Wag Roundup (April 17th to April 23rd)

News found by the community. Curated by the community. Backed by OpenGov.

DOT Ecosystem News

Written by yay.oi

• Jonas Gehrlein (Parity) has posted an update on the progress of variable unbonding time for staked DOT (RFC-0097). The implementation has been taken over by Blockdeep Labs and is expected to be ready for audits by the end of May.
• Copper has partnered with P2P.org to offer secure and yield-optimized staking of DOT to its institutional clients.
• What better place to find promising talent? Parity is currently interviewing twenty graduates from the Polkadot Blockchain Academy Campus course in Lucerne.
• To ensure no further delays to the BRIDGE TGE, participants in the Hyperbridge Initial Relayer Offering have been given a deadline of April 30th to complete the KYC process.
• The Easy-A Polkadot Hackathon kicked off in London on Saturday, April 18th and was oversubscribed by 4x. Let’s congratulate our winners:
• In the Polkadot Existing Projects Track, third place ($1K) went to Echopay, a voice-activated app for sending and signing transactions. Paxmata, a non-commercial real-estate project management and funding platform, came second ($3K). First prize ($5K) went to Anarchy Build, an AI community innovation hub where creators can build in public, monetize their work, and earn engagement-based rewards.
• Third prize in the Polkadot New Projects Track went to Astartes, a forensic-grade logging system, while LiquiDot, an automated yield-farmer, came second ($3K). In first place ($5K) was Polkaship, a marketplace for trading and hedging of freight shipping slots.
• With the full integration of Subscan, builders can now verify executed transactions as Polka-VM goes live on the Westend testnet.
• OriginTrail has won a place in the European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI (ELSA) second Industry Call. It will receive a grant of €60K to collaborate with ELSA over a six-month period on a project that will utilize AI and the OriginTrail DKG to securely share genomic data and generate personalized health insights. ELSA is a Network of Excellence that includes members such as Nvidia and Oxford University.
• Project Zero is now live on Peaq, offering DePINs access to its advanced real-time data infrastructure for the deployment of AI agents, dynamic dApps, and smart machines.
• Aira, SkyX, Beacon Protocol, Combinder, and DecenSpacehave been selected to join the DePIN Base Camp accelerator program, a collaboration between Peaq, Outlier Ventures, and 1kx. Each team will benefit from mentorship, focused workshops led by experts in the industry, initial funding of $200K from 1kx, and access to further investment opportunities.
• Peaq DePINs Quakecore and SkyX have entered into a mutual data exchange arrangement. With SkyX real-time weather data, Quakecore can expand its offerings into extreme weather event prediction. Meanwhile, SkyX will receive advance seismic activity warnings that can help it to protect its infrastructure.
• Crust has partnered with the Australian AI Music Alliance to co-develop an AI music registration and encoding platform that uses the new ISRC-AAM-CID Standardized AI Music Identifier. This new framework addresses issues of correctly attributing copyright ownership and revenue distribution for works created with the assistance of AI.
• Dot Shield v2.0 now supports EVM addresses, making its automated verification and moderation solution for Telegram available to communities such as Moonbeam, Mythos, and LAOS.
• Get giga as SubWallet now supports one-click swaps involving GDOT, with mobile support to follow.
• In Nova Wallet v9.8, you can now buy and sell tokens such as DOT (Relay Chain) and KSM (Relay Chain) in-app via Mercuryo and Transak. In addition, improvements have been made to staking collator suggestions and the dApp Browser.
• Still feeling loopy? Time’s up, fam. The 2.2M GDOT cap on Hydration was filled in 36 hours.
• With the passing of Hydration Referendum 65, SKY and LINK, bridged over Snowbridge, are now live in the Omnipool.
• Evrloot Marks Season 2 has commenced, bringing the new Rift expedition and a revamped battle system. In-game gilt has just got a whole lot more valuable. You will now be able to mint NFT citizens with 12K gilt.
• On April 22nd, Encontrar, a generative art collection by Edudux, dropped on KodaDot. It sold out within 24 hours.
• Bastian Kocher (Parity) has initiated Whitelisted Caller Referendum 1536 to open and assign cores to Mythos and Xcavate for a period of approximately two months, after they failed to renew their slot on time. During the Coretime sale period, all available cores were bought by a rogue activist, seeking numerous changes to the way Coretime sales are handled. Basti has opened RFC-142 to discuss potential solutions to balance the current market dynamics and prevent future exploitation.
• The PoKe BD team, originally funded by a Decentralized Futures grant, has requested 290K USDT from the Polkadot Treasury for six months of continued operations. This extension is necessary to provide key accounting and project management for a range of business opportunities in late-stage negotiations.
• Hydration Referendum 67 proposes to maintain existing DOT incentives, with the exception of CFG, in the Omnipool for an additional month.
• After distributing 50K BNC to the Top 100 Polkadot Yappers, another 50K BNC is being requested from the Bifrost Treasury for another round of incentivized Bifrost content creation.
• Stellaswap has proposed to register the Snowbridge assets ETH, USDC, USDT & DAI in Moonbeam Referendum 108. It is planning to transition its Wormhole ETH and WBTC pools to Snowbridge assets and add DOT incentives.

DOT Ecosystem Events

Written by yay.oi

• On April 18th, Polkadot hosted its second DV AMA session on the community Telegram, featuring Kristen and Xiaojie from Polkaworld.
• The Polkadot Ambassador Fellowship shared its latest updates and achievements in the second Sprint Update livestream on April 18th.
• Polkadot hosted Seun (Hyperbridge), Ben (Braille), Dean (Agoric), and Zaki (Somm Finance) on April 22nd for a panel discussion on chain abstraction and cross-chain user experience.
• Polkadot hosted Nikos and Jay from KusDAO for the third Decentralized Voices delegation AMA on April 22nd to discuss voting philosophies and how you can get involved.
• On April 23rd, Polkadot hosted Tim Janssen to discuss the ins and outs of the Anti-Scam Team initiative.
• Episode 30 of Acala Buzz aired on April 23rd and featured updates about the Meme and dApp contest, staking yields, and more.
• Crypto x AI Weekly, on April 23rd, featured Peaq DePIN XMAQUINA in a panel discussion about robotics and Decentralized Physical AI.
• On April 24th Moonbeam will host N3mus for an AMA and 1hr Wegainst tournament.
• In Port Harcourt, Nigeria, on April 26th, KodaDot ambassador Vic Dan is hosting the Polkadot Creators Hangout, a day for Web3 creatives to discuss and display their works.
• Polkadot has secured a high-traffic 20’x20’booth for Consensus Toronto from May 14-16. Expect community activations, live talks, swag, and demos. Ecosystem teams and builders interested in showcasing their work areinvited to apply now.