Wag’s Behind da Code? (May 12th to May 18th)

What is up, my friends!

Behind the Code represents one of the most significant pieces of content that follows the journey of Polkadot and brings people into the ecosystem. It resonates with what we're about at WagMedia, with our focus on content creation and news storytelling we look to bring people in too.

Furthermore, it inspired our queen bee, Jay, to join the Polka hive and lay those eggs that go on to form the foundations of WagMedia. The WagMedia initiative itself has also cultivated ecosystem agents, such as JB (Astar core team); Jeepers (former Mangata core team); Pnin, Csaint, Le Comte, Indiko, and Crane (The Kusamarian); and many more.

To celebrate the release of the first installment of Behind the Code, Season 2, we shall be featuring it in our Top Story. In emulating the approach of captivating storytelling, we shall also cover a few other items that caught our eye this week.

A few newsletters ago, we mentioned Polimec joining WagMedia as a new treasury and did a special profile report about them. This past week their very first bounty was announced, furthermore, it has been extended to May 24th.

The bounty includes coverage of Apillon, given it will be the first project to fund via Polimec. Therefore, to assist those looking to be evaluators as well as potential sale participants, check out our special profile report about Apillon in this week’s edition.

With all the news and content coming through WagMedia, which you are probably eager to get to, you may have missed our Wag Challenge on May 15th. The competition is to literally look for treasure and uncover the Easter eggs. Keep your eyes peeled or your Wag notifications on, as there might be other opportunities soon.

Without getting further behind, let’s journey on to the stories and news updates.

Dodow, Chief Editor

Top Story of the Week - Behind the News

Written by yay.oi

Pass the DOTcorn fam, this week the Polkasphere kept us glued to our screens. A real-life drama began unfolding before our eyes over in OpenGov. Meanwhile, a groundbreaking proposal could see Polkadot technology empowering 150M US social network users to take back control of their online identities.

But let’s kick things off, by taking a look at the highly anticipated return of the Polkadot treasury funded Behind the Code series.

As told in Space Monkeys 146, the story of Behind the Code started in 2016 when Gavin Wood got in touch with his old school friend,director Simon Hipkins, to see if he’d be interested in doing some filming for his new project, a successor to Ethereum.

Hipkins filmed Gav on and off over the following years, and in 2019 proposed to cut the footage into a series of films that could help explain Polkadot to the general public. The result was Polkadot: Behind the Code, a three-part series that, with over 300k views, has the highest engagement out of all Polkadot content on YouTube.

In January of this year, with Referendum 415, Hipkins successfully proposed the sequel to Behind the Code to tell the Polkadot 2.0 story. This time with four episodes released between April and December 2024.

“The internet is broken.” (Frank McCourt, Project Liberty).

Episode 1 is titled Creating the Web3 Future. It presents us with a problem. In the Web 2.0 world we have completely lost control of our identity. People tend to associate their online identity as their social network account, such as Facebook or Google, but these companies fundamentally aim to control identities.

Arguably the biggest asset of the largest tech companies in the World are their databases, and that data is harvested from its Web 2.0 user base. Braxton Woodham, co-creator of the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) argues that this data should be treated more as a natural resource that can be harnessed to benefit all of humanity.

According to Ingo Rube, founder of KILT Protocol, the problems of Web 2.0 are innate, they can’t be fixed by regulators, they can only be fixed by technologists. Web 3.0 can fix the internet by building the common good protocol layers that are missing from the internet of today.

“We’re looking to contribute global protocols to this new iteration of the internet.“ (Dakota, Invarch)

Enter our savior, founder and chief architect of Polkadot Gavin Wood. He tells us that Polkadot is a tool of Web 3.0, a resource aiming to keep barriers to entry as low as possible to ensure that it can be used by as many use cases as possible.

Polkadot is an open technology, a utility, and a decentralized protocol with a decentralized system of governance. It is also the world’s biggest DAO, which governs the world’s biggest decentralized economy.

Decentralized governance not only gives the people a voice, it also gives power back to the people. It provides a mechanism to distribute opportunities equally around the world.

Ingo Rube’s vision of automated governance goes beyond blockchains. He believes that organizations of all kinds will begin to adopt it to govern completely different things. It is at this point where we see that the Web 3.0 movement is heading far beyond financial technology towards a much broader socio-political movement.

“Basically anything you can imagine that is impossible on-chain now, would all be manageable in JAM.” (Gavin Wood)

JAM is presented as the technology that will get us where we need to be as a digital society. It’s the secure computational infrastructure that can be trusted and will bring the end to debating about truth.

Leemo calls on us, the Polkadot DAO, to usher this technology to the masses. It’s so much more than an incremental update. In fact, according to Gavin Wood it is a fundamental technology in the development of societies.

So, that’s a wrap for episode one of Behind the Code. It's certainly recommended to find the time to enjoy the captivating cinematography. While the pace is not as rapid as this recap, you should get through the 15 minutes in no-time.

The theme of reclaiming our digital identities and recognizing the value of our data was also a running theme in this week’s real-life Polkadot soap opera in OpenGov.

After much exchange of leads with the voting, the community decided to reject Referendum 684, a request of 1M DOT by Chainalysis for data, analytics, and compliance solutions to facilitate entry into the institutional market. With a record breaking 186M DOT of voting power casted, it was one of the most contentious OpenGov votes yet.

On the AYE side we had none other than Giotto De Filippi who argues that Polkadot will not be taken seriously by institutions until it has Chainalysis integration. On the NAY side the loudest objections came from DeFiGuy, who believes that the proposal was an opportunistic money-grab, and that this expense does not need to be borne by the Polkadot treasury.

Referendum 684 was not the end of the matter. The drama has now spilled over into the Root track where Chainalysis have resubmitted their proposal. We may not get a verdict on that referendum because a Referendum Canceller was submitted shortly after.

Moving away from OpenGov to USGov, you may have heard that President Joe Biden signed a law that could force TikTok to sell its US operations. Prominent voice in this week’s Behind the Code episode, Frank McCourt, has announced his intentions to form a consortium to make a bid to acquire social network giant.

If successful, his plan would be to re-architect the platform to return control of data back to its users. This would be done using the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol facilitated by parachain Frequency, meaning an additional 150M+ monthly active users entering the Polkadot ecosystem!

These themes of institutional and mainstream adoption may feature in the next episode of Behind the Code: Building for Mass Adoption. The episode is not due to drop until late June, but keep an eye out on the Polkadot twitter for a preview.

If you’d like a preview of what’ll be in next week’s WagMedia Weekly News, why don’t you come hang out with us in the WagMedia Discord where you can see all of our finders and creators hard at work. Maybe you could submit a find or two yourself. Don’t forget to follow @thatmediawag too.

Special Report - Behind Apillon

Written by Sanchez

Polkadot’s decentralized economy is set to welcome an era of decentralized funding, where ordinary users can effectively become venture capitalists. The first project to be put through the Polimec protocol is Apillon.

Those within the ecosystem may have already heard the name, met with the team at events, or even worked with them and their products. Originally set to launch on Moonbeam and partnered with Kilt, Apillon was known as Authtrail and focused on data integrity services for enterprises looking to onboard in Web3.

They raised USD $3.6M in private funding at the end of 2021 and followed up with a community sale in early 2022. Despite the looming bear market, following Polkadot decoded 2022, the team announced a pivot to focus on providing Web3 tooling and services based on feedback received at the event. This was followed by the rebrand approximately a month later.

Apillon continued to evolve, and you will see them at events presenting the prospect of drag-and-drop functionality, which may help entice more developers to create dApps within the Polkadot ecosystem.

Furthermore, Apillon sought funding from the Polkadot treasury to support the development of their subscription based platform, making it more enticing for developers. Token holders eventually approved for a milestone approach. After fulfilling the first milestone which includes integration of DOT and payments, NFT-based solutions, and more, the team has set a new proposal.

The latest milestone proposal includes deliverables such as integrating more Polkadot parachains, such as HydraDX for automatic asset swaps, Unique Network as another NFT minting option, and Acurast for decentralised cloud functions. Other deliverables include wallet account abstraction, integration of Asset Hub, support for XC-20-based assets, RPC as a service, and the availability of custom smart contracts.

Apillon can now be widely recognised as a Web3 development platform for developers and businesses. By abstracting away the complexities of building on Polkadot and its parachains, Apillon provides Web2 developers the ability to build on Web3 with familiar tools. Developers can use tools like Typescript, Python, React, Javascript, and more to build products on top of Polkadot.

Parachains on Polkadot are specialised, offering specific use cases for users and developers. While Kilt offers identity solutions, Invarch offers universal custody solutions, Phala offers cloud computing, and Moonbeam and Astar are smart contract platforms. It can be overwhelming for developers looking to build and utilise features across these Networks.

Apillon resolves this problem by providing developers with APIs to integrate data and services from other applications and parachains. Using these APIs, developers can access the specialised features of Polkadot's parachains to build their products without understanding the complexities of each parachain.

Developers also enjoy payment for these services with a unified currency, such as DOT and fiat, rather than the currency of each chain utilised. Apillon’s subscription based platform converts the payment currency to the currency of the chain used to pay for the services, thus offering easy and predictable pricing.

Also on offer are SDKs and documentation templates to make the product-building process faster and more efficient. These also provide useful analytics, giving insights into the use and growth of the products, as well as monitoring the product's backend performance.

Apillon currently offers APIs for Moonbeam, Astar, Crust, and Kilt, with support for developers looking to integrate identity, utilise storage services, or build smart contract products. Users can already deploy NFTs, utilise storage buckets, and use DIDs issued by Kilt.

As originally planned, Apillon will not be a Polkadot parachain; instead, it will be situated on Moonbeam. Its token, NCTR, will have a total supply of 150 million and will be utilised for the governance of Apillon, which will primarily include choosing which parachains and products to integrate and make available for developers.

NCTR will also serve as the payment pathway for users paying through fiat for Apillon services and chain-specific payments. It will also function as the token for incentivising developers to use Apillon, rewarding those who can obtain high user adoption of their products.

Token allocation, roadmap and token generation event details can be found in their latest blog article. One important thing to note is that, regarding early backers of Authtrail, there was no change in deal with the rebrand, and additional bonus of NTCR tokens will be provided as compensation for the long wait.

With Polimec Protocol going live, the evaluation phase has begun, and (at time of writing) it’s just shy of reaching the $50,000 target for this phase. The evaluation phase allows Polimec users and interested parties to scrutinise the project and its token sale parameters.

It effectively helps determine the viability of the funding and whether it moves to the funding round or is stopped. You can read more about this from our previous coverage of the Polimec Protocol.

Apillon seeks to bring traditional Web2 developers to Web3, specifically Polkadot, by offering full-stack solutions enabling them to build their products using familiar tools. Understanding the functionalities of complex parachains can be intimidating, and the solution Apillon offers eases the onboarding of developers.

Hopefully this can help foster adoption as well as more diverse and user-friendly products on Polkadot. This sentiment is embraced further as Apillon have formed a strategic partnership with Polimec to offer a start-up initiative package to projects who have successfully raised.

Not convinced? Did you know that Apillon is a partner to our ecosystem’s beloved PINK memecoin project. Apillon’s platform enabled the next wave of PINK gaming fun via the Pink Pass NFT free mint.

We hope you have found our report informative, and perhaps helpful for those looking to bond PLMC in the evaluation. If you are interested in the crowd sale of the NCTR token, check out the Apillon page on Polimec for more information.

General News

Written by Dodow

• Check out the blog that outlines the developments and the roadmap that the Parity engineering team have in mind for the Polkadot ecosystem.
• Crust’s Cloud solution, which is secured by Polkadot, can now be leveraged by the Optimism ecosystem.
• With a self-funded bid of 1K DOT, Integritee wins the latest Polkadot auction slot to secure blockspace for another 2 years.
• Phala's Phat contracts get deployed on Astar WASM smart contracts in a lottery app.
• Here's a tutorial on how to join Integritee Network's Incognitee test campaign, which aims to safeguard privacy on Polkadot.
• Tanssi in the spotlight as Coinlist announces Tanssi incentivised testnet. Could this association lead to a public sale and white list on Coinlist?
• Frank McCourt, the founder of Project Liberty, which focuses on decentralized social data and leverages the Frequency parachain has been identified to be looking to buy TikTok. You may have seen his recent interviews featured on The Kusamarian.
• There's some things tokens cannot buy. For DePINs, there's now Mastercard. Peaq joins Mastercard's Start Path Program, a move that potentially opens up traditional financial infrastructure as well as a vast user base to DePINs.
• Crust integrates into the Tanssi ecosystem and aims to provide storage services to container chains.
• OnFinality is now supporting Krest Network, Peaq’s canary, and is providing performance enhancing RPCs.
• Nuklai, a L1 that focuses on data-driven AI and LLM, has now joined the Peaq ecosystem to enrich DePINs.
• PoKe, a new Business Development unit, is the latest recipient of a Web3 Foundation Decentralized Futures grant.
• Krevio, a decentralized payment hub developed by Virto Network, is now on NovaWallet.
• Just in case you missed it, here’s a link to Behind the Code S02E01: "Creating the Web3 Future".
• Peaq secures funding of $20M, becoming the largest CoinList token sale in the last 2 years. The public sale was oversubscribed, with over 14.5K participants pledging $36M.
• TraceLabs, the team behind OriginTrail, joins NVIDIA's Inception program. They look to build on their work on Verifiable Internet for Artificial Intelligence.
• Moonbeam provides some insights into Sightsea, which is a new decentralized social platform backed by the Moonbeam Foundation.
• Natix, an AI powered geospatial DePIN in the Peaq Ecosystem, is next up with its public token sale on Coinlist.

NFT & DEFI News

Written by Dodow

• Get ready as Evrloot revamps its marketplace!
• Check your wallets as Wen Beefy memecoin has announced its Pre Airdrop Airdrop. HydraDX listing also happened next.
• NeuroWebAI have concluded its knowledge mining beta, which results in artwork being maintained as knowledge assets using OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph. Participants will be rewarded with NEURO tokens.
• SubWallet adds support for Mythical Games’s MYTH token.
• Did you paw some liquidity to get the multiplier for adding to the Dogwifdots LP, which recently launched on HydraDX.
• Karura, Acala's canary network, has a proposal to fund a marketing campaign on Telegram.
• Anemoy Capital has made a Centrifuge governance proposal for onboarding DeFi Yield Fund.
• Pendulum is now integrated with Subscan.
• Beamswap is working with Gauntlet to follow the strategic guidelines for Moonbeam ecosystem grants.
• Holders of Bifrost's vAstar on EVM are set to get an airdrop of the new LAMB memecoin!
• Polkaswap introduces KARMA, a new farming token.
• A good amount of ASTR and BNC pours into HydraDX's omnipool.
• There’s not much formal communication about the vDOT situation. News from the Bifrost server suggests that there was a hack of a user's wallet, and that the protocol is safe. However, there is a short term arbitrage that has caused delay on redeeming vDOT for DOT.
• Another parachain sets up on Paseo, as Bifrost has launched its testnet.

Governance & Events News

Written by Dodow

• OpenGov proposal 762 aims to sponsor an esports team with the view of establishing the Polkadot brand in the rapidly growing world of esports gaming.
• Polkadot Head Ambassador Irina Karagyar has signed a MOU with the Founder Institute who is seeking a formal partnership with Polkadot via Referendum #755 on the OpenGov Wish for Change track.
• Did you know that the 186M DOT in voting power has made Referendum 684 the highest ever voter turnout on OpenGov?
• Polkadot Insider hosted an AMA with Unique Network on May 14th, to cover the future of NFTs on Polkadot.
• As part of a feature to cover Forbes list of those shaping web3, Ferrum Network hosted Tanssi for a discussion on May 15th.
• There was an Encode Club workshop on May 15th, which covers KILT Protocol's DIDs
• Polkadot Insider hosted an AMA with LAOS Network on May 16th.
• LAOS Network were involved with a spaces session on May 16th, with the topic on “Which Reward Systems Will Disrupt the Gaming Industry”.
• Join the On Chain Art Day as part of Berlin Blockchain Week on May 24th, where the KodaDot team will be available to provide support.

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.

PS: Did you catch the awesome Raoul Pal interview?