Events DOT bring us together (May 26th to June 1st)

What is up, my friends!

The week has been full of events in the Web3 industry calendar, and many of our ecosystem teams were out there doing the rounds. Given the relatively early stages of Web3 adoption, in-person events play a crucial role.

Sometimes, they can be considered thrilling, especially when you're faced with a huge plant dangling over your head. Technology is definitely a strong talking point, particularly when it comes to coffee machines. But in the end, in-person events bring us together, and it can be especially fun over a game of Exiled Racers.

This week's top story provides some highlights of these events, as well as details of the eventful things happening in the Polkadot ecosystem. We shall cover the most talked about thing that happened: Mythical Games’ Pudgy Penguins announcement, which happened live at an event.

With Mythical topping the headlines, you might wonder what’s happening with gaming in Polkadot. Our special report in this week’s edition about Polkadot gaming will help provide some answers.

Our stories this week might also provide creators with some inspiration, especially with bounties from the bounty hub. For instance, the bounty topic on Mythical Games’ Pudgy Penguins was just announced this week. It ends on June 11th and participation can earn you up to $180 worth of DOT.

Speaking of bounties, it’s the end of the month, so here’s a reminder to WagMedia creators to submit nominations for our retroactive rewards initiative. Additionally, there is the followtheDOT bounty that just got announced.

Now onto those eventful stories, and the usual flurry of updates on the week’s news and events.

Dodow, Chief Editor

Top Story of the Week - DOT is Eventful

Written by yay.oi

What’s pudgin´pengus. What a week of crypto huddles and spreading the good vibes. The Polkadot eco’s finest have been reppin’ in Austin, Rome, and Prague, but this week’s MVP has to be Mythical’s John Linden whose massive announcement at Consensus 2024 still has the hive buzzing.

We first got wind of something big coming on Wednesday, and perhaps the biggest hint was a reference to “iconic IPs" in John’s presentation title. Well, he didn’t disappoint, as the iconic IP was none other than Pudgy Penguins, a name very well known not just in the Ethereum ecosystem, where they originate.

The announcement came with a slick animation, and it confirms that Pudgy Penguins will be appearing in Mythical’s new mobile party game next year. This is the first confirmed new release for the upcoming Mythos 2.0 chain secured by Polkadot.

Pudgy Penguins is already much more than a PFP NFT collection, they have made huge inroads into the mainstream market. Since the project was acquired by Luca Netz in 2022, Pudgy Penguins has accumulated 1.4M Instagram followers, 20B views on GIPHY, and sold over 1M toys through major retail agreements with Amazon, Walmart, and now Target.

One million toy sales is a very nice achievement, but what’s even nicer is that each sale is used as an opportunity to seamlessly onboard a new user onto Web3. Each Pudgy Penguin toy comes with a QR code that gives users a loot box of NFT traits to customize their own Pudgy Penguin in the Pudgy World, a Web3 platform powered by ZKSync.

Behind the scenes of the simple email login and QR code scanning process, each user is assigned a wallet, and their customized Pudgy Penguin is minted as a Soulbound non-transferable NFT. Trait NFTs, however, can be traded in the Pudgy World marketplace.

This seamless model of user onboarding is not dissimilar to the approach Mythical already takes with its game NFL Rivals. Adding further to this match made in heaven, Mythical believes the gaming engine that they´ve developed for their upcoming Blankos mobile release will be a perfect fit for the Pudgy Penguins mobile experience.

With their shared vision of unlocking the power of iconic IP to bring Web3 to masses this is looking to become an unstoppable partnership that will bring increased traffic and adoption of Polkadot’s blockchain technology.

The potential for mainstream adoption doesn’t end there, you may remember we reported about Frank McCourt’s bid to bring TikTok to Polkadot a couple of weeks ago. Well, Frank along with members of Project Liberty, Amplica Labs, Frequency, and MeWe were at Consensus 2024 spreading the word about decentralized social media.

It was Frank’s first public appearance since the TikTok announcement, and his message is still loud and clear. He called on the wider community to collectively take action to rescue user data from big platforms, and for everyone to come together to help build a better internet.

Furthermore, it seems like folks may have been listening, because daily transactions on Frequency have spiked and are now the highest on Polkadot. Appearances at events like Consensus can only help boost the awareness.

While the Frequency was out there building its social media communities, Polkadot was busy fostering real world connections. From bonding with parachain teams at the first ever Consensus hackathon, to chilling on a bean bag playing Exiled Racers with Conor Daley, the community vibe was strong. To top it all off, Polkadot and {bash} hosted the official Consensus after party (Bill didn’t go, he was too tired).

The fun didn’t end at Consensus 2024. Across the pond, Web3 Foundation’s Fillipo Franchini educated the Romans about Polkadot while cosplaying as Conor Daly. As well as a Polkadot booth, there were two Polkadot panels at Rome Blockchain Week.

The first panel Polkadot: A World of Opportunities featured Fillipo and ambassadors Irina Karagyaur and Patrizia De Bella. They gave a run-down of opportunities within the Polkadot ecosystem, such as infrastructure (validators and nodes), funding, and real-world applications.

The second discussion Why Choose Polkadot, the panel drew on their personal experiences to give a comprehensive overview of the entire Polkadot ecosystem. They outlined the future roadmap, training, benefits for business, and investors.

There was also representation from the parachains in Rome. Alessandro De Carli from Acurast was there to present about their decentralized cloud computing solutions. Daniyal Ajdadi from Energy Web X explained how their technology can help enterprises with the clean energy transition.

Compared to the beautiful Palazzo Brancaccio in Rome, the setting for ETH Prague was a little more austere and a lot more volatile. That said, there was a full house waiting to Czech out what Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin had to say to each other in their first public meeting since Ethereum Singapore 2019.

Some of the chatter on Twitter suggested that the talk was a little lackluster and barely even mentioned Polkadot. Perhaps they were expecting Vitalik to thank Gavin for building him such a lovely tec demmo and then bend the knee to the only true DAO. He did not do that, but he did start the day with a zinger, “I thought I was the ideas guy and Gav does all the real coding”.

A running theme throughout the day in both Gav’s JAM presentation and his Fireside chat with Vitalik is that the ecosystem can benefit from reduced opinionation. Opinions breed conflict and create unnecessary restrictions.

Gav views the original multichain vision of Polkadot as too opinionated, and aims to resolve that with JAM. He views a lack of opinionation at every level as something that breeds good community, and it is something that Ethereum has had from the outset.

Opinions aren’t all bad for Polkadot, one company has had a massive change of opinion about the best place to launch their project. TVVIN, a platform for the RWA tokenization of precious metals, has realized that Cardano is not ready for them, and have decided to launch on Polkadot.

They will utilize the comprehensive asset management solutions of Asset Hub to launch both their utility token and LBMA-certified gold token. Native USDC and USDT (apparently Cardano doesn’t yet have this) also helped seal the deal, and in the future Polkadot’s trustless bridging will facilitate their omnichain vision.

Speaking of native stablecoins, did you know that you can now request USDC and USDT in treasury proposals? This adds a necessary layer of pricing certainty for proposals involving third-party providers.

Events like those we saw this week take a long time to plan and deal with numerous third parties. It can be tough to organize with the added pressure of potential DOT price movements. This is a welcome change to avoid the necessity of top-up proposals or the obligation to return excess funds due to DOT price movements.

So, cheers to future Polkadot Decoded and free beer proposals being denominated in stablecoins. Be sure to follow the WagMedia weekly for the latest news and updates on upcoming events.

Special Report - Roundup DOT Gaming

Written by Sanchez

Blockchain gaming presents an exciting frontier, offering novel pathways for adopting blockchain technology. However, it currently lags behind traditional gaming regarding quality and gameplay. Games like Grand Theft Auto and FIFA boast captivating scenes and thrilling gameplay, setting a high bar that blockchain games struggle to match.

As it stands, blockchain gaming primarily focuses on ownership of in-game assets and the potential to earn from gameplay rather than on game quality and mechanics. While this approach has been acceptable thus far, developers are increasingly expected to enhance gaming economies, graphics, and gameplay over time.

In the Polkadot ecosystem, a similar evolution is underway. Few of the first games launched on Polkadot talked much about the quality of the games and gameplay. Most focused on providing a rewarding enough economy to keep user attention. Over time, the quality and economies of these games have improved.

The release of the Polkadot Unity SDK is a significant step in actualizing better gaming on Polkadot. Over 29% of traditional games are built and maintained using the Unity game engine. The partnership and availability of the SDK on Polkadot provide over 1.5 million game developers with familiar building tools and support to build their games on Polkadot.

A triple play of the Polkadot Unity SDK, Asynchronous backing, and Coretime are the perfect requirements to provide the ultimate environment for fostering game developments on Polkadot.

Asynchronous backing reduces block times to 6 seconds, allowing the processing of faster transactions and complexities, especially in games. You can read more about Asynchronous backing in our previous newsletter or x article.

When it comes to Coretime, it’s about making the utilization of blockspace more efficient. Complex games can utilize one or more cores as required, marking a substantial upgrade in what game developers can build on Polkadot. This potentially alleviates any concerns about scalability or slow and cost of transactions. Read more about Coretime, here.

The belief that Polkadot is set to make its mark on gaming is centered around Mythical Games, which we covered a couple of weeks back. If you haven’t read already, they have recently announced a partnership with Pudgy Penguins to build a mobile game for millions of players. This adds to their already impressive games catalog that includes NFL Rivals, Nitro Nation, and Blankos, which will bring over 4 million active game players to Polkadot.

Expectations with Mythical Games are high, they are already a leader in this space and was recently voted the top gaming company by Blockchain Gamer. With the future of gaming on Polkadot looking promising, it’s now a good opportunity to explore what currently exists.

Zoombies World, launched in Q3 of 2021, is an NFT card trading game on both the Moonriver and Moonbeam Network. The game allows players to mint, trade, and burn their NFTs with ZOOM tokens set as rewards. Since launch, over 378,433 Zoombie NFTs have been minted by 36,955 Zoombie herders.

Moonscape, from the Seascape Network, is built on Moonbeam, and the game is situated on the Moon. It involves growing your city and weapons and battling other players to conquer the Moon. Players can build and grow their cities and attack other players to progress.

If you like apes and bananas, you’d love the Great Escape. It is available on mobile and desktop and involves apes racing and battling others to collect fruits. The Great Escape is built on Moonbeam, is free to play, and is currently in the closed beta phase. Furthermore, the team will be looking to expand by creating their own chain on Tanssi Network.

Evrloot is a dark fantasy role-playing game with immersive and rewarding experiences. They started on the Kusama Network before journeying to the Moonbeam Network on Polkadot. The game features exciting lore, game mechanics, and RMRK NFT tech for various functionalities. Furthermore, they recently launched a groundbreaking marketplace for trading.

For petrolheads and race enthusiasts, Exiled Racers provides an NFT-based racing and prediction manager for everyone. Racers can pick their racing stacks and race for victory, while predictors can simply pick who they think the race winners will be. Racers require a pilot, racecraft, and Booster to enter the races.

For treasure hunters who love to sail the seas and conquer lands or other pirates, the Damned Pirates Society (DPS) welcomes you. DPS started off as an NFT collection on Moonriver before transcending on to the Moonbeam. Since then, they have successfully gone multichain by integrating on Arbitrium Nova. The gameplay involves pirates, ships and treasure. Players can participate in different events to win artifacts which can be traded.

Other honourable mentions of games on the Moonbeam Network include The Pink Drop, Heroes Battle Arena, Blockchain Monster Hunt, Snake Soldiers, and Lokian Monsters.

Gamified projects apply elements of game playing to make actions more fun. Healthree and Moonfit, are Web3 healthcare apps that reward users with tokens for exercising and performing certain actions. Astar Farm on the other hand gamifies DeFi, putting a fun twist to staking tokens and earning.

Bit.County is an appchain specifically dedicated to providing 2.5D and 3D metaverse services for communities enabling users to grow and directly interact with them. After launching Pioneer on Kusama, they recently launched Continuum on Polkadot. Cosmize, on the Astar Network also enables users to create their own virtual spaces.

Ajuna, another appchain on Polkadot, launched its Kusama sister chain, Bajun, in 2022. Ajuna hosts a suite of products and SDKs to improve efficiency in production and remove the complexities of building blockchain games. In fact, the team at Ajuna are the creators of the Polkadot Unity SDK.

When it comes to games on Ajuna, the Ajuna Awesome Avatars (AAA) game has seen over 1.8 million NFTs minted by 1.5k players. A mobile game, the Big Balls of Bajun, is the first game built using the Polkadot Unity SDK and is expected to roll out soon. The team has also announced another game, Stardust Colonies, in partnership with Evrloot.

From NFTs to Gaming with NFTs, Unique Network has progressed forward, and even has a bounty which supports it. An early winner of the bounty is Forever has Fallen, a mystery game, proclaimed to have achieved the fastest mint on Polkadot. And do you still remember all the fun with DED gaming?

Infrastructure development such as the Polkadot Unity SDK, Agile Coretime and Asynchronous Backing are important foundations for the next generation of games to be built on Polkadot. Ventures such as the Mythical X Scytale gaming academy can also elaborate and boost the gaming economy on Polkadot, by providing guidance and mentorship in building top class games.

The ease and speed of building appchains on Polkadot through Tanssi further simplifies the building process, as developers can spin up appchains faster without the complexities involved. There are already a number of gaming and metaverse dedicated appchains live on the Tanssi testnet campaign.

With a sponsorship proposal for the Heroic Esports team currently up for voting on OpenGov, what are your expectations as regards the development of gaming of Polkadot? Could you see a future where we have Esports battling it out with games on Polkadot? Feel free to share with us below with a comment.

General News

Written by Dodow

• Just in case, here’s the announcement of the Gavin and Vitalik fireside chat.
• The LAOS foundation has decided to honor the rewards to those who contributed to their crowdloan that could not execute due to a technical issue. Contributors will be receiving 100 LAOS tokens per every DOT contributed. It's important to note, that the tokens will now be all unlocked on June 28th 2024 (instead of linear over 2 years), and rewards must be claimed by 31st August 2024. Any unclaimed rewards will be burned.
• Talisman has reached a momentous milestone of 7M DOT staked in its nomination pools.
• JAM has been ratified by the community as the next major version of Polkadot.
• Cybersecurity DePIN, DATS, has joined the Peaq ecosystem. It’s the first of its kind share-to-earn decentralized computing power marketplace focused on cybersecurity.
• Get ready as Polimec announces the next project that is looking to raise funds on its platform. ImpactScope supports organizations with their sustainability goals by deploying AI and Web3 tools.
• Transact across any chain using InvArch tech.
• Apillon’s partnership with Oasis has been featured in crypto news. The partnership forms an Account Abstraction (AA) proposition for Web3 ecosystems. This is achieved through Oasis’s front-end AA wallet SDK and Apillon’s back-end wallet service.
• Ser have you heard of Phyken? They’re a green energy RWA fractionalization protocol building on Polkadot, furthermore they have announced a new partnership with multichain KYC services provider Hypersign.
• The Frequency parachain is topping the Polkadot daily transaction charts with an impressive 6300% increase.
• TVVIN, a platform for the RWA tokenization of precious metals, announces its expansion to Polkadot, where it will be launching its LBMA-certified gold token VVG and platform utility token TVVIX.
• Peaq welcomes NyxCarbon into its ecosystem. NyxCarbon identifies as being a lending platform for carbon removal and ecosystem restoration businesses and has chosen to build on the Peaq L1. This brings about a new class of Real World assets that focuses on the environment with services such as commodity swaps and lending markets linked to real-time climate data financing.
• Mandala are hinting at some special bonus for early KYC ahead of their funding through Polimec.
• You can now catch a glimpse of Polkadot on the digital boards at Singapore Changi Airport, even if you are not heading to attend the Polkadot Blockchain Academy.
• Novawallet now supports the Hyperbridge Nexus token.
• OriginTrail have announced a strategic partnership with AI platform SingularityNET. Together they will look to develop the Knowledge Layer - the Internet of Knowledge.
• Check your Talisman wallet because Talisman Quests Beta rewards have been distributed to all eligible participants on Asset Hub.
• Litentry has partnered with privacy oracle protocol zkPass. Furthermore, they will also be involved in S2 of their Identity Hub event.
• Astar released details about their approach of dynamic staking.

NFT & DEFI News

Written by Dodow

• Ajuna is getting ready for BBB launch, as such there has been storage migration from Bajun Network.
• The snapshot for holders of Youdles v1 and Rainbow items on Kusama has been taken. Check out the thread for an explanation of the migration to Astar, which includes details on the quantity of Youdles that will be airdropped based on rarity. Unfortunately, their mint date has been pushed back to 3rd June.
• After weeks of tweeting bananas, Ape Chimpz unleash clothing.
• Beefy memecoin announces there will be an updated roadmap with an emphasis on burning tokens.
• PINK is set to introduce competitive game modes for Pinkdrop. Players can compete head-to-head or battle in a 4 player Degen mode, furthermore, a player won't know who they are up against until the match begins.
• Rare armors are finally available on Evrloot.
• Mythical Games will partner with Pudgy Penguins to build a mobile game.
• Astar Degens holders, it's time to check your wallets, as March and April rewards have finally been distributed.
• Get ready as there will be a special FlappyWud event in June, with the chance to win some WUD.
• As part of the roadmap to revitalize DeFi on Moonriver, Beamswap has been chosen to launch a new DEX.
• You can now perform cross-chain swaps of Moonbeam assets with other EVMs on Sushiswap.
• PINK is now tradable on Polkadex, where the PINK/USDT pair is available.
• Moonbeam ecosystem grants voting is now underway, and in line with the Moonrise product roadmap update, there are recommendations from Gauntlet. The recommended allocations are 30% for Stellaswap, 25% for Primeprotocol, 25% for Moonwell, and 20% for Beamswap.
• If you haven't had a chance to keep up with Pendulum, then check out their end of month report. With native USDC and vDOT now supported, along with integrations such as Soroswap and Subscan, the month has been pretty busy.

Governance & Events News

Written by Dodow

• Polkadot OpenGov voting for Beamswap’s DOT loan for use on its perp dex, Beamex is now live. Referendum 794 is for liquidity, and 795 is for incentives.
• What do you think about the prospects for Polkadot advertisement on Spotify? Feel free to vote or comment on OpenGov referenda 808.
• Acala’s on-chain vote is to reduce the ACA staking bonding period to 14 days.
• Gavin Wood is set to level up, given all his recent contributions, as the referendum 814 on the Fellowship Admin track is aimed at promoting him to VII Dan with the title of Free Master.
• Maintaining XCM transaction performance is up for on-chain voting on Pendulum.
• OpenGov treasury funding proposals can now be requested for stablecoins USDT and USDC.
• Led by Braille, a few of our ecosystem teams have joined forces to request funding to address Polkadot UX. Check out referendum 819 for more details.
• Funding for Polkadot business development in Brazil has been requested in referendum 818.
• Chaos DAO have made a proposal to fund free beer at Polkadot Decoded.
• Following the ratification of JAM, the next vote is to ratify the fellowships’ role as the judge in the JAM Protocol implementation prize.
• Seun (Polytope Labs), Agyle (Talisman), and Shun (Light Protocol) discussed Chain Abstraction and the Future of Wallets on 30th May.
• Irina and Daniyal from Energy Web held an X space to discuss The Future of Energy on 28th May.
• Taking stage at Blockchain Week Rome on 30th May was Filippo, Irina, and Patrizia to cover Opportunities to Join the Web3.
• Polimec hosted an event in Zug Switzerland on 29th May, and it featured Flavio and Joe Petrowski.
• Jeffrey Edell of MeWe appeared on a panel at Consensus on 30th May to discuss the current state of decentralized social media. There was also the opportunity at Consensus to stop by for drinks as Frequency hosted a happy hour.
• Peaq’s AMA on 29th May focuses on EV charging.
• If you want to find out more about Moonbeam’s upcoming integration with Tanssi and Glacis, then check out the recording from 29th May.
• Xcavate, who are launching on Polkadot via Tanssi Network, held a session on 29th May.
• Crust covers DePIN on 30th May.

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.