DOT Wud it Take? (August 4th to August 10th)

What is up, my friends!

As mentioned in last week’s editorial, the markets turned red as the US government moved a good amount of Bitcoin around. Well, the market slump continued into the weekend, fueled by fears related to the situation with the BOJ rate hike and US recession indicators being triggered.

This culminated on Monday, with the US stock market witnessing around $1.9 trillion wiped out. For some, one key question remains: What would it take to turn things around?

Now turning to the Polkadot ecosystem, we can pose a similar question: What would it take to turn things around for the good of the ecosystem? This could likely center around OpenGov, which empowers the community to have their voices heard in the world’s largest DAO.

Then we have builders focused on shipping products that appeal to both new and existing users. There are also builders in the ecosystem working to turn things around for traditional industries. Additionally, some are laying the foundations for wider adoption, and perhaps a fresh perspective could be beneficial.

In this week’s top story, we will take a deeper look at what has been happening to turn things around. As many readers may already be aware, WagMedia provides opportunities for people to get involved for the good of the ecosystem by creating content. We will also cover the recent content that is being generated in this week’s featured update.

Even this very newsletter you’re reading is made possible by the Wag community, which gets involved by sharing news via the Finders Program and earning a writing spot to deliver compelling stories and news updates.

So, without further ado, let’s turn to this week’s stories, followed by a summary of the news from our Finders Program.

Dodow, Chief Editor

Top Story of the Week - Wud is Going On?

Written by yay.oi

WUD morning comrades! How’s it flapping? While market conditions tested the common investor this week, the Gavun Wud personality cult learned a thing or two about the riziliuns of cumunitee. Whether it be the uniting force of a culd wun, or the common goal of flapping the disembodied head of your founder and chief architect into a KusBoost, the power of community can get us through the tough times, and help us turn things around.

While the dynamics of memecoin speculation has continued to shift over the years, the pre/post 2024 Bitcoin halving era is marked by the crypto-casino narrative. Whether it be a well-timed trade that coincides with an Elon Musk tweet, or getting in early to one of the 1.4% Solana Pump.fun launchpad tokens that manages to make it to launch, one of memecoin’s biggest mainstream draw-cards is the miniscule chance of striking it rich.

Scams, rug-pulls, and general failures aside, every now and then, a project will defy the odds and succeed, often minting millionaires in the process. While luck plays a large role in this, one defining factor that has led to the success of many memecoins is a strong community.

The community of one of 2024’s success stories Dogwifhat, for example, donated over $690K to display their beloved pup’s face on the Las Vegas Sphere. Perhaps it’s an alternative funding model that the Polkadot marketing maxis could consider.

Nonetheless, the mix of humor, popular iconography, gambling, and community, results in the broad mainstream appeal of memecoins, and in turn can be a strong driver of blockchain adoption. Recognizing this, the Polkadot community began to make some collective efforts to try and capitalize on the potential memecoins could bring to the network early in 2024.

Gavun Wud, fownder and cheef arkitukt of Polkadot landed on the scene in April this year with a mission to Mak Polkadut Gud Agan. With his hilarious one-liners such as, I maede etherium az a tec demmo, the project gained traction quite quickly. That was, until Gavun unveiled his spechuh suhpriz.

Of course, the hints were there all along. After reaching 100 Telegram followers, the dev announced his departure from the project, and that he was handing it over to the community. While there was panic that this may be a rug-pull, he stayed true to his word, and handed over ~3.4% of the WUD supply to the new volunteer project leaders, who hit the ground running and showed they have wut it taeks to turn sentiment around.

The project flourished under its new management, reaching its peak with the launch of an addictive Flappy Bird clone called Flappy Wud. The iconic noggin of Gavun features prominently, along with voice acting by The Kusamarian’s Jay Chrawwna and someone who sounds suspiciously similar to the legiet Gavin Wood himself.

While high-score and NFT campaigns were able to boost player numbers temporarily, the initial buzz of the project seemed to be dying down. But the project leaders had been quietly working on a plan to booost teh comyunitee even further.

The first hint was a Hydration referendum to establish WUD as a sufficient asset, meaning that 20K WUD would be enough Existential Deposit to maintain a Hydration wallet address. Next came a new Tanssi Let’s Forkin’ Dance campaign to draw in new users. Finally, to keep the new users hanging around, came a dynamic airdrop campaign for Flappy Wud to spredd teh WUD to evrywun, in real-time.

Coincidentally, the timing was perfect amid market hysteria over a BOJ rate hike and US recession fears; what better distraction than to flap Gavun Wood to earn WUD? The campaign saw a massive increase in X followers, Telegram members, and WUD holders. Even better for Hydration, it also gave a MASSIVE BOOST to the network, accounting for 70% of new wallet holders and 58% of transactions, driving all-time-high traffic. We’re evun nao, you kepd us fuly hyjratd and we maed u verrry WUDratd. Yur welcum!

While these achievements are commendable, they do not capitalize on our fownder’s ultimate strengths, coodin and bilding! Unfulfilled by the inevitable zero-sum endgame of traditional memecoin projects, this week Gavun Wud and Polka-sibling BEEFY announced their plans to launch their own appchains, backed by Tanssi infrastructure.

Gavun Wud’s initial plan is to use Tanssi infrastructure to increase WUD token utility and add new features to Flappy Wud. BEEFY has its sights on creating the BEEFYverse, a much larger ecosystem with governance, new game pallets and cross-chain interoperability to integrate DeFi and NFT features.

As Gavun Wud and BEEFY are innovating and setting the bar higher for Polkadot memecoin projects, more developments are being made to get projects off the ground. Hydrations’s Jakub Panik demonstrated NoFunOnPolkadot, an upcoming memepad platform that can mint a token on Asset Hub and launch a liquidity pool in less than two minutes.

Too broke to fund your own liquidity pool? No worries, inspired by Solana’s Pump.fun, with just 0.5 DOT you can launch a token on Polkadot’s Only.Fun. When the market cap reaches USD$6000, liquidity is deposited on Hydration and burned.

Solutions such as these that break down technological barriers, have played a major role in the massive number of memecoin projects on Solana this year. Launching a token has become so easy that anyone, literally anyone, can do it.

Memecoins are great for building awareness, community, liquidity, trading volume, and drawing in new users. And while they capture attention, the underlying blockchain technology that supports them also serves as the foundation for enterprise solutions that provide robust performance for continued growth.

Polkadot has builders that cater to enterprises, including Energy Web, Aventus, OriginTrail, Kilt, and more. This week Aventus released some promising data from their study conducted with Airport Perishables Handling (APH) at Heathrow Airport. They found that integrating Web3 solutions with airport cargo handling led to significant reductions in errors, documentation, stock updates, and loading times, resulting in an overall 7% reduction in costs to airlines.

While London’s major airport is set to benefit from a Web3 boost in efficiency and cost effectiveness, efforts in the financial district are aiming to build Polkadot awareness. For the next 5.5 months, digital billboards will be running a series of animated Polkadot content targeting finance, asset management, business management and creative professionals.

Raising awareness increases opportunities, but having boots on the ground is crucial for capitalizing on them. Hot on the tails of another CultureDot awareness campaign in New York, locals Transistor have just received a Decentralized Futures grant. They will be paving the way in US Polkadot ecosystem business development.

Transistor co-founder Peter Mauric started out his career with Parity, playing an instrumental role in onboarding some of the largest Polkadot ecosystem projects. While Chief Strategy Officer Yoon Kim has a background in Wall Street tech investment, bringing a wealth of financial expertise and connections in traditional finance.

In the meantime, another Decentralized Futures grant recipient, Distractive, has been busy giving the Polkadot website a massive glow-up. With new branding, and simplified messaging for newcomers to the ecosystem, it also features a decentralized job board and events page. This is just the start, they have much more planned for the future.

Since the release of the Polkadot H1 Treasury Report, efforts have been made to turn around spending. Part of this has resulted in the defunding of the Marketing Bounty with the AMI Bounty looking to fall victim too. So, we are left to consider whether to try to replace these initiatives or focus on a new approach.

In his recently successful Wish for Change referendum, Giotto attempted to enshrine the beginning of Polkadot marketing strategy on-chain. He defined it as a campaign to create as much awareness as possible to crypto end users which will in turn signal VCs and investors to get on board. While it has received criticisms for a lack of true community consensus, it is a basic vision that can be built upon.

In a week of market turmoil, we saw glimpses of hope with a resilient memecoin community, builders that keep building, and the on-going efforts of Polkadot governance to work together to achieve our objectives. As the world’s largest DAO, our community dynamics can differ from other blockchains.

DOT holders are incentivized to secure the network by staking, and improve the network through governance. The protocol itself promotes the engagement of the community in governance to ensure its growth and evolution. However, the nature of politics can often lead to division in a community.

Community led projects such as Gavun Wud offer some entertainment and respite from the drama of governance while drawing in new users and promoting engagement with the ecosystem. While some are eagerly awaiting JUMazin game-changing ecosystem developments, these things take time. In the meantime, there needs to be enough activity in the ecosystem to keep people engaged.

Of course, the fate of Polkadot does not rest on Gavun Wud maintaining ecosystem engagement while it develops into something much greater. However, it did give an example of the impact a small optimistic community led project can defy market expectations and promote growth even when it’s least expected.

So, is the sum of efforts between parachains, DAOs, memecoins, dApps and ecosystem agents enough to achieve the levels of growth and engagement necessary to sustain the ecosystem? The jury is out, however the intent of the community is clear: everyone is hoping to turn things around for the benefit of the Polkadot ecosystem.

Featured Update - Gud Content!

Written by Sanchez

WagMedia herds creators seeking opportunities to showcase their talents, shepherding them to produce Gud Content for the Polkadot ecosystem. Curated content is appraised, with feedback often provided and awards shared openly.

The introduction of the Bounty Hub has further streamlined this process, by incentivising content related to the latest trends and narratives about industry and ecosystem updates, thus enhancing awareness. For instance, the coverage of Polkadot Decoded in July demonstrates this well, with creators going through hours of talks to pinpoint highlights from the conference.

Content can be Gud, but isn’t so much if it isn’t seen. To address this, WagMedia encourages creators to improve their approach by adopting better hooks for their content. This is especially noticeable through the engagement weighting criteria in select bounties from the Bounty Hub.

July began with the 26th bounty from the Bounty Hub, which challenged creators to explore Polkadot's current economics and recent developments. This task was based on a comprehensive post in the Polkadot Forum and offered rewards of up to $120, depending on the quality of the content.

For the 26th bounty, Gbaci crafted an excellent and detailed X post in which he simplified the process of refilling the treasury from inflation and outlined steps to make the treasury more sustainable. For his efforts, Gbaci was awarded 17.8 DOT.

Pablo also tackled the 26th bounty by discussing the Runway Misconception and specific economic upgrades of the Polkadot treasury, earning a reward of 17 DOT. Other notables came from Pitcoin's analysis of the Financial Health of the Polkadot Treasury, Mikewill's Polkadot Treasury Economics, and Prophet's Ensuring Sustainable Treasury, awarded 10, 7, and 7.5 DOT, respectively.

The next bounty, the 27th necessitated an interpretation of a high-level Nearly-Optimal Merkle Trees (NOMT) interview with Robert Habermeier, co-founder of Polkadot, conducted by the Kusamarian. Rewards of up to $150 per creator were offered.

Prophet was the first creator off the block, discussing NOMT, its performance boosts, and its benefits to parachains, and was rewarded with 8 DOT. Next came creations from Turing Machine, Gbaci, Mikewill, and Gigs, further dissecting and simplifying the interview. Gbaci received the highest rewards with 22.3 DOT, compared to 7 for Turing, 5.5 for Mike and 4.5 for Gigs.

With the start of Polkadot Decoded, two bounties for the event were set on the 10th of July. The first, the 28th bounty, required rapid delivery and offered rewards as much as $150 with an 80% engagement weight, for highlights from the event. Whereas the 29th bounty required more in-depth details from the event.

For the 28th bounty, Daureen was rewarded with 9.5 DOT for a succinct thread highlighting the Polkadot app, the Nova Wallet debit cards, unified UX, and the Polkadot Ledger app. Other creators also highlighted the Nova Wallet debit card and the Polkadot app, with CMosh receiving 6.1 DOT and Mikewell receiving 4.8 DOT for their submissions.

Gbaci earned the highest reward of 34 DOT for the second Polkadot Decoded bounty (29th bounty) which had rewards as high as $200 with a 70% engagement weight. He effectively analyzed the keynotes from prominent figures such as Dr Gavin Wood, Bjorn Wagner, CEO of Parity, and Fabian Gompf, the CEO of Web3 Foundation.

Other standout creations from the 29th bounty include Maxim's thread, which covered many developments from the event, and Emil Kietzman's take, which focused on the Polkadot Pay app, the Nova debit card, and the new Polkadot Ledger app. Maxim was awarded 22 DOT, while Emil received 21 DOT for their efforts.

Moving on from Polkadot Decoded, the 30th bounty was a flash bounty that requested creators to summarize Gavin's talk at EthCC2024, where he talked about forging truly resilient virtual services with Web3. The bounty, offering rewards up to $50, closed quickly as only two solid submissions were required. Daureen and CMosh managed to pull it off and were rewarded 8.5 and 5.5 DOT, respectively.

This was closely followed up by the 31st bounty, offering creators up to $30 in rewards with a 75% engagement weight for creating witty memes around Origin Trail (OT) and chickens after the OT logo was spotted on Natur Premium chickens.

Pitcoin was awarded 4.1 DOT for TRAC your chicken, 4 DOT went to Turing Machine for Do you know your chicken, and Daureen 3.8 DOT for Origin Trail. Others include CMosh’s A Trail from the Origin and Celestialbeing’s Origin Trail, receiving 3 DOT each.

Bounty 32, also a flash bounty, demanded a summary of the Jam space with Web3 educator Filippo Franchini and Kian Paimani, a coredev on Parity with up to $50 in rewards. As with most recent flash bounties, entries were limited to only two solid submissions. These were received from Daureen, who was awarded 6.3 DOT, and CMosh, who earned 6.1 DOT.

The 33rd bounty asked creators to provide authentic takes from Shawn Trabizi's interview with Teachmedefi, which spanned several topics, including DOT being a software, Blockspace, JAM, and Plaza. Furthermore, creators needed to focus on specific topics from the interview. The bounty provided rewards up to $130 with a 70% engagement rate.

Pitcoin took a first stab at the 33rd bounty, centering on why block quality is more important than the Transaction Per Second (TPS) metric, and received 20 DOT. Gbaci followed with a submission discussing JAM and Polkadot's position in the industry, and was awarded 21 DOT. Subsequent entries included Daureen's Building a Supercomputer and Gigs' submission on a Unified and Decentralised Web3 Asset Pool, earning 10 and 7.8 DOT respectively.

The final bounty from the Bounty Hub for July, the 34th bounty, required a tldr from the End the Grift stream hosted by Alice und Bob. Offering up to $60 as rewards, only two solid submissions were required for this bounty. Daureen, and CMosh tackled this bounty, receiving rewards of 8 and 7 DOT, respectively.

Outside of the Bounty Hub, there was the potential for bigger rewards through monthly retroactive content based on nominations. Gbaci received 80 DOT for his more extensive coverage of the Polkadot Decoded event, which was recognised and praised by Gavin Wood.

Other notable retroactive content include Pablo’s list of live and upcoming upgrades on Polkadot, which reached 56.3k impressions on X and was awarded 60 DOT, and Gbaci's Graypaper interview recap, which was awarded 30 DOT. Additionally, Maxim's Exploring DeFi on Moonbeam received 15 DOT, while Emil Kietzman was awarded 25 DOT for We Want a Polkadot ETF?

Moving on to bounties from ecosystem projects with treasuries at WagMedia, the LAOS bounty centered on creating awareness around the LAOS presale and received entries from Maxim, Celestialbeing, and AmedKarim. The Polimec bounty, on the other hand, revolved around explaining the aim and potential of the proposed Polkadot Growth Initiative (PGI) and received entries from Mikewill, Daureen, Celestialbeing and CMosh.

The flexibility of the Bounty Hub, with its broad coverage and stringent reward criteria, helps ensure quality and effective reach. This creates a progressive environment for creators to shine and earn, while also facilitating effective communications of developments and activities to audiences both within and outside of Polkadot.

Content created around buzzing conferences like Decoded helps highlight important developments around the ecosystem. More focused coverage of interviews like those of Rob and Shawn ensure complex interviews and discussions can be effectively explained to general audiences. Even the memes about the Origin Trail logo on the Natur Premium chicken, recognizes the ongoing efforts of developers within Polkadot.

WagMedia recognizes the importance of cultivating Gud creators and content that help raise awareness and educate people about Polkadot. If you wish, you can start with the finders program to gain a foundational understanding, and some of you may even get the opportunity to write the stories like the one you are now reading from our weekly newsletter. Embrace the Wag–join us!

News from the Finders Program Part 1

Written by yay.oi

• Polkadot's new website by Distractive has launched, featuring new branding, a decentralized jobs board, an events page, and simplified messaging for newcomers to the ecosystem.

• CultureDot's latest Polkadot awareness campaign has launched in the financial districts of London City and Canary Wharf, targeting relevant professionals with a series of 10 second animations on 91 digital billboards in 41 office buildings.

• The Web3 Foundation has awarded a Decentralized Futures grant to Transistor to pave the way for US Polkadot ecosystem business development.

• People Chain is live, you can now set your on-chain identity using the Identity feature on Polkassembly.

• After going all the way to the Remainder Round for their Polimec fundraise, Mandala Chain achieved and accepted 35% of their target. Tokens have been distributed, but bonded PLMC from evaluators will be slashed.

• In Tanssi’s Monthly Newsletter for July, you can catch up on their latest news including their recent collaborations, the Smart EVM feature, and testnet transactions exceeding 2.2M.

• In Phala’s monthly report for July, you can read all about the integration of Nvidia H100 confidential GPUs, Messari’s report, partnerships, events, and more.

• Litentry temporarily paused all features after some errors were detected during their runtime upgrade. Don’t worry, all assets are safe, and things are back to normal now.

• App deployment just got easier on Acurast with CLI, a single command solution.

• With Pull Request #4424 in its final stages, automatic Coretime renewals will be available on Kusama soon.

• Peaq welcomes decentralized VPN and Wi-Fi DePIN NetSepio, who will mint its token natively and build on the Peaq network, while exploring synergies with the rest of the Peaqosystem.

• Ava Protocol joins Tanssi's Let's Forkin Dance campaign.

• Join the Moonbeam Moonrise Points campaign to earn GLMR rewards by completing various Moonbeam ecosystem tasks and climbing the leaderboard.

• Centrifuge is offering a prize pool of USD$125K for their security review competition starting on August 19th.

• In an effort to achieve their vision of true decentralization, Integritee is seeking more collators. You could also receive rewards of up to USD$10K by participating in their bug bounty program.

• After a successful Initial Paranet Offering, Polkabot.AI knowledge miners can now start claiming their TRAC rewards.

• Manta has won Polkadot Parachain Auction 77 with a self-funded bid of 150 DOT.

• In a study conducted at London Heathrow Airport, Aventus found that an overall cost reduction could be made by integrating Web3 solutions into airport cargo handling.

• Nova Wallet continues its multilingual support, now with Polish, Japanese, and French.

• The Parity X account has hinted that we might be hearing a lot more about Polkadot Parachains as a superior Ethereum Rollup solution soon.

• In their monthly report for July, Pendulum showcases the upcoming Vortex Forex DEX with its stablecoin on/off ramp, the Nabla testnet campaign, the integration of Circle’s EURC, and more.

• Two new isolated pools from Acala have launched on Hydration, ACA/DOT and LDOT/DOT, with liquidity provider incentives coming soon.

• Apillon’s NCTR and Dogwifdot’s WIFD have been added to Stellaswap’s XC-transfer feature.

• In their latest upgrade, Stellaswap have enabled one-click swaps, boosted swap speed by 70%, reduced gas fees by 20%, and boosted security by revoking infinite transaction approvals.

News from the Finders Program Part 2

Written by Sanchez

• Daniel Aguilar's Linear collection is live for minting on Kodadot. The collection consists of 64 NFTs.
• Gavun Wud helped Hydration set a new all-time high in transactions processed on the network during their dynamic airdrop, where players flapped to earn Wud tokens. Gavun Wud was responsible for 58% of the transactions and 70% of the accounts created on Hydration during the period of the dynamic airdrop.
• Astar Degens (AD) has proposed two proposals to ensure the DAO’s financial health, efficiency, and future. One proposal aims to reduce monthly dividends for NFT owners to fund other ventures that will benefit the community in the future. The other intends to reallocate unclaimed rewards from the AD dapp staking after four months.
• Dogwifdots is offering a 30% multiplier in WIFD tokens to users who buy the WIFD memecoin and hold it for three months.
• Hydration co-founder Jakub Panik gives a first look at a memecoin launchpad platform to be launched on Hydration. The platform NofunonPolkadot will enable anyone on Polkadot to create memecoins in under 2 minutes.
• GameDAO, to extend their services to Astar, has joined Astar’s dapp staking program and currently has over 17 million ASTR staked.
• Gavun Wud has againcollaborated with the Kusamarian to drop 15 special edition NFTs to players of Flappy Wud. Amongst other conditions, a player must possess a WUD balance greater than 0 and 3000 cumulative points to win one while flapping.
• Season 2 of NFL Rivals is now available on app stores. This season is fully on the Polkadot Network.
• The Big Ballz of Bajun (BBB) from Ajuna is now supported on the Nova Wallet. Players can easily locate the BBB dapp and participate in the game using Nova.
• On the 8th of August, Mythos and Polkadot leapfrogged Ethereum to become the blockchain and L0 with the highest daily NFT sales with over $4.6 million in sales.
• In their newest monthly recap, Unique Network covered their July activities, including participation and attendance badge drops at Polkadot Decoded and EasyA challenges.
• Wish for Change referendum 959 by Giotto has passed. The referendum seeks to switch the direction of the Polkadot marketing strategy towards crypto end users with the expectation that the switch will increase the interest of investors and VCs in the Polkadot ecosystem.
• Nova Wallet includes new governance features such as abstain voting, a prediction timer, and historical referendum data.
• Head ambassador, Leemo, has put forth referendum 1069 requesting a $1000 tip for exposing Michiko Watanabe, the faux HA from Japan.
• Birdo initiated a discussion to hand over the IP and source code of the Polkadot app to the Polkadot Community Foundation, ensuring the app is open source post-launch. The discussion also requested $50k to handle the legal and administrative fees for the app.
• Referendum 1077 requests $59 million DED tokens to fund a targeted marketing campaign for the Korean-speaking community before the Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul. This will, by extension, provide international exposure to the Dotisded project.
• With some coming changes, nomination pool stakers will soon be able to participate in Polkadot governance through OpenGov.
• On the 5th of August, Polkadot Beyond the Chain, a small-scale event, was hosted in London by Leemo and Remy. The event shed light on exciting developments around the ecosystem and featured the likes of Ben McMahon and Chrissy Hill.
• Crust and Xcavate held an X space on the 6th of August, where both teams discussed their new partnership.
• Peaq hosted an X space with 7 DEPIN projects to envision the future of a DEPIN-powered city in 2030 and discuss the steps required to reach that point.
• Polkadot hosted the Decentralized Mic on the 7th of August, with a spotlight on marketing and featured team members from Distractive, Airlyft, Decentered Studios, Polkadot social media and Polkadot at universities.
• OneBlock held Hackathon Workshop 5 on the 10th of August, and it featured an introduction to the Blockchain for Good track, SubConnect and the ins and outs of DEPINs on Polkadot.
• On the 8th of August, Seun Lanlege from Polytope Labs, Filippo Franchini and Bhargrav from the Web3 Foundation discussed trustless bridges, and the conversation centered on Hyperbridge and Snowbridge.
• Sachal from WebZero, Alice und Bob, Angie from the Web3 Foundation and ET90266 together gave a rundown ofBlockchain Symmetry, a 72-hour multi-chain hackathon at the Web3 Summit.

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 Dodow.