Dot is ded Eggshilarating! (March 24th to March 30th)

What is up, my friends!

The Easter long weekend provided an opportunity for many to take a break, indulge with some treats, and gather with friends and family. Some much needed respite given the eggstraordinary first quarter of 2024 we had.

Our WagMedia weekly made its recent return just in time to ensure that you don’t miss on the news of key developments, which include institutional funds with DOT, Agile Core Time on Kusama, the announcement of JAM, the flurry of memecoins, and much more.

Emerging from the depths of a bear market, the quarter has witnessed our ecosystem teams involved in a mixture of shipping, expanding, proposing, rebranding, and securing the last remaining parachain auction slots.

Web3 certainly doesn’t stop, as validators are keeping blockspace going, markets are trading 24/7, users interact on chain anytime, and with OpenGov there’s always something to vote on.

Speaking of OpenGov, the top story this week delves into the situation with the eggshilarating Indy 500 Polkadot treasury proposal, we also cover a few other captivating news items too. Supplementing this is our usual basket of news and events via our finders program.

And if you want to know more about how we keep the hot stories and news flowing, then skip to our feature to discover the treasures that await the journey for our top finders.

Of course wag is about creators too, so chick out a recap on the latest insights as those carrots are dangled in our Bounty Hub.

Whether you're feeling rejuvenated after the break or inspired after you finish reading, why not consider joining us to unleash your creativity.

Without any further delay, tuck into this week's top story, brimming with tasty content.

Dodow, Chief Editor

Top Story of the Week - Indy eggshilarating news!

Written by Sanchez

Hello there, egg-hunter. I hope your Easter was filled with joy and plenty of egg-citing adventures! Over the holiday, the Polkadot ecosystem once again demonstrated its egg-ceptional strength and invaluable community spirit.

It's always exciting to see the community come together and surmount challenges like saving the Indy 500 proposal. Despite some unforeseen difficulties which threatened the participation in the races, the community band together and ensured the continuity of the partnership.

The Indy500 proposal is a marketing proposal which intends to provide a full Polkadot sponsorship for Conor Daly over 3 car races which includes the 2024 Indianapolis 500, NASCAR Truck Series Race, and Nitro Rallycross Race.

An average of 5 million viewers and over 300,000 attendees are present at the Indy 500 races year on year. The cars will be fully wrapped with Polkadot logos and colors and the driver, Conor Daly, will also be serving as a Polkadot ambassador for these events.

The proposal (Ref 514) passed with huge community support, however, the partnership was threatened due to a recent runtime upgrade and UI bug, which stopped requested funds from being paid out.

While a new proposal has been put forth, funding to set up these race cars and pay the race team was required at the time Ref 514 passed. This meant 130k DOT had to be urgently raised, to make up the shortfall.

Well-meaning members of the Polkadot community were asked to temporarily loan their DOT to quickly provide funding and keep the deal alive by sending to this multisig address. The loaned DOT will be returned when funding is received from the new proposal.

So far, over 140k DOT has been amassed and 2 deposits have been made towards preparations for the race with over 75k DOT loaned by Giotto. This speaks hugely of the community within Polkadot, with members putting aside differences and chipping in when there is a need.

A somewhat similar situation which has seen the community also band together is the launch of the DED memecoin. Community members have communicated their displeasure at the reduction of the number of DED tokens being airdropped to DOT holders from 100% to 5% and what has followed has been a bit puzzling.

First was the suspension of the official X handle of DED, and then supreme DED leader, Giotto, went on a rampage, trolling critics and quoting the FDV of DED over the more appropriate metric of current market capitalization.

DED currently is tradeable on HydraDX’s isolated pools and on Polkadex with a market capital of $55 million. Can DED overcome the critics and negative sentiment and turn it around?

Moving on to something less dramatic, Peaq Network announced a significant $15 million raise of funding led by Generative Ventures and Borderless Capitals, to make launching of DePINs on Peaq easier and faster.

The funding round comes before the public sale offering of Peaq and the eventual launch of its mainnet on Polkadot. Peaq is expected to launch in 2024 and the team has teased some exciting updates including the integration with Wormhole, launch of a machine tokenization platform, DePIN accelerator program and more.

More DePIN projects are launching on Peaq including dTelecom,who recently announced moving from Arbitrum to the Peaq Network ahead of its launch. Check out the DePINs already utilizing Peaq,here.

Many folks will make incredible journeys during Easter, and it seems befitting that Pendulum announced the launch of the Spacewalk bridge which enables the seamless transfer of stablecoins and XLM to Polkadot.

The Spacewalk bridge is a trust-minimized bridge between Polkadot and the Stellar Network. This opens the gates for the utilization of native tokenized fiat currencies in DeFi on Polkadot.

It certainly seems to be a compelling DeFi proposition to be able to trustlessly move tokenized fiat currencies from Stellar Network’s compliant, sustainable and scalable market leading platform.

Reflecting on the developments in this past week, not only do we see a variety of promising updates, more importantly we see an active and thriving community that will push the Polkadot Network to even greater heights.

More news and updates around the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems can be found in our regular news sections below.

Becoming a WagMedia Finder: My eggscellent adventure down the Polkadot rabbit hole!

Written by yay.oi

What’s hatchin’ yolks! Spring has sprung, and it’s time to turn over a new leaf. Have you considered joining us at the WagMedia Finders team? It’s like the world’s best easter egg hunt, but you’re rewarded with something much sweeter than chocolate (DOT).

Let me introduce myself. I’m yay.oi and I first stumbled upon WagMedia back in November 2022. Honestly, I didn’t know what awaited me when I first hopped into that Discord server. Content creation was still a total mystery to me, so the Finders crew was the perfect place for me to sharpen my skills and acquire much deeper knowledge of the Polkadot eco.

Learning the ropes takes some time, but the Finders team is all about nurturing fresh talent. Director Dodow is there to guide you every step of the way. Play your cards right, and you’ll be upgraded to a Tier 1 Finder in no time. Impress the right people and you may be invited to complete some special tasks.

Did I get your rabbit tail twitching? Here’s a basket of top tips to be the become a top-notch finder:

Find your sources. The large majority of your finds will be from X, so make sure you are following the right accounts. You could start with the Polkadot and Kusama parachains, and important Web3 Foundation folk such as Gavin Wood, Bill Laboon, and Filippo Franchini.

Cheat-code? Get some ideas from the X Following list of a well-known finder such as yay.oi.

Check your sources. Before you share something, check your facts. While X is a great resource, sometimes the information might be second-hand. Make sure you burrow a little deeper and read any linked press releases, Medium articles, or official documentation.

Get your formatting right. You won’t be receiving any sweet DOT rewards until your post is formatted correctly:

At the top goes your title, so write “Title:” and add something snappy. On the next line write “Description:” and insert your news summary. After that, paste the original source link(s), and at the bottom you can add some hashtags.

Cashtags are prohibited, and make sure your news is related to the Polkadot ecosystem. For example, plenty of parachains have been dabbling in zkEVM projects and that is totally outside of our scope.

Become a Polkadot ecosystem TL;DR champion! The work of the Finders team is appreciated by the whole WagMedia community. Having comprehensive summaries available of everything going on in the Polkadot world is a valuable source of research for our content creators, and also the very foundation of this WagMedia weekly newsletter.

For me, joining the WagMedia Finders team brought so much more than I could have imagined. As a finder, you delve into every facet of the Polkadot ecosystem building a massive knowledge base along the way.

It has boosted my research and writing skills but also opened the door to contributing to this very WagMedia newsletter. And let’s not forget the amazing guidance of our WagMedia directors who were always there to push me in the right direction. I now feel ready to jump into the world of content-creation.

So, what’s stopping you? Hop on over to our Discord and see what the Finders team is all about.

The Bounty-Hive(Hub)

Written by Turing Machine & Dodow

The Bounty-hub is like a hive, where creators are like bees looking for pollen to produce sweet honey. Led by Goku, the initiative provides creators with the impetus to create content, based on focused topics and trending narratives within the paraverse.

Information on each bounty topic is provided upfront, as well as a detailed brief of what is required from our creators. Requirements can vary from guides, overviews, and opinions/takes; usually presented in the form of X threads.

Additionally, the specification could be for quick delivery due to the time sensitivity of the topic, and we sometimes see rewards being more weighted towards engagement.

Any member of the WagMedia discord is free to participate, although it is recommended that a creator role is obtained in advance by tagging a director. It is worth understanding that your work will be reviewed, and feedback is often provided to help foster growth.

Rewards are not guaranteed, therefore, in order to get them it's generally recommended to focus on producing one good piece of work rather than lots of them.

To date, there have been 8 bounties, and arguably the most populars ones were: Bounty 2, providing a take on Cryptoeconomic based chains over ZK chains? Bounty 4, write-up about Agile Core time arriving on Kusama. Bounty 6, interpretation overview on JAM, and Bounty 7, a dogfooding guide on the new Telenova application.

There has been a reasonable amount of submissions, and following are just a few of the standouts.

Emil’s thread on JAM was very well received from an engagement perspective. Furthermore, it was comprehensive, yet simplified with the ELI5 approach, thus fully deserved the award of 25 DOT.

The complex topic of Coprocessors which had pitted the Cryptoeconomic approach against the Zero Knowledge approach, was masterfully explained by Mikewell. Not only did it receive an impressive award of 25 DOT, it even got a like from Rob Habermeier.

Pablo, who is well known within the community with his stunning image work, once again impresses with 20 DOT rewarded for his JAM bounty entry.

As a new member of the WagMedia discord, it’s quite daunting to get involved. Given my appreciation for the latest technological ideas, I decided to participate in the JAM bounty.

After watching Dr Gavin Wood’s keynote several times, as well as taking the time to learn from some of the entries for the various bounties, I came up with “This JAM sounds Wood”.

To my surprise I was rewarded 20 DOT and received valuable advice on how to improve my style.I didn’t expect to receive this much, hence if a new creator like myself can do it, then why not give it a try.

You could also try the finders program first, like how yay.oi and most of us started. What’re waiting for, make your way to the hivenow, which is buzzing with delights!

General News basket

Written by Gigs

• Kanary hosts its airdrop campaign on Zealy.
• DOTins announces a partnership with Jam memecoin.
• PINK and Moonbeam's xcPINK lists on Nova wallet.
• An anonymous bidder wins Kusama Auction #135 with a self-funded bid of 210 KSM.
• Moonbeam Network introduces 10 powerful tools to promote innovation in its ecosystem.
• Nova Wallet provides support for DED tokens on HydraDX, allowing users to manage their tokens using the Nova Wallet app.
• In-app purchases of new tokens like HDX are now available on Nova Wallet as it partners with on-ramp provider Banx.
• Polkadot Wiki has added a new page discussing Agile Coretime.
• Integritee launches on the Paseo network, Polkadot's new Testnet, replacing Rocco.
• Parity Tech releases runtime updates on Polkadot and Kusama, focusing on Snowbridge and Agile Coretime improvements.

NFT & DEFI hunting News

Written by Gigs

• Unique Network hosts a second NFT quiz to mark its NFT 2.0 journal launch, with prizes for winners.
• Evrloot partners with PINK to conduct the PINK VILLA auction.
• JAM token minting, facilitated by DOTins, commences.
• HydraDX lists DED.
• Spacewalk Bridge goes live on Pendulum, letting users to bridge assets like XLM with transaction fees paid in PEN.
• Bifrost drops an update on PINK distribution.

Carrot(er) building Governance News

Written by Gigs

• Novasama Technologies requests funding of over 45K DOT for a period of six months for the research and development of Telenova, a Telegram-integrated Polkadot wallet.
• A new Polkadot referendum,ref #616, was submitted to crowdloan DOT for the Indy500 sponsorship.
• Referendum Analytics on Polkassembly launches, enabling access to OpenGov and Gov1 data for all partner networks.
• Bill Laboon, director of Education and Governance Initiatives at the Web3 Foundation, presented a proposal to register Billcoins as an XCM asset (XC-20) on the Shiden Network.
• Polkadex put forward a referendum for voting by its community to integrate its governance features into the Novawallet app.

Event gathering News

Written by Turing Machine

• The Game is on at The Kusamarian, participants from Scytale Digital x Mythical Games Gaming Academy joined for an interactive AMA on 27th of March.
• Due to unforeseen circumstances, the scheduled KuCoin AMA with Velocity lab's co-founder, Nicolas Arevalo, scheduled for this week has been postponed.
• Hyperbridge is taking its steps to build its community, the first AMA to get to know the team and the planned roadmap, was held on March 28th.
• Bifrost’s Product Manager, Tyrone, gave us a unique look at the LST leverage engine associated with the new staking strategy feature, the session was hosted by Polkaworld on March 28th.
• Polkaworld will host Decoding Polkadot 2.0 on 5th of April, during the Hong Kong Web3 Festival.
• Ajuna's weekly AMA on Discord was not held this week, it is next scheduled for April 4th.
• Exciting weeks in Austin from April 15th to May 6th! The Polkadot Hackathon will take place in Texas for the North America Edition.
• The Phala Network’s Spanish community organized an online meet up on 30th of March to discuss the most important progress of the last month.

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.

Awesome cover art created by aemonk.