Web 3.0 Biweekly II (23 Dec 2019– 5 Jan 2020)

1. Polkadot 2019: Year in review. The Polkadot project has over 300,000 lines of code, with 121 contributors and around 3,000 individual contributions. The Kusama network (KSM), as an early version of Polkadot, launched successfully as planned. More well-known projects including Mediledger Network, Polymath, Shift Project, and Blockchain.com, start to migrate their present systems to Substrate or support the ecosystem of Polkadot. Numerous grand events including Web3 Summit, Sub0, Sub0.1, and Web3 Foundation ETHCC happened around the world to grow the community. Substrate 2.0 is launching, with numerous plug-and-play modules for on-chain governance. In 2020, more interesting pieces of functionality, including governance, parachains, slot auctions, parathreads, XCMP and Spree, are coming.
2. New release v2.6.8-beta & v2.5.13-stable of Parity Ethereum nodes protect against potential attacks, in which valid blocks with manipulated transactions (added/replaced) cause the client to stall.
3. Web3 foundation’s Grant Wave 4, funded the development of new runtime modules including stablecoin runtime module, high-throughput trading parachain, and Solidity to WASM compiler.
4. Google’s Youtube bans cryptocurrency videos and Google Suspends MetaMask From Its Play App Store.
5. Coinbase is removing Dapp browser from their mobile wallet due to the pressure from Apple.
6. Building a Distributed AppStore with 3Box.
7. Base Layers And Functionality Escape Velocity. Layer 1 development in parallel with layer 2 development in the short term, and more focus on layer 2 in the long term.
8. ShiftNrg uses Substrate and off-chain workers to speed up development of their blockchain storage and web hosting platform.
9. Polkadot Consensus Part 4: Security.
10. Cargo remote speeds up the builds of huge Rust projects.
11. Polkadot ambassador program.
12. Investigate Web3 gaming ecosystem and the user base across four top games, i.e., CryptoKitties, GodsUnchained, decentraland and PlasmaBear.

The path to Web 3.0 twists and turns, may our persistence pay off. — Yaoqi

Follow me on Twitter @jiayaoqi, to keep you posted on the latest information around Web 3.0.

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