Polkadot News
The Polkadot Weekly News has been off for a couple of weeks, so this will be a high-level review of some VERY exciting times in the Polkadot ecosystem.
There has been quite an upsurge in scams. Please note: THERE IS NO DOT AIRDROP.
Rococo V1 launched on December 22nd. This is the parachains testnet running on the latest Substrate. It is currently running three test parachains - Tick, Trick, and Track. https://polkadot.network/rococo-v1-a-holiday-gift-to-the-polkadot-community/
It was announced that the Rococo V1 parachain registration opening will occur today, January 11th, 2021. Follow the #rococo:matrix.parity.io channel on Matrix for up-to-date information.
On 13 Jan, Bruno Škvorc will be presenting the state of NFTs on Kusama and explaining how RMRK works. https://www.crowdcast.io/e/metaverse1/register
Bill Laboon's 20-lecture "Blockchain Fundamentals" course has moved to YouTube. The Matrix channel remains open for chatting about it. https://mooc.web3.foundation/
If you missed Bill’s conversation with Zoe Meckbach about Polkadot governance, you can watch it here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/polkadot-conversations-session3
There has been quite a bit of activity on Web3 Foundation's Open Grants Program, even during the break. It has now reached the 200 Grants Milestone https://medium.com/web3foundation/web3-foundation-grants-program-funds-over-200-projects-ff499f438820. If you are interested in building on Polkadot, check out the grants program here: https://github.com/w3f/Open-Grants-Program/
Alexandra Heller produced an interesting thread of Polkadot "by the numbers", showing stats since it launched this year. https://twitter.com/alxheller/status/1343667911567810561
The Polkadot Network blog released a roundup of what happened to Polkadot in 2020. It's been a busy year. https://polkadot.network/polkadot-2020-roundup/
A bounty for updating the Polkadot brand has been approved. https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Fcc1-1.polkadot.network#/bounties
A multi-sig curator has been been selected for this Polkadot branding bounty. The multi-sig includes several people from the Polkadot ecosystem. https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Fcc1-1.polkadot.network#/bounties
Decrypt has a good summary of the Polkadot rebrand proposal - https://decrypt.co/53325/leading-design-agency-koto-is-giving-polkadot-a-rebrand
Some substantial slashing occurred for "LLC"-identified validators in era 215. https://polkadot.js.org/apps/#/staking/slashes
Four additional bootnodes have been added to the Polkadot and Kusama chain specs. https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/pull/2204
A Treasury proposal has been made to sponsor a 30-day Substrate / Polkadot hackathon. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/motion/52
OnFinality has issued a Treasury proposal for high-performance public infrastructure. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/motion/53
Check out these neat Polkadot animations done by a community member! https://twitter.com/JacopoDeGiu_/status/1347238584449961987
The current referendum is failing by ~ 3.1 million DOT to 10 DOT (weighted). https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referendum/14
On 13 Jan, Bruno Škvorc will be presenting the state of NFTs on Kusama and explaining how RMRK works. https://www.crowdcast.io/e/metaverse1/register
P Tips & Tricks
If you are interested in gathering data on your staking rewards over a particular time period (for Polkadot or Kusama), Jonas's "Staking Rewards Collector" is very useful. https://github.com/w3f/staking-rewards-collector
The new Validator Stats script can tell you (among other things!) the lowest nominator to get into the active set. Very useful for staking! https://github.com/w3f/validator-stats In case you don't want to run the script, this era's lowest nominator was ~ 61 DOT.
There have been lots of improvements to the Polkadot{.js} extension - Thibaut Sardan explains them here: https://medium.com/polkadot-network/polkadot-js-extension-release-update-3b0d2d87edb8
The call for proposals for Polkadot Decoded 2021 has begun! If you are interested in giving a talk, please see here: http://bit.ly/0x3i3h8T6
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