BangDOT! (March 10th to March 16th)

What is up, my friends!

This past week was all about the Polkadot Developers conference, also known as Sub0, held in Bangkok, Thailand.

While many gigabrains at the event were banging out announcement after announcement, the WagMedia discord was busy sharing all this alpha via our finders program.

A big shoutout goes to Alice und Bob for his live reporting on X, and also to The Kusamarian for providing us with daily sights and sounds ensuring the key messages were captured.

Top finders who have made it to the Secret Finders channel(s) were brimming with excitement, ready to cover the mind-blowing news coming out of the event in this week’s newsletter.

Therefore, this week, we present a double top story feature on the event. Hopefully, our fresh takes will keep you excited as we get into Dr Wood’s keynote, as well as present some of the latest application features from our ecosystem builders.

We just can’t stop banging on about dot! As per usual, we’ll provide a recap of all the recent Polkadot news and events uncovered by our Finders, conveniently summarized in the news sections of this newsletter.

Now, let’s move on to our double feature.

Dodow, Chief Editor

Top Story of the Week - Over the JAM

Written by yay.oi

Sawasdee Krap Wag Fam! This week’s top news comes from the City of Angels in the Land of Smiles, Bangkok, where the Sub0 Developer conference gathered the brightest minds from across the Polka-sphere. This is the 6th Sub0 conference and the first Asian edition.

So, what is Sub0 all about? It’s a deep dive into Web3 development focused on the Polkadot ecosystem, Substrate, and blockchain technologies.

This year’s organizers, Decentered Studio (recipient of the Decentralized Futures Grant), set an audience target of 50% new developers from outside the Polkadot ecosystem in an effort to grow our developer pool and industry presence.

As a developer focused conference, talks can get a little code-heavy. For the less tech-minded Polkadot enthusiast, there is a more accessible option (don’t miss Polkadot DecoDED in Brussels degens).

While Polkadot Europe 2023 missed out, Sub0 Asia 2024 was lucky enough to have our founder and chief architect Gavin Wood deliver a keynote. Gav’s Sub0 keynotes aren’t just informative, they also offer a glimpse into the future of Polkadot.

In his inaugural keynote at Sub0 Berlin 2019, Gav laid the foundation for Polkadot’s future. The core message was that strong community governance is crucial to the continuous valuable evolution of Polkadot. So, when he presents a bold new vision, he always reiterates that the Polkadot community has the final say in turning it into reality.

In the spirit of valuable evolution, this year’s keynote marked a dramatic shift from the ideas presented in 2022.

2022’s keynote emphasized that the relay chain, as a security chain, should only be used for its primary purpose of validating the network. Other functions should be moved off the relay chain and onto regular or common good parachains.

Fast forward two years and a lot has changed, the relay chain has infinitely more potential yet it’s being underutilized. The solution named JAM chain by Gav, represents a significant upgrade that will increase efficiency and speed, whilst maximizing the utilization of valuable Polkadot Core resources.

WHY JAM?

The Polkadot Relay Chain was built with the sole purpose of validating state transitions on the parachains. Upon building the Relay Chain it became evident that due to its flexibility, it could accommodate a much broader range of use cases.

The imminent introduction of Agile Coretime will offer the flexibility of how Polkadot core resources are procured. Jam will offer the flexibility of how core resources are used.

JAM or JAM chain would allow for more complex computations and processing directly on the Relay Chain. It introduces modular components called Services which are designed to:

- perform specific tasks or computations

- update the shared state of the JAM Chain

- and transfer tokens between services.

Services are permissionless, meaning that anyone can create them. The only limitation being that creating a Service comes with a cost, and the more complex the service the more costly it will be.

A couple of examples that Gav gave of the first Services on the JAM Chain are: a Service building Service, which enables the creation of new Services; and the Parachains Service, which would essentially contain the functions of Polkadot 1.0 in its entirety.

Effectively, Polkadot 1.0 becomes just one module amongst a constantly evolving ecosystem of permissionless modules.

COULD THE JAM CHAIN HANDLE THAT MANY TRANSACTIONS?

In a first of its kind, JAM chain would be transactionless. Instead of transactions, Work Packages comprising of a bundle of computations and actions are sent to a Service, which are then processed by the Polkadot Cores to produce the desired outcome on the JAM chain.

By streamlining computations and actions in this way, the result is faster processing and reduced congestion. Additionally, Jam will be based on PolkaVM, a refinement of RISK V ISA which offers simplicity, security, and exceptional performance.

JAM, combined with Agile Coretime, will dramatically improve accessibility to the Polkadot ecosystem. New projects will easily be able to procure the Core resources they need, for as long as they need. They can tap into existing Services and tailor make new Services on the JAM chain to suit their needs, all while enjoying blazing fast speeds.

For a deeper dive into the technicalities of JAM, take a look at the JAM RFC, and Gavin’s keynote video. Alice und Bob, and Cris also provide great summaries of Gavin’s keynote.

If your mind has been blown away and you need some questions answered then Filippo Franchini from the Web3 Foundation has got you covered. Check out the Polkadot AMA Special - JAM for Normies on Wednesday, March 20 at 13:30 UTC.

Sub0 was so much more than a keynote, let me pass the mic to Sanchez for a roundup of some more big developments.

Top Story of the Week - Sub Features

Written by Sanchez

A common narrative often used with Polkadot is the complexity of its first wallet, the Polkadot JS wallet. This is frequently and unfairly used in comparisons between Polkadot and other ecosystems.

While this was a pain point a couple of years ago, developing teams on Polkadot have built standard and easy-to-use wallets like Nova Wallet for mobile, Talisman for desktop, and Subwallet for mobile and desktop. With a massive focus on the UX and making the complicated look easy, we could say that these teams have been quite successful.

At the just concluded Sub0, held in Bangkok, the team at Novasama Technologies announced the launch of Telenova. Telenova is a Polkadot wallet built into Telegram, which allows onboarding in less than 1 minute. Users can use this to send, receive, and manage token assets. Transfers can be made to user contacts and wallet addresses, making it a smooth experience to onboard many users with support for stablecoins expected soon.

Telenova effectively abstracts the complexities associated with creating a wallet and conducting token transactions, offering a user experience that is as straightforward as possible. It would be interesting to see if it can be integrated with dapps similar to what Nova Wallet currently does, potentially a game changer for the Polkadot ecosystem.

Similarly, at Sub0, Bifrost announced the launch of Loopstake, a leverage staking protocol on Polkadot. Leverage staking is a strategy for amplifying staking rewards utilizing liquid staking tokens (LST) on lending platforms. Users can use a maximum of 4X leverage to boost their staking rewards according to their appetite for risk.

Leverage staking is already possible on Polkadot but must be conducted manually. This involves numerous transactions and cross-chain transfers between the lending platform and Bifrost, which provides the liquid staking tokens via its Staking Liquidity Protocol (SLP).

Loopstake packages all of the manual transactions into one, making the whole process of leverage staking simple. Taking a cue from the hype around Ethereum LSTs with a market capital of $57.04 Billion, leverage staking with LSTs can help activate the DeFi ecosystem in Polkadot.

Sub0 also featured demos showcasing the products being built by different teams. Following is a limited selection.

The team building Bagpipesshowed a demo of their drag-and-drop workflow builder, allowing the creation and composition of custom XCM-powered cross-chain dapps with no code. The team received funding from the treasury in December last year and is building out Bagpipes to make cross-chain interactions on Polkadot user-friendly.

Subwallet announced the launch of a swap feature on their wallet interface, allowing seamless native and cross-chain token swaps right in the wallet. Simple in wallet swaps from DOT to ETH and back and more, with this feature launching in just over a week.

Zeeve also demoed their Polkadot parachain management platform which provides analytics and a full stack tool kit for parachains.

While Sub0 featured a lot of demos and launches, follow through with our news sections for many of the other developments around the Polkadot ecosystem in the past week.

General News

Written by Gigs

• Energy WebX unleashes its worker nodes to celebrate the achievement of 2 million EWT on-chain.
• To infinity and beyond! A seven-member Polkadot Social Media Editorial Board was inaugurated to expand the ecosystem's social media presence and community collaboration.
• Subwallet launched a Grill campaign with an 80k SUB prize pool for participants.
• Phala Network partnered with Code4Arena to host a smart contract audit competition worth 60,500 USD, with rewards for every legitimate finding.
• Polimec introduced a new block explorer that allows users to access real-time and historical data.
• Phala integrates with Tanssi to bring its trustless off-chain computing infrastructure into the Dancebox Testnet.
• Mandala Chain wins the 64th Polkadot Parachain Auction with a bid of around 124k DOT.
• Introducing Telenova, a proposed Nova Wallet integration with Telegram that will enable the transfer of DOT and other assets on Polkadot through telegram.
• A BEEFY technical announcement was released during the week.
• Polkadot Wiki undergoes a makeover with captivating storytelling images created by illustrator Dima Moiseenko.
• Acurast joins the Peaq ecosystem, enabling Peaq ecosystem DePINs with decentralized cloud computing and oracle infrastructure.
• Subwallet has introduced a SWAP feature that will allow users to exchange their favourite tokens on the app.
• Ink! v5 is released, providing significant security enhancements.
• The Web3 Foundation plans to shut down the W3F register on April 1.
• Karura to extend a slot on Kusama following its 130 KSM winning bid.
• Destore joins InvArch dApp staking, allowing users to stake their VARCH tokens in support of the project that uses hybrid NFTs to incorporate RWAs into a Web3 Shopify experience.

NFT News

Written by Turing Machine

• As part of the NFTs 2.0 CodeCraft Grant Fund, Unique Network announced a $10,000 bounty to develop a mobile game.
• The NFTs cross-chain Proof Of Concept by Unique Network has been concluded, the team has now introduced an NFT Think Tank to discover new business opportunities and go-to-market strategies.
• Unique Network and Acala announced a collaboration to bring Acala NFTs to the Unique marketplace.
• LAOS Network updated its roadmap, a public sale followed by the Token Generation Event is expected in May.
• The Eduardo Crivellari's generative art NFT collection “Convergente” has been dropped on Kodadot.
• LAOS Network is now accepting grant applications for projects that build on their platform or help enhance community engagement.
• BEEFY is not “just” about consensus, the memecoin has been born with its BULLRUN game expected soon.
• MoonFit are set to launch oMFG to its testnet after a snapshot scheduled on 20 March, this will translate to an airdrop of the MFG governance token on its mainnet. Additionally, look out for their PINK Bounty Spin, where a prize pool of 2M PINK tokens is up for grabs.
• Expect top-notch lore and content as our very own WagMedia legend, Pnin, officially joins the Evrloot team as a writer.

DEFI News

Written by Turing Machine

• Bifrost launches Loop Stake, leverage your stake without needing to repeat the lend, borrow, mint steps in just one click. Available for DOT and KSM, please be aware of the potential risk.
• Polkadex releases its Hestia update, which brings “cexy” improvements to the UIX, liquidity mining, and trading fees.
• You can now do dollar cost average investing on Moonbeam Network via Mean Finance.
• Following the HRMP cross-chain channel opening between Integritee Network and Basilisk, the KSM/TEER pair is now available to trade on Snek Swap.
• Beamswap's February monthly recap covers the PINK allocation proposal, its new yield booster feature, and improvements to its V3 liquidity UI/UX.
• Parallel Finance’s oracle appears to have been compromised this past week, It allowed a hacker to withdraw an equivalent value that was greater than the original lending position. This is based on on-chain data, as there has been no official communication from the team.
• There have been murmurs of the Parallel issue causing some unavailability of withdrawing USDT from Binance through the Asset-hub.

Governance News

Written by Gigs

• Talisman submitted a Unified Retroactive Proposal #2 for funding to improve user experience, adoption, and security on Talisman wallet and Talisman Portal.
• The Decentralised Future of Business Development for Polkadot (Ref #506) proposal which has passed, requested 50K DOT to source, vet, and place five top-tier business executives into the program.
• A proposal was released and passed by HydraDX to approve runtime upgrades for v24.0.0 such as permissionless account registration, EVM account binding, and EVM fees in other currencies.
• Pendulum proposes to fund LP rewards for PEN/DOT and PEN/GLMR pairs on Zenlink for a 3 month period.
• Polimec Governance integrates with Polkassembly and is now part of the Polkassembly portal.

Events News

Written by Gigs

• Only a handful of events were hosted by projects in the Polkadot ecosystem, as most teams were at Sub0 during the week.
• Acalaheld a community call on March 15 to discuss the details of its Ambassador Programme.
• Crust Network hosted a Telegram community call on March 15 discussing updates such as its partnership with PINK.
• Mark your calendar for DePIN 2049 on April 18.

That is all for this week. If you enjoyed the newsletter, please share it. You can subscribe on Substack to receive an email when next week's edition is ready. And if you're participating in creator staking on Subsocial, you can interact to increase your rewards — perhaps a good two-for-one deal by providing feedback or comments.

Dig the awesome cover art created by aemonk.