Polkadot: The first batch of parachain auctions on Kusama has been completed and Bifrost won the 5th slot, Statemine upgrade launches new phase of parachain functionality, Karura Swap launches, Celer cBridge v1 is now live on mainnet, Crust mainnet launch timeline was published, RAZE Network public testnet is live, and more!
Biweekly update on the Polkadot ecosystem vol. 16, 15th July — 29th July
TL;DR
- The Kusama community has just voted to upgrade the runtime of the Statemine parachain, Kusama’s instance of Statemint.
- The first part of parachain auctions on Kusama has been completed. These 5 external chains, combined with the common-good Statemine chain for assets, comprise the first 6 parachains on Kusama.
- Khala Network won the 4th slot with 132,280 KSM bid, and it is now officially the 4th commercial parachain on Kusama.
- After winning the fifth parachain auction, Bifrost is now being onboarded as Kusama’s parachain. Approximately 1,000 network stakeholders locked up KSM in favor of Bifrost being added to yours truly. Furthermore, Subscan has now supported Bifrost Mainnet Query.
- Karura Swap has opened trading for the Kusama/Karura — KSM/KAR — pair as the platform becomes one of the first DEXs to launch on Polkadot and Kusama.
- Parachain auctions are a central feature of Kusama network and Polkadot. Their outcome determines who gets which parachain slots and the amount of tokens locked. Learn why auctions are better run on-chain than off-chain and why a candle auction is used in the latest Polkadot blog post.
- This week, the Polkadot Relay Chain passed 6000000 (six million) blocks produced (in the canonical chain) and was finalized.
- Sub0 Online, the Substrate Developer Conference, is coming back this Fall. Send in your proposal for a talk or workshop and you could be sharing your experience with thousands in the Substrate community.
- Centrifuge partners with Defactor.Total value locked in Tinlake continues to grow regardless of the volatility of the crypto market.
- Darwania: 10+ projects announced to join the NFT land auction in the Metaverse Evolution Land.
- Interlay announced its seed capital raise of $3M.
- Celer cBridge v1.0 is now live on mainnet. Users are now able to use cBridge to instantly transfer tokens across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, with many more side chain and layer-2 chain integrations planned for in the near future.
- Raze Network testnet is launched now. Testnet is an experimental network where developers and the community can test, create, or modify functionalities while monitoring the blockchain network performance, before the follow-up release of a mainnet, with real economic stakes.
- The Clover Wallet Mobile App’s newest version 2.5.0 + 2.5.1 now supports asset swap on Ethereum, BSC, Fantom, Heco, Polygon, xDai and OKEx chain.
- Biconomy’s meta-transaction infrastructure is now live on Edgeware, their first mainnet deployment across Polkadot Ecosystem.
- Moonriver has completed Phase 1 of its launch process (adding third-party collators to the active set). It has now entered Phase 2, during which the network will enable on-chain governance. The staking functionality is now enabled.
- As a result of the summer Kusama crowdloans, Robonomics reached the Top-10 projects of the Polkadot ecosystem. Before the next wave of auctions, the project’s developers decided to deploy and maintain a functionally identical network — Frontier Relay chain, that will be integrated with Robonomics parachain.
- Astar Network joins the Crypto Climate Accord, an initiative to decarbonize crypto by powering blockchain with 100% renewable energy. Also, Subscan joins the Astar Builders Program.
- The Humanode teams shared some bullet points to shine some light on the exciting advancements that they have been working on.
- The MaraLink team published a proposal on Polkassembly: their idea is the development and operation of decentralized cross-chain protocol MaraLink, which allows anyone to send assets to applications on any blockchain. It will expand Polkadot ecosystem boundaries and bridge the gap between Polygon and Polkadot.
- StaFi rMATIC liquidity staking solution is granted by Polygon Foundation.
- Manta Network presented its canary-net Calamari KMA PLO Strategy. Up to 3 billion KMAs will be distributed to KSM contributors.
- Chainlink Price Feeds went live on Avalanche mainnet, marking a pivotal moment for over 225 projects building in the Avalanche ecosystem.
- Kylin’s parachain is producing blocks now via Chachacha.
- Zenlink website update, Polkadot Eco DEX composable hub newly unveiled.
- Crust mainnet launch timeline was published.
- Equilibrium supports MakerDAO’s DAI.
- OceanDAO Round 7 results are out.
- And more!
Latest News
Kusama Parachain Auctions
The timeline:
- 2021/06/15, 12:00 GMT: First Kusama Parachain Slot auction commenced.
- 2021/06/17, 09:00 GMT: First Kusama Parachain Slot auction ending period began.
- 2021/06/22, 09:00 GMT: First Kusama Parachain Slot auction bidding ended.
- 2021/06/22, 11:00 GMT: First Kusama Parachain Slot auction winner selected. Karura has won the first parachain auction and has on-boarded as Kusama’s first non-common-good parachain.
- 2021/06/22, 12:00 GMT: Second Kusama Parachain Slot auction commences. Moonriver has won the second parachain slot on Kusama.
- 2021/06/29, 12:00 GMT: Third Kusama Parachain Slot auction commences. Shiden has won the third parachain auction.
- 2021/07/06, 12:00 GMT: Fourth Kusama Parachain Slot auction commences. Khala has won the fourth parachain auction
- 2021/07/13, 12:00 GMT: Fifth Kusama Parachain Slot auction commences. Bifrost has won the fifth parachain auction
Statemine Upgrade Launches New Phase of Parachain Functionality
The Kusama community has just voted to upgrade the runtime of the Statemine parachain, Kusama’s instance of Statemint. Statemine was Kusama’s first featureful parachain. Like the launches of Kusama and Polkadot themselves, the launch of a parachain is a multi-step process.
In case you missed its launch, Kusama ran with a simple “shell” parachain to ensure block production, inclusion, and finalization. The Shell parachain has extremely limited functionality; it does not even have the notion of accounts. It only accepts a message from the Relay Chain stakeholder body to upgrade itself to something else.
The first upgrade from Shell to Statemine added features for fungible and non-fungible assets as well as the teleport interface to accept KSM from the Relay Chain as its native unit of account. However, the ability to create assets was restricted to the Kusama Council. This trial phase allowed the Parity and Web3 Foundation teams and Kusama Council to evaluate the performance of Statemine before lifting restrictions and allowing anyone to create assets.
After successfully demonstrating teleport functionality both to and from Statemine, and implementing the recommendations of our security auditors, the Kusama Council passed a motion to authorize the upgrade of Statemine to make it permissionless.
This upgrade process follows almost the exact same procedure as the Shell to Statemine upgrade. First, after passing stakeholder referendum, the Kusama Relay Chain sends a cross-chain message that authorizes the upgrade. Once Statemine successfully processes the message, anyone can submit the authorized runtime. The network will autonomously upgrade to the new runtime approximately one hour after submission.
What’s next?
Once the network enacts this upgrade, anyone will be able to create assets and NFTs on Statemine with a 1 KSM deposit for each asset class. These assets have an interface for asset managers as well as users. Asset managers can add metadata like a name and symbol to their assets as well as perform admin operations like mint and burn. With this upgrade, the team expects to see several real world assets represented on Statemine.
The development team is also working on the cross-chain interfaces necessary to use assets from Statemine on other parachains, making it the “home base” of assets in the Kusama network. Like the Relay Chain, Statemine will use a reserve based system where it tracks how many units of each asset have been sent to other parachains, and allow those parachains to send the assets back to Statemine. This feature will allow users to own and use an asset on multiple parachains, but with the asset’s properties, like total issuance, tracked in a single place.
Trustless cross-chain messaging opens new paradigms of development for multi-chain applications that harness the specialization of each chain. With the successful rollout of the first six parachains, the upgradeability of parachains and the Relay Chain, and new features and optimizations in the roadmap, Kusama is breaking new ground for the way people use and represent assets in blockchain networks.
Research Update: The Case for Candle Auctions
Parachain auctions are a central feature of Kusama network and Polkadot. Their outcome determines who gets which parachain slots and the amount of tokens locked. Learn why auctions are better run on-chain than off-chain and why a candle auction is used.
Parity
SBP Graduates: OnFinality
The Substrate Builders Program is an initiative by Parity to support builders in the Substrate ecosystem. The program allows teams building Substrate-based blockchains, applications, or ecosystem components to benefit from Parity’s extensive experience and resources, thereby setting themselves up for success.
The Substrate Builders Program is structured in three milestones, each lasting three months. Each milestone is reviewed by Parity’s Runtime Engineering team, providing guidance and feedback on the way the team is implementing their solution. After successfully completing all three milestones and/or going live (either solo or by becoming a parachain), the team graduates from the Substrate Builders Program.
Now, Parity announced a team that has recently successfully completed the Substrate Builders Program: OnFinality. OnFinality’s mission is to support blockchain developers by providing infrastructure services to customers of all shapes and sizes. They currently provide Blockchain API services, dedicated nodes and devops solutions for blockchain teams through their Partner Portal.
Read more:
Sub0 Online: Take the Stage and Share Your Knowledge
Sub0 Online, the Substrate Developer Conference, is coming back this Fall. Send in your proposal for a talk or workshop and you could be sharing your experience with thousands in the Substrate community.
Awareness and Events
- July 29th: Polkadot Club: Introduction to Substrate: The Encode Club team will host another event of their newest educational series as part of Encode Polkadot Club.
- Parity & Friends: NFTs: This edition of Parity & Friends addresses one of the hottest topics in crypto currently — NFTs.
- The Next Top Blockchain Startup is a global hackathon and startup competition that aims to spotlight the next wave of blockchain entrepreneurs. The Web3 Foundation is awarding the top 3 teams to build a custom blockchain that could one day become a parachain on Polkadot or Kusama. Utilise Substrate and build your specialised chain from the ground up. All teams have to submit their projects by August 8th.
Submissions: June 15th — August 08th.
Finance
Active accounts and the number of transactions (information from Polkascan)
Polkadot markets (information from Coingecko)
Polkadot Ecosystem Market Cap (information from Dotmarketcap)
Roadmap
Current Phase: Parachain Rollout
The launch of Polkadot began a year ago with the first four phases; the last — a move to complete decentralisation and permissionlessness — happened finally at the end of July last year. Now, phase five, the final phase in the launch of Polkadot is beginning.
Before being enabled by Polkadot’s network governance, parachains will be tested and optimized both on parachain testnets and on Kusama. Once the code has been fully tested, audited and benchmarked, and parachains are running smoothly on Kusama, Polkadot governance can enable parachains and begin parachain slot lease auctions.
Future Upgrades
Polkadot upgrades currently under development include upgrades to XCMP (Cross-Chain Message Passing) and the launch of parathreads. These and any subsequent upgrades can be enabled by Polkadot’s on-chain governance community once development, testing, benchmarking, and auditing are complete.
Ecosystem Updates
Bridges
Bifrost
Bifrost has developed an EOS network bridge that enables trustless cross-chain asset transfer by implementing on-chain light nodes with merkle tree verification.
- Subscan has now supported Bifrost Mainnet Query: After Bifrost launched the Kusama parachain mainnet, Subscan supported Bifrost chain transaction query function to provide users with more convenient visual data services. Now users can query the data of Bifrost’s mainnet and the token status through bifrost.subscan.io, or apply to call Bifrost’s data API.
- A Review of the Bifrost Slot Auction Highlights
- New episode of Parachain Auctions Podcast:
Centrifuge
The ChainBridge allows Centrifuge to move fungible and NFTs between chains, enabling the financing of real-world assets in a variety of DeFi products.
- There is no bear market with diversified real-world assets: Total value locked in Tinlake continues to grow regardless of the volatility of the crypto market.
- Centrifuge partners with Defactor:
ChainX
ChainX, a crypto assets gateway, is planning bridges to several networks and has implemented a BTC to Substrate bridge.
- With the Taproot upgrade ChainX time will come. SherpaX and the decentralized cross chain solution to bridge Bitcoin to Kusama will be ready, integrating aggregate signatures, MAST and the ChainX consensus.
Darwinia
Darwinia is building a permissionless non-custodial bridge protocol featuring efficient, low cost decentralization of cross-chain tokens and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) transfers, as well as other cross-chain operations.
- Evolution Land Metaverse: Evolution Land is devoted to building an open visual metaverse and is listed on the Tech-times top 5 projects aside from Axie.
- APR 1000% + ！10+ projects announce to join the NFT land auction in the Metaverse Evolution Land
- Quick Start Guide for Evolution Land (Dawning)
Interlay
Interlay is building a trustless bridge from Bitcoin to Polkadot.
- Interlay announced its seed capital raise of USD 3M. The seed funding round was led by IOSG Ventures, Blockchain.com, Launchub Ventures, CMS Holdings, KR1, Hypersphere, Zeeprime and angels as other major participants.
Smart Contracts
Clover
- The Clover Wallet Mobile App’s newest version 2.5.0 + 2.5.1 now supports asset swap on Ethereum, BSC, Fantom, Heco, Polygon, xDai and OKEx chain.
- Clover Finance inbound transfers are officially accepted on CoinbasPro with the ERC-20 version of CLV:
Edgeware
- The Cutting Edge: Week of July 19th: A weekly newsletter discussing progress updates, events, and governance proposals within the Edgeware ecosystem.
- Biconomy unlocks next-gen essentials for Edgeware mainnet’s EVM environment: Biconomy’s meta-transaction infrastructure is now live on Edgeware, their first mainnet deployment across Polkadot Ecosystem.
Moonbeam
- Moonriver Completes Phase One of the Parachain Launch Process on Kusama: Moonbeam announced that Moonriver, its community-led sister network on Kusama, has completed Phase 1 of its five-phase launch process. Moonriver has now officially entered Phase 2, during which the network will enable on-chain governance. Once the Moonbeam team is confident in the network’s stability, they will rely on on-chain governance for future upgrades. Governance updates are exciting steps for the network and will give participants full autonomy in the future of the community-led Moonriver network.
- Moonriver has completed Phase 1 of its launch process (adding third-party collators to the active set). It has now entered Phase 2, during which the network will enable on-chain governance. The staking functionality is now enabled. Learn more about the Moonriver launch process in detail.
Scaling
Astar Network (previously Plasm Network)
- Astar Network received a new Web3 Open Grant to implement a Zk Plonk pallet. The ZK Plonk was originally created by Aztec. Implemented by Astar, the plonk will be a core technology in terms of scaling and privacy solutions.
- Astar Network Joins the Crypto Climate Accord, an initiative to decarbonize crypto by powering blockchain with 100% renewable energy. 3 strategies to make Astar Network carbon negative are: NPoS, Azure and AWS and Proof Of Green. Learn more.
- Do you know what makes Astar unique in the Polkadot ecosystem? Here is the answer.
- Subscan joins Astar Builders Program
- Bware Labs joins the Astar ecosystem as one of the go-to service partners for future developers
- Pinknode creates the gateway to the Astar ecosystem
- Weekly Technical Update July 20th:
Celer
- Celer cBridge Launches: Seamlessly Bridging Cross-chain and Cross-layer Liquidity: Celer cBridge v1.0 is now live on mainnet. Users are now able to use cBridge to instantly transfer tokens across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, with many more side chain and layer-2 chain integrations planned for in the near future. Anyone can run a cBridge node to join the cBridge Network and provide cross-chain and cross-layer liquidity while generating yields through transaction fees. This marks an important milestone for Celer to create a key interoperability infrastructure to unite all the fragmented liquidity back together in the future of a multi-layer-2 and multi-chain blockchain ecosystem.
- AMA on July 30th:
DeFi
Acala
- Karura Swap has opened trading for the Kusama/Karura — KSM/KAR — pair as the platform becomes one of the first DEXs to launch on Polkadot and Kusama.
- As the first decentralized exchange in the ecosystem, Karura Swap has opened trading for the KSM/KAR pair.
- Crowdloan rewards (KAR) have been distributed, here’s a guide on how to check rewards on Karura Network chain and how to claim KAR (if you participated in Karura crowdloan from channels other than the officially supported ones. If you participated via exchanges, all exchange rewards have been distributed to them, so please contact them directly.
- Kraken and OKEx are now supporting Karura (KAR).
Akropolis
- Akropolis Weekly Updates: Compensation page is live, new UI/UX updates & more:
Amara
- Amara July 19th AMA Recap
- The MaraLink team published a proposal on Polkassembly: their idea is the development and operation of decentralized cross-chain protocol “MaraLink”, which allows anyone to send assets to applications on any blockchain. It will expand Polkadot ecosystem boundaries and bridge the gap between Polygon and Polkadot ecosystem.
Zenlink
- Zenlink Website Update, Polkadot Eco DEX Composable Hub Newly Unveiled
- Zenlink x MathChain: The two parties will cooperate on the DeFi application on Polkadot Layer 2 and cross-chain asset transactions between parachains.
Privacy
Phala Network
- ANN | Khala Crowdloan and Vendetta Testnet Rewards Distribution Done. Check them Now
- Users can claim Khala rewards through https://app.phala.network/ now. The Khala network does not currently provide a transfer function. The decision whether and when to enable transfer will be made through a referendum after removing Sudo. The guide “How to Check and Claim Your Rewards”.
- Expect Chaos! | The Things that You Should Know Before Khala Goes Live
- 24,961,006 K-PHA Distributed as Planned, Claimable on Phala Wallet! | Phala Weekly Vol.44
Manta Network
- The Calamari Crowdloan on Kusama: Manta Network presented its canary-net Calamari KMA PLO Strategy. Up to 3 billion KMAs will be distributed to KSM contributors. The cap of crowdloan is up to 300,000 KSM. 34% will be released and the remaining 66% will be vested every 8 weeks. Calamari crowdloan contributors will be rewarded with 10,000 $KMAs per 1 $KSM. The first 500 and 1000 participants will get additional bonuses as well as referral bonus (both the referrer and their referred counterparts receive a 2.5% bonus each) The Calamari team is working on various ways to participate in the PLO. More details will be released in the upcoming days as the plans are finalized.
- Manta Network Partners with Subscan for Integration with Block Explorer
RAZE Network
- Raze Network testnet is launched now:
- Raze Network Public Testnet Launch & Quick Tutorial
- RAZE Liquidity Migration to Uniswap V3
- Raze Testnet Bounty Program With RAZE Reward
- Raze Network Partners With DefiCliq
Data
Crust Network
- Crust Mainnet Launch Timeline: Crust Maxwell, as the preview network of Crust mainnet, launched on February 4th, integrating all core functions of Crust. With 5 months of stable development and optimization upgrades, Maxwell now has 2,746 nodes and 650P of storage capacity, which has the ability to undertake commercial applications. Check out the checklist which will be updated from time to time, and the specific mainnet launch time will be scheduled:
- Frequently Asked Questions | Crust Mainnet Launch
- Crust Project Development — July 19 — July 25
- Summary of Kusama Crowdloan Rewards
- Crust Profit Data — “Lucky Order” Activity
Ocean Protocol
- OceanDAO Round 7 Results: Over 21.7M OCEAN voted in the latest community funding cycle
- OceanDAO Round 8 is live: What you need to know for Round 8 of OceanDAO
- 275K USD is available for your idea that will unlock the open data economy via Ocean DAO:
Oracle
Chainlink
- Avalanche Integrates Chainlink To Supercharge DeFi Development: Chainlink Price Feeds went live on Avalanche mainnet, marking a pivotal moment for over 225 projects building in the Avalanche ecosystem, including top-tier projects like Tether, USDC and The Graph, as well as next-generation DeFi applications.
- StormX Integrates Chainlink To Immortalize Pop Culture With NFTs
- Arbol CEO Sid Jha Discusses Critical Need For Decentralized Insurance And Climate Data Ahead Of SmartCon #1
- Dr. Andy Boyan Talks Chainlink Live, SmartCon #1 And The New Chainlinked Podcast
- Smart Contract Summit #1: This August 5–7, discover how market-leading blockchain projects are using Chainlink’s expansive collection of off-chain services to accelerate smart contract innovation at SmartCon. Sign up below today to save your spot for this blockchain event.
Kylin Network
- Kylin Partners with Nftfy to Make DDMOs a reality
- Kylin is on Chachacha (and partnered with Centrifuge): Kylin’s parachain is producing blocks now (without the impediment of grabbing time ad-hoc via Parity), via Chachacha. This technical collaboration will make it much easier to run the various functionalities of any testnet process via parachain for anyone.
- Human Capital Announcement: Sam Elamin named as CTO
Other
Humanode
- Humanode Dev Report 2:The Humanode teams shared some bullet points to shine some light on the exciting advancements that they have been working on.
- Humanode in Simple Terms: Crypto-Biometrics: In this episode of Humanode in Simple Terms, Shannon Higgins — Humanode Core member — goes over the basic concept of crypto-biometrics, and what it means to privacy and security of bio-authentication.
- Biometrics, an overview: The Humanode team is using biometrics to enable Sybil resistance. This technology will ensure fair distribution of power and governance in distributed systems like blockchains. Read more about biometrics types, modalities, pros & cons, examples in use, and privacy considerations.
- Liveness detection solutions, a comparison: Check out a detailed list of liveness detection providers and a quick overview of their technologies in the Humanode new blog post.
- The seventh Humanode Fireside conversation was fully devoted to biometrics ownership. The recording is up on Humanode Podcast and YouTube channel.
- The seventh Fireside took place yesterday. The team was talking about the use of biometrics for DeFi. Recording soon.
Robonomics
- Robonomics Frontier: Robonomics developers decided to deploy and maintain a functionally identical network — Frontier Relay chain, that will be integrated with Robonomics parachain. Frontier Relay chain will use the same versions of Polkadot releases, which will be implemented by Kusama network in the form of its Relay chain. After connecting the Robonomics parachain to the Frontier Relay chain there will be a blockchain that could work in real-time and would be integrated into the Kusama network. All new capabilities that will appear with new Polkadot releases, will be also supported by Robonomics’ parachain.
MISC
- Latest Polkadot Digest:
- Learn more about parachain types and ways to allocate slots in the recently-published guide:
Social Media Metrics
Social media activity:
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Polkadot Twitter followers and Reddit subscribers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com
Polkadot Social Channels:
Polkadot Digest by Bill Laboon
This is not financial advice.
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