DOT do you Know? - Newsletter Edition 75

In this week’s edition:

1. Editorial: Wagtober vibes, Sub0 Media partnership, Showcasing Polkadot, bounty hub update.
2. Top Story - DOT Talks Resilience: Shawn’s Talk, Joe’s comms, and talking blockchain educational series.
3. Featured Update - Report DOT Rollups: Catch up on Messari’s research, as they provide Q3 reports on Phala and Moonbeam.
4. Wag Roundup(s): News from our Finders Program between October 18th to 24th and October 25th to 28th.
5. Extras: Credits and anything else.

Editorial

What is up, my friends!

Since our last newsletter, the October vibe has emerged to be more about Bitcoin dominance and growth of the AI memecoin phenomenon. Additionally, there’s a certain eagerly anticipated launch scrolling short on happy faces.

Meanwhile, over in the Polkadot ecosystem, there are plenty of other metrics to look on favorably from this past week. These include increasing our social Frequency, driving Mythical volume, establishing Mandala balance, ramping Peaq performance, and some Stella burning.

Teams in our ecosystem have been shipping, as there’s quite a bit of news to catch up on. In fact, we even have two lots of news roundups this week. The Wagtober vibe continues, as we are proud to be an official media partner at the upcoming Sub0 conference in Bangkok.

We are looking forward to helping build awareness, reporting on the alpha, and providing coverage of the anticipated great talks showcasing Polkadot. Speaking of showcasing Polkadot, did you catch Shawn Tabrizi’s awesome talk?

In this week’s top story, we shall be unpacking Shawn’s message on resilience through the multicore cloud. We will also take the opportunity to cover other fantastic talks that could help better educate you about Polkadot and Web3.

Our featured update showcases the rollups built on Polkadot, as we review Messari’s latest reports on Phala and Moonbeam. You may recall we featured Messari in our newsletter back in May.

As mentioned last week, we are returning from our recent pause with some positive changes as we go along. This also applies to our bounty hub, where Goku announced that we shall be starting things off with an emphasis on free content creation.

While daunting for some, the approach is viewed as positive for our creators. It will help break up some of the overreliance on needing instructions from our bounty topics. This might encourage some creators to expand their creativity by taking the initiative themselves.

For those who feel a little stuck, check out the newly instated content ideas dump channel. Additionally, the news channels on the WagMedia Discord provide some of the best summaries and simplified information from our Finders Program, which could inspire some great content.

Or how about reading the stories we have lined up this week for some creative inspiration.

Dodow, Chief Editor

Top Story of the Week - DOT Talks Resilience

Written by yay.oi

Aloha amazing Amazonians. It’s time to get your head out of the Polka-clouds, because our very own wunderkind Shawn Tabrizi has been brewing up a storm this week. His speech at the Tech Forum Argentina captured the imagination of the Polkadot community, and now it seems we have a whole new narrative brewing.

He burst onto the stage with a grand statement. Polkadot will be to Web3 what Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to Web2. Like AWS, Polkadot’s mission is to provide a cost-effective, secure, and scalable platform for cloud-based service providers to innovate and grow. The key difference, however, is that Polkadot will do it with resilience.

Polkadot demonstrates resilience through a robust and innovative technology stack that is often steps ahead of its competitors. Polkadot is, according to Shawn, the first multi-core blockchain. Unlike single-core blockchains that struggle with congestion and rising gas prices with the arrival of new resource-hungry apps, Polkadot, with more than one hundred processing cores, can scale with ease.

Furthermore, through parallelization (or data and execution sharding), processing tasks can be split into smaller pieces and executed simultaneously over multiple cores. The result is an increase in throughput and reduction in congestion.

That said, a sharded design brings with it additional security considerations, as each shard, or core, needs to execute securely. However, that is not a concern with Polkadot’s shared security. By design, any application running within the ecosystem inherits the same level of security as Polkadot itself.

Along with security, interoperability between other applications and services in the ecosystem has been integral to the design of Polkadot from the beginning. Furthermore, Polkadot is building trustless bridges to other ecosystems, such as Ethereum, ensuring seamless and secure communications across chains.

Such is the impressive design of Polkadot that, while recent hot narratives form around data availability (DA) solutions, Polkadot already provides its own robust DA layer with no additional costs. In fact, at 42MB/s+ it almost doubles the throughput of dedicated DA chains such as Celestia, and avoids the bottlenecks of fragmented multi-chain solutions.

The all-in-one multi-core solution offered by Polkadot boasts some of the highest speeds in Web3. However, due to its unique next-generation architecture, it is not easily comparable using current metrics. A single-core Polkadot application with 0.5s block time has a throughput of up to 1,500 tps. However, with 100 cores, the Polkadot network in its entirety can achieve a massive 150,000 tps.

Other blockchains often rely on DeFi metrics such as TVL to measure their success, however, Shawn sees Polkadot as much more than a DeFi chain. Shawn envisions the Polkadot Cloud as an all-in-one platform that can handle the Web3 verticals that other blockchains are not even equipped for yet.

Polkadot is equipped to handle all of it while maintaining true decentralization and resilience. With a Nakamoto coefficient of 120, no other L1 blockchain comes close to Polkadot, thanks to its highly decentralized and vast network of independent collators.

In addition, Polkadot has been shown to have the lowest carbon footprint among proof-of-stake L1 networks. This is due to the efficiency of its nominated proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and multi-core architecture.

Now, if you’ve been involved in the Polkadot ecosystem for long enough, not much of what Shawn said would be overly surprising. However, with his rapid-fire delivery and crystal-clear explanations the excitement was infectious, even for those familiar with Polkadot.

Another topic that Shawn touched on was education, such as the university level programs of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy, which prepare our next generations of developers to build on Polkadot. Meanwhile, Informal education through the ecosystem’s community and media outlets fills the gap between those completely new to blockchain technology and established developers.

On that note, make sure you check out Blockshots, an educational web-series by Blockdeep Labs founder and former Parity Director of Delivery Services Gautam Dhameja. Select episodes of the 116 episode series are being rebroadcast by The Kus to expand their reach.

While making exceptional educational content, overseeing the deployment of one of Polkadot’s largest new parachains, and conducting code reviews for Polkadot keep Gautam busy, he does have a few spare moments to drop a hot take or two on X. Just this Sunday, he commended Shawn’s new Polkadot Cloud and Polkadot Hub narrative. Wait… Polkadot Hub?

It seems to be the name that many, such as Shawn Tabrizi and Jay Chrawwna, have begun to use to refer to Polkadot Plaza. Joe Petrowski provided some insights into the projects that will help realize the Plaza vision in the latest episode of TeachMeDefi and a Parity blog post that dropped this week.

One of Joe’s messages in the TeachMeDefi episode is that too much focus is aimed at chains, while not enough is placed on applications. According to Joe, the end-user shouldn’t need to know what chain an application is running on.

The original vision of Polkadot was that the parachains would not need to be visible, but in practice, parachain developers were proud of their work, and wanted everyone to see it. This led to applications often built around a single parachain rather than spanning multiple ones as intended. Joe believes it may be why some early Polkadot projects faced criticism for a suboptimal user experience.

Parity is now working on a chain abstraction project for developers that will remove a lot of the complexity involved in building applications that efficiently span multiple parachains. They are aiming to have a fully stable API with functions that completely abstract individual parachains from developers by Q2 of 2025.

For Ethereum developers, EVM compatibility for the Asset Hub chain is also expected to be implemented by Q2 2025. With a playground on the Westend testnet expected to be ready before year’s end. But that’s not all, while standard Solidity contracts will work out of the box, the Polkadot solution will use PolkaVM. This brings better performance and supports more complex code written in C or Rust.

Another project that Parity is working on will address Shawn’s concern that current metrics aren’t able to truly reflect Polkadot’s strength. They are working on building their own tools and dashboards that can effectively aggregate Polkadot data across the ecosystem. It ensures that data, such as entire network transactions per second, is accessible and verifiable by all.

The new narrative around Polkadot Hub and Polkadot Cloud may have come in time to refresh the community just before the Sub0 Reset developer conference in Bangkok. Hopefully you’ve already applied to speak, because speaker registrations closed on October 16th. Free tickets, however, are still available, and if you are a student, you may qualify for a travel scholarship.

Word on the street is that a new entrant to the ecosystem will be there, and he’s planning to turn DOT around. Make sure you keep an eye out for TOD. You might even get a little souvenir to take home.

WagMedia will be there as an official media partner. So even if you can’t make it in person, stay tuned on our socials to hear all the updates as they happen. You can rely on Wagmedia to provide coverage by the community, curated by the community, backed by OpenGov.

Featured Update - Report DOT Rollups

Written by Dodow & Sanchez

Most of the recent noise on Crypto Twitter has been about an anticipated Uptober, this even had Web3 market intelligence firm Messari asking if it’s really happening. As the month closes, things might actually be starting to take off.

Shifting the focus away from market sentiments, there’s been a lot of activity within the Polkadot ecosystem. While our weekly newsletters offer consistent, comprehensive coverage of these developments, industry leaders like Messari have collaborated with the Polkadot ecosystem to provide quarterly reports on key progress and milestones.

The Messari Polkadot report for Q1 of 2024, which we covered in our May newsletter, showcased the state of several important data points and metrics within the ecosystem. These metrics changed in Q2 as the markets dwindled. The market cap of DOT decreased from $13 billion in Q1 to $8.6 billion in Q2, along with a 25.7% reduction in revenue in DOT.

Despite these challenges, the number of active developers in the Polkadot ecosystem grew from 2100 in Q1 to 2400 in Q2. This growth was driven by development of the Polkadot Ledger app, the introduction of Agile Coretime, Asynchronous Backing and Elastic Scaling as the components of Polkadot 2.0. Additionally, there was the integration of Polkadot and Kusama on Dune analytics.

While we await the Polkadot Q3 report, Messari has released the Q3 reports for Moonbeam and Phala. This is likely for good reason, as these two parachains, or perhaps we should say rollups, have dominated the metrics in Polkadot's Q1 and Q2 reports.

Starting off with Moonbeam, Stellaswap’s massive liquidity incentives drove a 111% increase in TVL, reaching $11.9 million. The stablecoin supply on Moonbeam also rose 16% from Q2, reaching $8.5 million, particularly driven by the 76% increase in USDC supply to $2.7 million.

Moonbeam continues as the most active rollup on Polkadot, boasting 860 developers and the highest number of active addresses. Daily transactions recently fell by 33% to 36,300 partly due to the batch pre-compile function, which enables the batching of multiple transactions into one. However, with the implementation of Asynchronous Backing, transactions now process faster.

Perhaps Messari has been following our newsletter stories, particularly where we cover Moonbeam’s $13 million innovation fund and its direction with Moonrise. They highlight the strategic focus on Gaming and RWA, mentioning key partnerships with Animo Industries and COLB Finance, as well as strategic investment in N3MUS.

Other areas of growth include the strong focus on the Brazil market, featuring a real pegged stablecoin, the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu initiative, and the Tokeniza partnership. More developments in the region are anticipated, especially given the close ties with Tanssi and Sunset Labs. Additionally, progress is being made in DePIN, with Diode offering a platform for secure and private communication.

While the growth in focus areas mentioned is promising, Moonbeam continues to consolidate its value within the Polkadot ecosystem by enabling multi-chain liquidity through Moonbeam Routed Liquidity (MRL). It is heavily utilized by the Hydration rollup and has exceeded $31 million from over 2000 sizable transactions so far.

Messari did recognize Moonbeam’s proposed strategic direction to form further ties with the Ethereum ecosystem, adhering to the Moonrise roadmap. They also managed to reference the Moonrise points campaign, which engages its community and helps maintain Moonbeam’s stature as being the most active rollup on Polkadot.

As Moonbeam routes in builders and users, Phala has been teeing up processing. They have been tirelessly mastering the use cases of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Starting with privacy, they evolved to align with DePIN by providing decentralized computing through Phat contracts. This year, they have further advanced their developments to focus on AI co-processing.

According to the Messari report on Phala for Q3, the network closed the quarter with 66.7 million contract executions, a 2.9 % drop from the 68.7 million executions in Q2. That said, Phala still remains the Polkadot rollup with the highest volume of transactions. Additionally, reflecting the general market outlook, its market cap decreased 7.7% to $99.1 million from Q2.

Addressing sustainability has been part of Phala’s plan for some time. Since 2023, they have steadily switched TEE workers nodes from their canary, Khala. During the quarter, this has led to a 7% increase in delegates on Phala and a 2% decrease in delegators on Khala, resulting in a net growth of 5%. Furthermore, through halving events, they have reduced staking inflation and coupled with the decrease in token value, rewards for delegators have declined by 27%.

The transition to focus on AI began in early April with the introduction of AI-agents and a waitlist for their proof-of-concept AI Agent Wars. This initiative resulted in a modest TVL $8000 from over 60 users. However, the value lies more in progressing the alignment of digital entities on blockchains to be autonomous and intelligent, capable of generating value and onboarding the masses.

Taking things further with AI, Phala recently conducted the first-ever GPU-TEE benchmark study. This study examined how adding TEEs to NVIDIA H100 GPUs, would affect the speed of running large language models (LLMs), such as chatbots. Notably, the benchmark showed only a moderate slowdown in response times, demonstrating that Phala’s solution is ideal for those developing decentralized AI applications.

With the AI sector rapidly developing in Web3, Phala is well positioned. They have partnered with AI-focused protocols such as io.net, Artela, Theoriq and many others to capitalize on mindshare and networked effects.

Messari’s reports on Moonbeam and Phala provide a solid overview and are worth reading. That said, we believe WagMedia can be at least complementary as we aim to offer deeper insights through the research from our Finders Program.

Based on the Q3 reports of the two leading rollups in Polkadot, it is fair to say that the status quo has been maintained from previous quarters. This would most certainly be reflected in the upcoming Polkadot Q3 report when it is issued.

Moving on to Q4, there are signs that this could potentially change. DeFi activity has surged with ongoing incentive programs on Stellaswap and Hydration, Bifrost’s incoming Liquid Wave series and the imminent launch of Hydration’s money market.

Competition among Polkadot rollups for the top performing rollup is heating up. The Neuroweb rollup has been steadily climbing, as OriginTrail leverages it in their quest for a Verifiable Internet for AI. For those who wish to control their own social media data, on-chain users on the Frequency rollup have surpassed 1 million. This number is expected to grow as the migration of MeWe’s 20 million members takes shape.

Enter the Mythos as Mythical’s rollup pushes its migration to Polkadot, achieving 3.5M transactions in July alone. Their latest user account numbers, boosted by an airdrop, speak for themselves. There is no slow down on NFT sales volume, which ranks among the top across all chains in Web3.

On the horizon is the Peaq rollup, the home for DePINs, which already has over 1 million machines lined up for its launch on November 12th. Then there is the Mandala rollup, who is set to serve the fourth-largest population in the world.

It will be interesting to see how the outlook for Polkadot rollups unravels in 2025 with the Polkadot Hub. Check out Parity’s recent blog by Joe Petrowski on plans to make Polkadot even more accessible. Looking further ahead, we can currently only imagine what the limits will be with JAM.

In the meantime, we look forward to the exciting announcements from Sub0 Reset. As official media partners, we will be on hand to report.

Wag Roundup

Written by yay.oi & Sanchez

• After a slight delay to prepare for listing on major exchanges, Peaq has announced November 12th 2024 as its mainnet launch date.
• To enhance governance and empower the community, Moonbeam has launched the Moonbeam Governance Guild. Five delegates on Moonbeam will receive 5 million GLMR of voting power, and five on Moonriver will be delegated 50 thousand MOVR.
• The Hydration DEX is finally integrated into Dexscreener. This comes after the consistent petitions by Gavun Wud. Users can now track the price movements of tokens listed on Hydration on Dexscreener.
• GameDAO is rewarding stakers who have staked to their dApp with 5 million tokens, equivalent to 5% of the total supply of GAME. While the exact reward details are still being worked out, the amount of ASTR tokens staked will play a role.
• Round 2 of Coretime sales are live, and Aventus has become the first team to perform a core renewal. Four other teams missed their chance to renew for 100 DOT in the renewal period, but can still purchase their core on the open market if they wish.
• Blockchain infrastructure automation company Perfuse is the latest recipient of a Web3 Foundation Decentralized Futures grant. Their grant project aims to lower barriers to entry by creating a one-click parachain deployment toolkit for the entire Polkadot ecosystem.
• Bifrost announces Liquid Wave, a three-phase campaign that will explore the new BNC tokenomics. Participants earn WAVE points to share in a BNC prize pool in each phase, and at the end of the campaign they can redeem their points for bbBNC. Raindrops earned in previous Bifrost campaigns can also be converted into WAVE.
• Polkassembly announces the release of a new batch voting feature. Multiple proposals can now be voted on with a single transaction, saving both time and gas fees.
• The Blankos NFT migration to Polkadot is complete, and trading went live on the Mythical Marketplace on October 23rd. To celebrate, Mythical has launched the Blankos OG Loyalty Program. Eligible OGs will gain early access to Mythical game releases, exclusive starter packs, in-game rewards, and more. In addition, Mythical is also submitting a proposal to the Mythos DAO to allocate a reward pool of 2M MYTH to be distributed quarterly to Blankos collectors.
• On October 20th, Polkaworld hosted an X Space with Polimec, inviting members from Xcavate and Archisinal, who are looking to fundraise on Polimec. The space was attended by Richard, the co-founder of Xcavate, and Tim, the co-founder of Archisinal.
• Lucy Coulden hosted a space to gather feedback and questions from the community as the Project Phoenix team of Polkadot Head Ambassadors released their manifesto to reform the ambassador program.
• SUB0 Reset, Polkadot's developer conference, will take place from November 9-11, 2024, in Bangkok. In an AMA co-hosted by Openguild and Joinwebzero, community questions about the conference were addressed.
• In his latest blog post, Joe Petrowski of Parity outlines four projects that they are working on to improve the accessibility of Polkadot for users and developers. They are Ethereum compatibility, protocol consolidation, chain abstraction for developers, and data aggregation and visualization.
• Full Wag Roundup 18th to 24th October.
• Full Wag Roundup 25th to 28th October.

Extras

• Awesome cover art created by Dodow.
• Recently Shared News (missed news from previous weeks) can also be found in the Wag Roundups.
• For all you budding creators out there, don't hesitate any longer – join us now! There are plenty of rewards awaiting your creativity.