Bruno (bitfalls on X)
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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.
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.
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:
a nice new UI for nomination pools on the Polkadot Staking Dashboard
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.
The traditional world is so behind
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.
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.
104,000 developers 24,000 websites hosted 229,000 IPFS files uploaded 17,000 NFT collections deployed
Despite a heavy load on our plate, nearly all deliverables from Apillon’s Polkadot Treasury Milestone 1 Proposal have been achieved and…
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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