank on Polkaverse.
Unique Network encourages people to build on their Substrate replica of part of RMRK's original functionality for equippable/customizable NFTs. If you want to launch dynamic NFTs on Substrate, this is how.
🌎 Community & Ecosystem
Starknet claim is live and Polkadot-related repo contributors qualify for an airdrop.
Stakenode offers some excellent breakdowns of coretime, blockspace, and agile coretime concepts with regards to to Westend deployment.
The Astar Degens DAO treasury holds DOT as well as ASTAR, and plans to redistribute the $DED they receive to their NFT holders.
0xGoku's incredible writeup about on chain governance, highly recommended read.
Stakenode's phenomenal explainer on Polkadot 2.0.
There is an awesome set of dashboards about the ecosystem by Parity.
🔧 Tools and Releases
The Chopsticks tool has been added to Polkadot JS UI. This is an amazing DX upgrade which allows developers to fork a clone of a running chain live, then and there, and continue from its current state but using their own local runtime. Ideal and effortless for testing!
Substrate-connect, the light client, gets a dapp extension.
Cargo-contract RC3 is out. Stable soon!
Tx-wrapper 7.2.1 is out. Just updated dependencies.
Ink! v5 RC2 is out. Stable soon!
Substrate API Sidecar 17.5.2 has been released. Dependency bumps and historic staking support, for withdrawing staked assets from ancient times.
Paraspell is a set of tools for XCM communication. It's amazing.
Asset Transfer API 0.1.8 is out. Among other things, it adds the transfer assets extrinsic from XCM.
NFT Review
Testing Frenpet, a web3 game.
Polkadot-native NFT projects are invited to apply for ArtsDaoFest.
New utilities have been added to the RMRK code examples, making building equippable NFT collections easier than ever.
Read more in the online edition.
🗣 Incentivized Feedback
For this edition's incentivized feedback, I would really like to hear from readers about the question posed in the editorial. Please leave an at least 50 word comment about the Project Conviction program on this post on Paragraph. Let's discuss. Leave your DOT address along with the comment to get 5 $LEAP.
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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