If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

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Our last installment on infrastructure touched on some basics — stuff that you’d find in different forms on other blockchains too. Here, we go all in on the unique stuff that can only be done on Polkadot!

Keepers? No need!

There is one particular limitation of most smart contract blockchains that really makes it difficult to do one basic action: responding to events. Or more generally, automating things.

Every transaction on Ethereum must come from an “Externally Owned Account” (EOA) — basically, a user wallet. Smart contracts can’t call functions on their own, they always need to be “nudged” by someone. This becomes a problem for certain actions that should be performed periodically: think of a Yearn vault rebalancing, MakerDAO liquidations etc. 

So far these functions have required dedicated keepers, or bots that automatically call some functions depending on a condition or just some time passing. If you’re a DeFi team, keepers are quite a pain point because they become an obvious point of centralization if done directly by the team. Many try to use decentralized services that automate the process, which is one of the reasons why MakerDAO keepers are available to anyone who has the technical knowledge to set them up.

OAK Network is creating an infrastructure that would completely negate the idea that all transactions must come from a wallet.

By tweaking Substrate just enough, the OAK team has created a smart contract blockchain with an event-driven execution model. As a user, you load up your event and its triggers into the chain, and the network collators will read from this stack and execute your functions whenever the conditions allow for it.

The system is so useful that it’s probably impossible to list all the things you can do with it! The team is focusing on scheduled payments and DEX limit/stop loss orders as initial use cases, but the possibilities are truly endless. 

And thanks to the magic of XCM, the OAK network can service all the parachains and bring the scheduled transactions to them. Polkadot effectively won’t need keepers — it will all be automated by the chain.

Event-driven transactions can make smart contracts truly smart and automated, especially if they’re combined with another cool Substrate feature…

The Offchain Worker & external data

There’s another thing that blockchains can’t do: interact with the external world.

That’s of course the entire premise of The Oracle Problem: even if they were able to, how could they trust that source of data? This problem seems to be fundamentally unsolvable with 100% certainty. But just like the double-spend problem, we can create enough economic incentives to solve it in practice!

That’s basically what projects like Chainlink do by providing price feeds into the blockchain’s smart contracts. But of course, you’re limited by the price feeds that Chainlink provides, so it becomes hard to do for exotic assets! Or, alternatively, maybe you don’t care about prices at all?

Chainlink at its core is a collection of nodes that perform requests, watch each other and agree on what is the correct version of a particular data request. If someone misbehaves, their stake gets slashed. Sounds familiar? That’s essentially the same model of any Proof of Stake network, including Polkadot.

And that’s why Substrate features the Off-chain Worker: a way for the blockchain to interact with the external world through the nodes it’s running on.

The Off-chain Worker can perform many different tasks. Sending HTTP requests (that is, browsing the web) is one thing, but it’s also designed to process very resource-intensive tasks that don’t need blockchain verification for the entire process. An easy example is mining: the calculations to produce blocks are very intensive, but they can be verified easily once done.

As for how to trust the data, that task is up to the parachain developers. Some simple techniques can rely on just averaging the data from the nodes, essentially trusting them to provide the correct data. That should be enough for basic things, since Polkadot nodes are already quite committed to the network!

There is so far just one project that aims to leverage Off-chain workers for data: DIA. Its Polkadot deployment offers an easy to use worker implementation that can be used to access its price feeds for both crypto and traditional assets.

The Power of Substrate

The common topic in all these projects is simple: Substrate is cool. Want to hear more examples? How about building Solana on Polkadot! That’s basically what Gear Protocol is doing.

It’s building a unique Wasm-based parachain using Rust, with a very innovative feature: instead of transactions, it features messages. This is important because transactions on the EVM are sequential: you can’t execute transaction 2 before transaction 1, because maybe tx 1 wants to make some changes to the data used by tx 2.

With messages, the virtual machine can be a lot more flexible. Each message is addressed to one or several specific contracts, so the system knows in advance which parts of the memory could be changed by each message. All transactions that are unrelated can be parallelized and run on multiple cores, which makes them much, much faster. 

This is the same strength of Solana, which uses parallel processing of transactions to speed them up. But since Gear aims to be a parachain, this speed will only be used by Polkadot developers who really need it.

The customizability of parachains is an incredibly powerful feature that hasn’t even reached its full potential yet! Even these unique projects are still just the very beginning. The possibilities are basically endless.

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Interlay won the fifth Polkadot parachain slot with 2.7 million DOT raised, with Equilibrium and Nodle now in a close battle for the sixth and final slot of this batch.

On Kusama, Mangata X won the first auction of the new batch, filling its cap of 14,000 KSM. Pichiu is next in line.

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Equilibrium

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses.

• Nodle

TL;DR: This decentralized IoT network offers 23% of its total treasury reserves or 10% of the circulating supply on the Nodle Mainnet. This includes various incentives to early and/or highest contributors!

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 21% APR for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM seems to have been removed

• KAR/LKSM with 107% APR

• kUSD/LKSM with 70% APR

• kUSD/KSM with 42%.

Moonriver Farms

• Sushi farms on Moonriver have APRs ranging from 7% to 44% this week; the MIM / WMOVR pool offers 81% APR on even smaller liquidity, compared to last week.

• Solarbeam offers a few very solid Pool 1 choices with over 100% APR. veSOLAR offers up to 400%, but at the cost of locking your assets for some time.

• RomeDAO is giving a 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking.

• Moonwell offers a good selection of farms with up to 40% APY for Compound-style supply and borrow farming.

Moonbeam farms

• Solarflare offers up to 400% APRs on Pool 2s, with Pool1s you can earn up to 54% APR. For stablers, yield is still about 20% APR.

• StellaSwap offerings are lower but decent. Yields on Pool2s are around 300% APR and a few blue chip Pool 1s APRs are around 170%.

This last week the whole world looked in shock as the Russian government began a new war in the heart of Europe.

The crypto community came in support of Ukraine in its plight, donating tens of millions to various organizations who set up crypto wallets.

The DotSama community of course pitched in as well, with Gavin Wood pledging to donate $5M if they set up a DOT address. The Ukrainian government quickly obliged.

A similar thing was done by the Subsocial team, which is largely Ukrainian-based. A special page was set up to accept donations with DOT. One important aspect here is that people can choose if they want to donate for military or humanitarian causes, which should be a very useful distinction for people who abhor war in any shape or form, but still want to help its victims.

The ratios are so far 25:1 in favor of humanitarian causes, while the official DOT address collected at least $1.5 million from over 3000 donors.

Let us all take a moment of silence for the hundreds of people who died in Ukraine in just a few days, as well as the hundreds of thousands trapped in besieged cities often lacking food, water, electricity and safety.

• IndexZoo to Launch on the Acala EVM+, Bringing Index and Leveraged Tokens to the Acala Ecosystem.

IndexZoo, a multi-chain ecosystem of index and leveraged tokens, will launch on Acala EVM+.The project will be bringing a Composite Index Token, a Polkadot ecosystem index that captures the top tokens by market capitalization, and a Leverage Token, long and short tokens for DOT and ACA, with up to 3x leverage.

• Binance Labs Makes Strategic Investment in Manta Network for Web3 Privacy.

Manta Network has secured an investment from Binance Labs, the venture capital and innovation incubator of Binance, aimed to support the efforts of Manta Network to build innovative products, services, and technologies that enable decentralized on-chain privacy.

• Acala Proposes aUSD and kUSD merge.

Shortly after the launch of aUSD on Acala, the team is discussing the possibility of merging the two stablecoins as XCM makes it possible to connect Kusama to Polkadot.

• Kintsugi’s KINT lands on Moonriver

Yet another XC-20 asset from another parachain lands on Moonriver’s EVM. xcKINT can now be used in DeFi on Moonriver’s DEXs and lending protocols!

• (Polkadot) Referendum 53 to upgrade Runtime to v9170 and Statemint Runtime to v700.

  (Polkadot) Referendum 52, updating Polkadot’s minimum nomination limit to 160 DOTs.

• (Kusama) Referendum 175, to reduce validation upgrade countdown from 14400 blocks (1 day) to 3600 blocks (6 hours).

• (Kusama) Referendum 174, to upgrade Statemine runtime to v700.

• (Kusama) Proposal 56, to unlock SherpaX team deregistration and exit from Kusama slot auction.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

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With most of the parachains done, it’s about the right time to start talking about something that is just as important: infrastructure!

Yeah we hear you, infrastructure is boring, right? Not on Polkadot! There are a lot of teams building very useful infrastructure for Substrate chains, some of which leverage very unique features that make it far more advanced than anything else on the EVM!

We’ll take a brief tour through some of the most important primitives here. There is a lot of ground to cover so we may not include everything — might pick it up in a Part 2!

Bridges, bridges, bridges

Let’s start with the bread and butter of any cross-chain blockchain: transferring assets to other blockchains.

Polkadot is designed to connect seamlessly within itself, but what about external chains? It’s unlikely that others will implement the native XCM format, so we need to create custom built implementations for each potential chain.

Bridges are such an important aspect of today’s DeFi landscape that it’s quite a shame that most of them are custodial. Recent hacks of a number of bridges showcase that holding a honeypot of hundreds of millions in funds is a very dangerous idea!

Most bridges today rely on a custodial architecture where bridging operations are done through multisig wallets held by validators. The validator set can be variable or fixed, the keys may be held in a secure enclave or not, but the basic architecture remains the same.

Snowfork, the Ethereum trustless bridge

The holy grail of bridges is the light client bridge, where the target blockchain itself verifies that a user committed funds to an address in the origin blockchain. With that information, the destination blockchain can mint or unlock funds for the user without having to trust any third party!

That’s what Snowfork has been building for the past two years. The basic idea is that Snowfork will let you trustlessly transfer ETH and tokens to any Polkadot parachain (likely passing through Snowfork’s hub), or back to Ethereum. 

Since it’s all EVM-based, it will likely work on other chains just as well, which is exciting! More advanced versions should allow you to send arbitrary data across chains, including function selectors and calldata. Translation: Polkadot could call Ethereum smart contracts!

But that’s still all work in progress. Snowfork has certainly been delayed on its initial roadmap by quite a bit and it’s not doing much public outreach, although the GitHub is still very much active. There’s also one important drawback of light client bridges — they’re expensive. Since you need to verify proofs on-chain, gas costs become a pretty serious issue!

ChainBridge, Interlay and others

While complex bridges are still being developed, other projects are building their own custodial bridges to ensure something can be used right now.

ChainBridge does this for Ethereum, and it’s been used in production. It’s a kind of “white label” solution built by ChainSafe and used by projects like Centrifuge and Meter to power their Ethereum bridges.

Astar Network is working hard on multiple bridges to make it a parachain bridge hub with other ecosystems. The first implementation will be that with Cosmos, which is useful because with IBC, integrating one chain immediately makes it work with all the others! But Astar aims to connect more and more platforms eventually.

Lastly, we have Interlay which is a bridging project for Bitcoin that launched its own parachain. Like Snowfork, this one is also trustless, but it mostly uses economic incentives for that. Bitcoin doesn’t have smart contracts, so this is about the best you can do! We covered Interlay and Kintsugi in-depth before. 

Data and Indexing

As a non-developer it’s often hard to understand exactly why indexing projects like The Graph are necessary! It all stems from the fact that blockchain nodes are really inefficient at retrieving old data directly, and it is a huge waste of time anyway: if it’s immutable, it really should be enough to get it just once and store it in a more accessible format.

That’s what indexing projects do, in a nutshell. It’s very important work for a whole bunch of projects and especially data platforms, such as DeFi Pulse. Instead of trying to query the blockchain and potentially make their own storage systems, data platforms can just run efficient queries through these indexing projects.

SubQuery is one of them, and it works mostly like The Graph: you have a class of indexers elected by stakers of the SQT token, which is also what you use to pay for queries. The indexers extract and organize the blockchain data so that users can query it at a much faster pace than directly from the blockchain. The biggest difference from The Graph is that there are no curators who create feeds, instead it’s done via a system called Purchase Order Contracts

Subsquid is another project developing indexing for Substrate chains. The basic mechanism is the same, but Subsquid introduces some innovations at the data retrieval layer. Instead of having one monolithic indexer class, it instead uses three separate actors called indexers, processors and gateways. 

Here, processors execute the data queries, gateways provide endpoints to users, while indexers do the heavy lifting of organizing blockchain data. The key difference is that any small device can be a processor, while indexers need to be large servers.

HydraDX has won the recent slot auction with almost 2.5 million DOT collected. Interlay is now in the pole position, with 2 million DOT raised so far, followed by Equilibrium and Nodle.

Current Polkadot leaderboard by parachains.info. 

On Kusama, SORA won the last auction with almost 10,000 KSM raised. KICO and Pichiu are next.

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Interlay

TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird encouragement.

• Equilibrium

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses. It seems to be running some promotions with up to 150% bonuses!

• Nodle

TL;DR: This decentralized IoT network offers 23% of its total treasury reserves or 10% of the circulating supply on the Nodle Mainnet. This includes various incentives to early and/or highest contributors!

Active Farms

Karura changed up its farms, removing BNC and KAR/kUSD pools.

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 23% APR for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 37% APR

• KAR/LKSM with 85% APR

• kUSD/LKSM with 95% APR

• kUSD/RMRK seems to have been removed.

Moonriver Farms

• Sushi farms on Moonriver have APRs ranging from 7% to 45% this week, with the exception of MIM / WMOVR pool, offering 91% APR on tiny liquidity.

• Solarbeam went lower this week, with up to 120% APR on Pool 2s and Pool 1 APR ranging from 11% to 80%.

• RomeDAO is giving a 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking. Market cap is stable so far.

Moonbeam farms

• Solarflare, the Moonbeam deployment of Solarbeam, is lower this week as well with up to 475% APRs on Pool 2s, Pool1s with up to 87% APR. For stablers, yield is about 20% APR.

• StellaSwap, another DEX offering decent yields on Pool2s (600% APR) and a few blue chip Pool 1s with triple digit APR.

Sadly, it’s been a bit of a rough week for the DotSama ecosystem! 

Meter Passport, one of the main bridges into the Moonriver ecosystem, got hacked due to an issue with how it handled the Wrapped ETH contract.

It seems that the additional code introduced over ChainBridge’s implementation by Meter introduced a vulnerability that allowed the attacker to mint unlimited BNB and ETH tokens on the Moonriver. These were used to dump on various AMM markets, and they were also added as collateral to Hundred Finance, a lending protocol, and used to borrow way more than should’ve been possible. 

A curious case where using external oracles was actually the reason it was vulnerable to this bug!

Unlike last time with the KSM hack on Karura, this is all happening on EVM land, so governance can’t really make the users whole. Meter committed to repaying the LPs who lost their money, though there are no specific plans yet.

There also seem to have been a few hiccups with Moonbeam’s runtime 1200 which introduces EIP-1559 to it! According to some Github issues, it seems that the EVM stopped working well on testnet, but the issue seems to have been fixed quickly. 

But technical difficulties happen often, hopefully some great news await us next week!

• Earn From 1 Million in ACA Rewards During Acala’s Inaugural Liquidity Mining Program..

On February 10, Acala will launch the inaugural liquidity mining program, Acala Kikoff, with 1 million in ACA divided into three rewards pools. The program will be extended over six months to include newer liquidity pairs as they become live on Acala Swap, Acala’s trustless DEX.

• Capx to Launch on Acala, Bringing Suite of Products for Unlocking Vested Token Liquidity.

Acala has partnered with Capx that will be bringing their products to the Acala EVM+ environment, including Capx Liquid, which will allow projects to issue Wrapped Vesting Tokens (WVTs) to their stakeholders, Capx Exchange and Capx Lend.

• Acala Enables DOT Bridge in Preparation for DeFi Economy.

Acala has launched a one-directional DOT bridge, a non-custodial solution endorsed by Parity, in order to invite early adopters to bring liquidity to Acala’s DeFi protocols. However, the team warns that users will only be able to exit with their liquidity when the platform is completely enabled and advises caution.

• Solarbeam Foundation Adopts Stable AMM on Moonriver and Moonbeam. 

There’s going to be a Curve-like platform on Moonriver/Moonbeam soon. Stable AMM will be launching first to Solarbeam on Moonriver, and then Solarflare on Moonbeam.

• Meter.io Hack Update.

Moonriver informs its users that the Meter.io team is working on getting the system running after the February 6 hack.

• (Polkadot) Motion 151, to incentivise the community to fight against scams and protect users from falling for them.

• (Kusama) Referendum 173, to upgrade Kusama Runtime to v9160.

• (Kusama) Motion 435, to upgrade Statemine runtime to v700

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

This week we continue our regular series of deep dives! The next in line is the Quartz parachain, the canary deployment of Unique. This one’s an NFT-centered blockchain that has a lot of interesting tech features that also border into DeFi territory, for example a pretty cool model of NFT fractionalization!

Quartz, the Parachain for NFTs

Quartz is a parachain designed to mint and use NFTs in its own dedicated environment. Unlike our previous entry Bit.Country, it’s not specifically designed for a game, though it does aim to support NFTs for Play-to-Earn games. Other than that, you should mostly expect the classic pfp and art NFTs to be here, and later on use cases for government registries and certificates!

What kind of benefits does Quartz bring? Well for one, it’s specialized on NFTs. That is a major benefit for the sanity and wallet of those who mint and trade NFTs, as the block space will be theirs only. Of course NFTs can definitely skyrocket gas fees during super popular mints and high trading activity, but they’re just never going to be on the same scale as DeFi and its arbitrageurs!

Since Quartz is a new platform, it also includes a lot of interesting UX optimizations for NFT users, which can be quite useful in the long run! Let’s run down a few of the key innovations.

Gasless transactions, natively fractionalized NFTs and more

The Unique team focuses strongly on crypto newbies, with whom NFTs are resonating much more than anything else in crypto right now! And newbies do have struggles with acquiring crypto, having to hold gas tokens, choosing the right fees etc.

For this reason, the Quartz blockchain features an interesting feature in Sponsored Transactions, which allows others to make transactions on a user’s behalf. It’s quite similar to the Ethereum concept of meta-transactions, which on Substrate is a native feature that doesn’t require the complex Gas Station Network. Everyone can probably agree that it’s a useful feature to have, especially for an upstart network whose gas token isn’t as ubiquitous as ETH!

The features don’t stop here! Fully leveraging the power of Substrate, Quartz enables things like subscription payments and scheduled transactions, which can give a lot of flexibility to Play-to-Earn developers. Of course the blockchain fully supports the EVM, though it is meant more for these smart contract games rather than financial applications. 

Another innovation that can definitely have vast consequences is the concept of Re-Fungible Tokens (RFTs). As you may know, one unfortunate thing about NFTs is that they're, well, non fungible! This means that regular people often get completely priced out of any expensive collection like BAYC or CryptoPunks.

Of course there are a number of fractionalization projects, but on Quartz this is essentially a native feature of the protocol! Holders of an NFT can decide to split it and distribute shards to other people — so quite different from protocols that turn NFTs into full ERC-20s. This can be a very interesting choice as you’ll be able to trade these NFT shards on the same marketplace, bringing more visibility to them!

Speaking of marketplaces and galleries, those are all natively integrated as well, providing a one-stop ecosystem for all things NFT. The team is also developing solutions to create collections without a single line of code, greatly benefiting independent artists!

So far Unique launched a few “pixelated” collections, for example Substrapunks and Chelobricks. 

Quartz vs. Unique & crowdloan stats

Quartz is mostly the same blockchain as Unique, but it’s deployed on Kusama and so it’s intended to be more experimental. One key difference here is that Unique already exists as an independent Substrate chain, while Quartz is so far the only one that’s connected to an ecosystem of parachains.

Quartz lays the seeds for a future inclusion of Unique as a parachain, which is of course a necessity for an application-specific chain! For an NFT parachain, specifically, you’ll definitely want to have DeFi support from other chains and the ability to supply liquidity from the wider Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems.

As for the Quartz crowdloan, the platform offered 8% of QTZ supply and ended up collecting 54k KSM, which made this slot surprisingly cheap! The token is just about to get listed on an exchange, so we’re just a tad too early to estimate returns for participants.

HydraDX is in the leading position for the next slot auction, which started on February 3, with a good cushion of 2 million DOT collected so far! As before, it’s followed by Interlay and Equilibrium, which would still make it as it stands.

On Kusama, Litmus has won the current auction with over 10,000 KSM raised. SORA is now the most likely winner for the next slot, followed by KICO and Pichiu

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Interlay

TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird encouragement.

• HydraDX

TL;DR: The DeFi protocol offers 10% of its supply in the crowdloan, but it works on a first-come first-serve basis! The team doesn’t want to pay too much for the slot, stopping rewards once squarely in the lead.

• Equilibrium

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses. Plus, it gives you an xDOT derivative to make use of your assets!

Active Farms

Karura changed up its farms, removing BNC and KAR/kUSD pools.

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 23% APR for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 37% APR

A couple of new farms popped up:

• KAR/LKSM with 95% APR

• kUSD/LKSM with 150% APR

• kUSD/RMRK with 114% APR

Moonriver Farms

• Sushi farms on Moonriver have lower APRs this week, ranging from 8% to 35%.

• Solarbeam provides up to 200% APR on Pool 2s, but Pool 1 APR is much lower.

• RomeDAO is giving a 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking.

Moonbeam farms

• Solarflare, the Moonbeam deployment of Solarbeam, has higher rates across the board with up to 574% APRs on Pool 2s, a good choice of Pool1s with up to 100% APR. For stablers, yield increased a bit to an acceptable 19% APR.

A huge tech upgrade is about to land on DotSama that will connect Kusama and Polkadot!

This upgrade to XCM creates the notion of a Universal Ancestor, which is kind of like the root address of the blockchain world! As you may recall from our edition on XCM, the format specifies a URL scheme that creates an “address” for each blockchain, for example putting all Polkadot parachains as children of the Polkadot directory.

Previously, the top level address for the Polkadot chains was the Relay Chain, which meant that the format would only work between parachains of the same network. With the Universal Ancestor, a kind of virtual parent is introduced to each top level blockchain, which means that XCM messages can now be passed to a whole different ecosystem altogether!

That means Kusama, at first, because it’s the only blockchain that implements XCM other than Polkadot. The system is modular and it can be used by other chains, but of course making new universal standards is never easy…

But for the DotSama ecosystem this will be a great addition! Connecting Kusama with Polkadot blurs the lines even more between the two networks, allowing for example DOT holders to take part in Kusama cₕₐₒₛ.

There are no definite timelines for release, as the feature still needs to make its way to the Rococo testnet. But stay tuned!

• Monthly Report | Statemine and Bifrost cross-chain channel opened to expand asset usage scenarios.

Bifrost’s team presents the report and update on the building of the network, including the Bifrost dApp, Bifrost Runtime, Service and more.

• Astar Network, Multichain Smart Contract Platform on Polkadot, Raises $22M in Strategic Round led by Polychain.

Astar is announcing a strategic fundraise with participation from Polychain, various DeFi projects, investment funds, angel investors, including Gavin Wood, Richard Ma, Keisuke Honda, and some executives from Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies.

• HydraDX Omnipool (part 2).

In the second part of the Omnipool R&D series, HydraDX’s team addresses the confusion created by the migration to a two-token design and introduction of Liquid HDX, and explains how using the protocol token HDX for liquidity would endanger the governance and assets in the system.  

• Polkadot Logo On FC Barcelona Uniform. 

Polkadot has reportedly become a sponsor of FC Barcelona, so the Polkadot logo will be on the players’ sleeves for 5 years.

• Open HRMP cross-chain communication between Kintsugi and Karura parachain.

Karura Network will bring KBTC from Kintsugi, which will allow BTC to be used for trading and liquidity.

• XCM v3: Bridge Infrastructure. 

Gavin Wood reports that XCM bridge infrastructure is almost complete and, once operational, will allow parachains on Polkadot to send XCM among them and later to parachains on Kusama as well.

• Gnosis Safe On Moonbeam.

ProtoFire has brought a fork of Gnosis Safe on Moonbeam, which will enable multisigs, advanced transactions, gasless voting and more.

• (Kusama) Referendum 172, to open HRMP channel between Basilisk & Statemine.

• (Kusama) Referendum 171, to remark the text “1KV rules! Will for president :)”.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

This week it’s the turn of Bit.Country, which shares mostly the same name between Kusama and Polkadot. On Kusama, Bit.Country Pioneer took the 13th project slot with over 200,000 KSM, which was quite high for this stage of the parachain auctions. It’s not quite a DeFi parachain, but you’ll surely see it pop up in a few liquidity pools here and there, so it’s definitely worth exploring!

Bit.Country, the Metaverse Parachain

Bit.Country is a Metaverse repository and framework built on Substrate. You can start thinking about it as Decentraland on Polkadot, but Bit.Country definitely goes beyond that initial concept!

In fact, Bit.Country is more like a Metaverse of Metaverses, expanding the concept from one single game world into the Continuum, a world made of expandable sub-blocks that are each their own Metaverse with their own land plots.

You could definitely see how this would be useful! For example Minecraft has tons of different servers with different player settlements and flavors. If we were to scale the Metaverse to these heights of adoption, you’d definitely need more than one single world!

Of course buying a plot in the Metaverse is all about its utility and scarcity. With worlds of worlds, there’d be tons of different land plots to buy. That’s not so bad though: think about how land in Hong Kong is (infinitely) more expensive than in Shenzhen, or any other place in the world. People pay the HK premium for a reason, and a similar thing should happen in Bit.Country!

This difference reflects the more community-centric nature of Bit.Country. Unlike monolithic Metaverse games, Bit.Country is designed to be an accessible place for communities to set up their own metaverses. This could be influencers, projects and corporations who want to create their own virtual world for their communities.

What can you do in the Metaverse anyway?

Each Bit.Country Metaverse is quite flexible and modular! The basic environment is a 3D world where you can explore the territory as an avatar.

A WIP demo of the game.

Each Bit.Country Metaverse has a few subdivisions, which is a buildable area owned by a resident of the Bit.Country. The owner has full control of their subdivision, which allows them to place things like virtual dApps, NFT art, or 3D assets made with the voxel (3D pixel) engine.

The terrain of a subdivision is also fully customizable, and Bit.Country does support interiors in buildings too.

If you’re a player though, it’s not just about building! You can take part in missions created by subdivision holders and the community, participate in your local neighborhood governance, and go to the marketplace to trade NFTs in-game. Indeed, the metaverse can become an interface into other dApps. Think using Uniswap from inside the game, it’s that sort of coolness!

Metaverse creators also have a variety of map templates and themes to choose from, which can be both in-built and community-made. 

So overall Bit.Country metaverses are pretty much what you’d expect from that definition! The directions this could take are basically infinite, and they only depend on what the community wants to build.

The Metaverse Parachain

Let’s now talk a bit more about why Bit.Country chose to become a parachain on both Kusama and Polkadot. The blockchain side of Bit.Country is called Metaverse.Network, and it’s a Substrate-based blockchain like any other parachain candidate. The Kusama deployment is called Bit.Country Pioneer, for pretty obvious reasons!

The Metaverse.Network powers all of the economic functions of the network, including paying with transaction fees with NUUM on Polkadot or NEER tokens on Kusama, but also minting and importing NFTs, managing land plots on the metaverses, adding fungible tokens etc. 

The parachain is optimized for the tasks it needs to compute to make the game run, but it also supports the EVM pallet and thus Solidity smart contracts. 

Bit.Country is probably one of the best examples of why parachains are valuable as a kind of specialized block space. The value of a transaction interacting with DeFi protocols is likely to be many, many times higher than that of buying a small game NFT on Bit.Country. So DeFi users will accept huge gas fees, driving out gamers.

Metaverse games running on generalized blockchains like Ethereum have to contend with this issue, which is why most are now choosing alternative solutions like Polygon. But even that one will eventually reach capacity! Specialized parachains don’t suffer from this: you don’t need to compete for gas with MEV DeFi bots if there is no DeFi on that blockchain!

Bit.Country is still in early access mode, so the game isn’t quite playable yet. But after taking the parachain slot and a massive community raise, the project seems to be on the right track!

NUUM, NEER and crowdloan stats

Bit.Country follows a dual token model like many other games. There is NUUM and NEER, which are the governance plus utility tokens for the two respective deployments. They do have functions as a universal currency to buy Bit.Country land, virtual dApps and other stuff, but the main in-game currency is BIT.

Owning Land gives players a certain allocation of BIT, which is expended when creating objects or buying in-game upgrades.

As for the NEER crowdloan, the project was offering 15% of supply which went to over 25,000 contributors who put up 209k KSM. 

​​

Sadly the token isn’t tradable yet, so we can’t estimate returns. The team has yet to go through some key steps like Sudo key removal and finalizing the NEER distribution, so stay tuned!

Centrifuge has won the third slot of the Polkadot parachain auction, gathering over 5 million DOT! HydraDX is the next in line and currently looking as the most likely winner for the next slot, though things may still get a shake up!

On Kusama, Crab Network has won the current auction with 7,500 KSM raised. Litmus is now in the lead, followed by SORA and Pichiu

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Interlay

TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird encouragement.

• HydraDX

TL;DR: The DeFi protocol offers 10% of its supply in the crowdloan, but it works on a first-come first-serve basis! The team doesn’t want to pay too much for the slot, stopping rewards once squarely in the lead.

• Equilibrium

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses. Plus, it gives you an xDOT derivative to make use of your assets!

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 16% APR (or 23% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 10% APR (36% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 45%, 50% with loyalty.

A couple of new farms popped up:

• KAR/LKSM with 19%/95% APR

• kUSD/LKSM with 31%/157% APR

• kUSD/RMRK with 130% APR

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 93% with loyalty, 28% without.

Moonriver Farms

• Sushi farms on Moonriver offer decent double-digit APR for blue chips.

• Solarbeam provides up to 160% APR on Pool2s, but Pool1s are weaker.

• RomeDAO is giving a 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking.

Moonbeam farms

On Moonbeam we have Solarflare, the Moonbeam deployment of Solarbeam. The Pool2s are very strong with up to 690% APRs and good choice of Pool1s with >100% APR. If you’re into stables right now, there are a couple of stablecoin-only pools with max APR of 15%.

This week we saw a major development for RMRK, an NFT project that’s been on Polkadot since before it had any parachains or smart contracts!

RMRK is available on Statemine, the common good Kusama parachain designed for token transfers. Well, that’s going to change soon!

Now that other parachains are live and can support XCM, it means that RMRK can spread and “infect” these other chains. This is a great benefit for RMRK holders because Statemine doesn’t support any token programmability.

As RMRK explains, Statemine is now “dead” and its holders should migrate to the other parachains where it has XCM support. 

Before you worry, “dead” doesn’t mean that Statemine is getting killed off! It’s just that RMRK outgrew Statemine, a chain that has always been intended for payments and cross-exchange transfers due to its limitations. It’s supposed to be the primary home of permissioned assets like Tether, which is very often used for those purposes. And that’s perfectly fine, as it means we’ll get very cheap transfers if we just need basic capabilities! 

The RMRK migration is not yet complete as governance is only supported on Statemine. But that’s expected to change soon, after which there will be no reason to hold RMRK on Statemine except for potentially sending them to a centralized exchange.

• Introducing Encointer: Making Web3 Truly Inclusive.

After securing Kusama’s second common good parachain slot, Encointer began its deployment to the network. In the post, the Encointer’s team takes a deep dive into the context of creating Encointer and the problems it addresses, which we explained in a past edition.

• RMRK/KSM Bootstrap and Liquidity Incentive Program to be launched on Zenlink DEX.

Opening of the HRMP channel between Statemine and Bifrost now allows RMRK to migrate from Statemine to Bifrost, with the cross-chain DEX Zenlink providing support for that. Zenlink will also launch the RMRK Bootstrap and RMRK Liquidity Incentive Program (Farming) to provide additional gains for RMRK holders on Bifrost.

• Cosmos and Astar (Polkadot) Bridge Is Coming Soon.

Octopus Network, a grant recipient in the Astar Builders Program, is building a versatile bridge on Astar, which will allow all Cosmos SDK-based blockchains to connect to the Polkadot ecosystem through Astar. The bridge will be deployed and tested on the Shiden network.

• 10 Facts About Acala. 

With Acala’s imminent launch on Polkadot, Acala shares factoids about the network, such as the team behind the project, the Hybrid Finance Vision, lcDOT and more.

• Moonbeam Hits 1M Transactions. 

Moonbeam celebrates reaching one million transactions on the network. Moonbeam is also bringing new integrations, 100k+ wallets, 700+ ERC-20 tokens and 1M GLMR tokens locked with collators to the Polkadot ecosystem.

• (Polkadot) Motion 146 a bounty proposal, Polkadot Pioneers Prize, to propel technical innovation on the Polkadot network.

• (Polkadot) Motion 143, to upgrade Polkadot’s runtime to v9151. .

• (Kusama) Referendum 170, to unbrick the Picasso chain. The issue appears to be an unfinished function that made its way to production with a todo! macro, which kills the entire program (blockchain) if executed.

• (Kusama) Motion 426 a proposal to cover the expenses of milestones 4-5 of SubVT.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

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We’ve made it past the first two batches and are now into the “continuous auction” territory on Kusama! The projects from here on have often gotten in for much cheaper than anyone before, but not always! Some of them had strong community traction and locked in a very decent amount of KSM, much more than they actually needed to win.

That’s the case of Picasso, the 12th project parachain and canary deployment for Composable.

Picasso, Composable’s playground

Picasso, the well-known modern artist, was famous for his ability to deconstruct any kind of figure and rebuild it in a new modular structure. That fits the project just right! Picasso is the canary network of Composable, the Polkadot parachain that aims to create the ultimate interoperability solution for cross-chain dApps.

Composable offers interoperability with a set of tools and routines to let different apps and blockchain layers communicate with each other. It’s pretty involved, so we’ll be explaining how the system works in detail.

Picasso is quite unique because it represents a great example of a canary network on Kusama. It’s an easily accessible open platform that is designed as an experimentation playground. On Picasso, both external and internal developers use their abilities and creativity to set up the most needed technologies and features, which will later be improved and used on Composable. The key part is that it’s not going to be just Composable on Kusama, but its own platform.

Still, to better understand what Picasso offers, we should take a step back and clarify what Composable does. 

Composable Layers for Efficient Cross-chain Operations

The rise of dozens of innovative projects across many chains and many developer environments turned DeFi and crypto into a fragmented landscape, where operating across blockchains or benefitting from different services becomes extremely complicated and time consuming. 

We have bridges, of course, but these are still all about multi-chain and not really cross-chain. You can’t interact with a Moonbeam smart contract from Ethereum, and contracts built for Solana or other non-EVM chains definitely can’t talk to Ethereum. A product that is able to connect all chains and satisfy all of these kinds of operations is very much needed, and Composable aims to do its best to create such a platform. 

How would that be possible? Composable accomplishes its mission through a technical stack of layers that covers all aspects of the blockchain architecture. 

The core is in Composable’s Innovation Availability Layer (IAL), a framework that is able to connect across both L1s and L2s and execute cross-chain functions without renouncing security and enabling users to seamlessly “jump” between chains, choosing the most convenient path with the Routing Layer. 

The Cross-Chain Virtual Machine (XCVM), a key part of the IAL architecture, directly communicates with all the smart contracts that join the IAL, abstracting all the information into a unified format. 

Finally, Mosaic is the layer dedicated to liquidity, which makes sure that liquidity is allocated where needed. It is linked to the IAL and XCVM and it is already integrated with Ehtereum, Moonriver and other L2 solutions. Its main purpose is to enable interoperability between layers to seamlessly manage liquidity.

The architecture is complex, to say the least. But that’s the beauty of creating middleware — Composable wants to simplify all of this for the end users and expose a familiar programming tool interface. 

Picasso, Pallets and Layers 

As with Composable, Picasso’s mission is to make things easier. The parachain focuses on leveraging already existing cross-chain communication layers to provide a complete toolkit for developers.

With Picasso, any cross-chain interaction is possible, starting with primitives (fundamental algorithms at the base of the parachain), core features like yield generation, and combined Lego sets such as yield aggregators. 

Picasso uses modularized pieces called pallets to let developers mix and match what they need. These are basically blocks of code that allow inserting programmable options into the runtime, the core logic of the parachain. 

Although developers are highly encouraged to create their own pallets, Picasso offers a set of pre-built pallets to expose new cross-chain features. One of them is an oracle system called Apollo, a fundamental tool for developing complex DeFi and NFT applications.

Apollo is followed by Cubic, the pallet vault created for projects focused on liquidity, such as AMMs, lending protocols, yield strategies and so on. The vault aims to create a cross-chain ecosystem where funds can be seamlessly sent from and to different blockchains including Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot and Kusama. Imagine an AMM where the two sides of the pairs are on different chains! That’s the kind of stuff this could enable.

And last but not least comes Angular, the pallet built for isolated lending pools (think Sushi’s Kashi), which are the most secure way for lenders and borrowers to choose the level of risk they prefer. 

Picasso’s Crowdloan

True to its focus of making the best out of DeFi with interoperability, Composable and Picasso have also structured an unconventional crowdloan strategy. 

In addition to the basic mechanism of commiting DOT/KSM to take part in the crowldloan, Picasso and Composable users were able to directly deposit their ETH or ERC-20 tokens in a dedicated vault. The assets were leveraged with Composable’s yield strategies and the profits used to buy DOT/KSM to participate in the slot auction.

Additional profit is going to be returned to users, who also receive a receipt token (parachain Auction Tokens, or pAT) that can be used to mint Equal Cash (EQLC), a multi-chain stablecoin. 

With these innovative strategies and technologies, Picasso won Kusama’s 12th parachain slot auction with a total of 115,071 KSM (about $28 million) raised from over 10,000 participants, who are going to be rewarded with the distribution of 2,000,000,000 PICA tokens, or 20% of the total supply. 

The parachain is not yet launched so the tokens aren’t liquid yet, but the Composable team has certainly grown fast! It took the 6th parachain slot on Polkadot, breaking its Kusama record with more than 6M DOT, or $130 million!

Centrifuge now looks very likely to take the third slot of this new batch, cementing its lead over all of its competitors. The overall top-6 hasn’t changed since last week, with HydraDX, Interlay and Equilibrium looking to battle it out for the last few slots.

On Kusama, Integritee won the last round with 20,000 KSM committed, while Crab Network leads the current auction.

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Centrifuge

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply to connect the Centrifuge Chain to Polkadot. Offers a whole bunch of early bird, referral, and double dip bonuses!

• Interlay

TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird encouragement.

• HydraDX

TL;DR: The DeFi protocol offers 10% of its supply in the crowdloan, but it works on a first-come first-serve basis! The team doesn’t want to pay too much for the slot, stopping rewards once squarely in the lead.

• Equilibrium

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses. Plus, it gives you an xDOT derivative to make use of your assets!

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 16% APR (or 23% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 10% APR (40% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 51%, 57% with loyalty.

A couple of new farms popped up:

• KAR/LKSM with 30%/160% APR

• kUSD/LKSM with 30%/150% APR

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 120% with loyalty, 35% without.

Moonriver Farms

• Sushi farms on Moonriver got pummeled, with blue chips squarely below 100% APR.

• Solarbeam took a hit, but the Pool2s are offering decent APR.

• RomeDAO is giving a 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking, but total market cap got hit.

Moonbeam farms

On Moonbeam we have Solarflare, the Moonbeam deployment of Solarbeam, with a fine selection of Pool2s and low liquidity Pool1s with >100% APRs. If you’re into stables right now, there are a couple of stablecoin-only pools with APRs of around 8%.

This week we had some very major developments in Kusama with the launch of KSM on Moonriver and the XC-20 standard!

This means that Moonriver users can now teleport Kusama to Moonriver and make use of it to farm! This of course was coupled with a listing on Moonriver’s DEXs, which is a pretty major step for the ecosystem!

The most interesting thing is that it sets up for interoperability between the EVM and the DotSama ecosystem, as XC-20s can be transferred to any other parachain as Substrate-native assets. Tokens following this standard have the “xc” suffix, so KSM becomes xcKSM.

The best thing? You don’t need to change anything in the ERC-20 standard to make XC-20s. So any token on Ethereum or other EVM chains can make its way to DotSama with barely any modification! The importance of this just can’t be overstated.

The XC-20 standard is of course powered by XCM, the Polkadot cross-chain messaging format. Done once, it works with any other parachain that uses XCM, so Moonriver assets will soon be everywhere!

With some time, the same technology will be added to Moonbeam, and other parachains with EVM support will presumably add something similar. Meanwhile, new farms!

Some shiny new pairs on Solarbeam.

• Celer cBridge Partners with Astar Network to Enable Asset Bridging and Inter-chain Messaging and Moonbeam.

Thanks to the partnership with Celer cBridge, Astar users will be able to bridge ETH, USDT, USDC, DAI from Ethereum and BNB, BUSD from BSC to Astar Network. Another integration with Moonbeam also opens up USDT, USDC and CELR, for bridging.

• Astar EVM is activated!

With the launch of Astar’s EVM, devs can now deploy Solidity smart contracts on Astar, making it the second functioning parachain on Polkadot!

• RMRK Fungible Token Bridge to Moonriver is Now Open.

Moonriver has implemented a one-way bridge from Statemine, which will allow users to move and use Statemine-based assets like RMRK to Moonriver. RMRK tokens can be bridged to Moonriver through the Moonriver dApp.

• Introducing Parallel’s 2022 Roadmap! 

Parallel Finance’s team shares the main milestones since their start in 2021, such as securing funding for the project, community and team growth and winning the 4th parachain slot on Polkadot. They then introduce the roadmap for 2022, which will include the v1 Multisig Crowdloan product, v2 of Decentralized Crowdloan, v1 of a Multi-Chain Wallet and more.

• Announcing SocialKYC, Built on KILT. 

KILT Protocol has launched SocialKYC, a service for managing the users’ digital identity and credentials. SocialKYC issues credentials confirming the ownership of the email address or social media accounts, after the user proves that they control the account. SocialKYC then forgets about the user and the credential, as soon as the credential is issued, thus leaving them under the user's control.

• (Polkadot) Referendum 50, to upgrade Polkadot’s runtime to v9151.

• (Kusama) Motion 423, to allow community collators on Statemine.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

And so we’re rounding out the first two batches of Kusama parachains with Kintsugi, the canary deployment of Interlay. Feels like we started it out just yesterday! For variety’s sake we may start to do deep dives on other topics from now on, although we’re nowhere close to tapping all the 20+ parachains that are live on Kusama!

Kintsugi: The Trustless Bitcoin Parachain

So while we’re here talking about parachains, smart contracts, privacy and whatnot, it’s time to take a nod to the roots of this movement and the grandfather of all cryptocurrencies. If it wasn’t for the rise of Bitcoin, we all wouldn’t be here!

Bitcoin is reliable and sturdy. Some may call it obsolete, but that is really by design. For its aspirations of being global storage of value, Bitcoin must be impervious to attacks, hacks and bugs, hence it takes a very long time to upgrade.

We have Polkadot and Bitcoin, two worlds separated by time and innovation, but with mostly the same spirit. Marrying them together is what Kintsugi is trying to do! Well, technically, they’re doing it with Kusama.

A note on Interlay

It makes more sense to explain Interlay, the Polkadot deployment, as it’s the same fundamental design as Kintsugi. We’ll talk more about their differences later.

Interlay and Kintsugi are decentralized networks, built as parachains on DotSama, which focus on connecting Bitcoin to other ecosystems like Ethereum, Cosmos, and of course Polkadot itself!

Interlay uses the flexibility of the parachains to create the perfect environment for bridging Bitcoin to the smart contract world. The system is fully trustless and community-based, using over-collateralized vaults to back the peg of InterBTC, the name of Interlay’s pegged BTC. 

This is a major difference from assets like Wrapped BTC, which are fully custodial and not too different from USDT or USDC but for Bitcoin. WBTC works as a stop-gap solution, but we really need a decentralized alternative for long-term resilience. That’s where InterBTC comes in!

Cracking the pegged Bitcoin nut is tough! Fully trustless bridges without intermediaries are essentially impossible to create, as Bitcoin’s lack of smart contracts means it can’t verify other blockchains. Interlay uses economic incentives to make sure nobody really wants to run away with the Bitcoin instead. 

InterBTC works through a system of Vaults on the Bitcoin blockchain. In order to create a vault, users need to deposit and lock some collateral assets on Interlay/Kintsugi (DOT/KSM and others) and activate the interBTC bridge. At this point the user or liquidity provider can lock their Bitcoin and mint interBTC. 

Having a collateral that ensures the value of interBTC is critical to guarantee that InterBTC maintains value, even if the original BTC was lost! The collateral would just be liquidated to pay for the withdrawal.

To ensure maximum peg stability the collateral is always significantly more than the value of the BTC, and you can use multiple forms of it. It’s almost like a Maker for BTC, but with the added stability of having actual BTC secured!

An additional and interesting feature is that Vaults can even leverage their positions by borrowing collateral from users, who are going to benefit by earning rewards. This aims to improve capital efficiency, which is probably the only weak point of this type of solution.

But the benefits are obvious. InterBTC can be used for lending, yield farming, for collateral and more, just like any other token. InterBTC is flexible and unlocks Bitcoin liquidity for DeFi in Polkadot and Ethereum, Cosmos and beyond. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars of potential DeFi TVL here!

Kintsugi vs. Interlay

So Interlay is cool, but what about Kintsugi? How is it different? There aren’t that many differences, like in most parachains. Besides being called kBTC instead of InterBTC, Kintsugi is designed to be more experimental and wilder in terms of its parameters. You can of course expect most major updates to make their way to Kintsugi first.

Still, they are two different communities with two different governance tokens. Speaking of the token, it is an important part of the Interlay system and KINT or INTR token holders are responsible for making sure the system works! 

Its governance is quite similar in principle to MakerDAO’s governance, where the community tunes the parameters to ensure the system is safe and effective for users. Borrowing a few concepts from Polkadot governance, Interlay community members elect a dedicated council for these decisions. 

Kintsugi won Kusama’s 11th slot auction by raising 200,000 KSM from over 8,000 contributors, who were rewarded with a distribution of 1 million KINT (10% of KINT total supply). 

Despite being one of the later parachains, Kintsugi actually launched its network and KINT is already tradable. At a price of $26, crowdloan contributors made approximately a 50% return so far!

As expected from the past few weeks Composable locked the 2nd slot of the new batch, opening up competition further down the standings!

The biggest change since last week is definitely the rise of HydraDX which is now solidly in the top-6 of parachains that might make it.

On Kusama, auctions have restarted with Integritee currently leading the way.

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Centrifuge

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply to connect Centrifuge Chain to Polkadot. Offers a whole bunch of early bird, referral, and double dip bonuses!

• Interlay

TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird bonuses too!

• HydraDX

TL;DR: The DeFi protocol offers 10% of its supply in the crowdloan, but it works on a first-come first-serve basis! The team doesn’t want to pay too much for the slot, stopping rewards once squarely in the lead.

• Equilibrium

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses. Plus, it gives you an xDOT derivative to make use of your assets!

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 16% APR (or 23% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 10% APR (40% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 51%, 57% with loyalty.

A couple of new farms popped up:

• KAR/LKSM with 30%/160% APR

• kUSD/LKSM with 30%/150% APR

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 120% with loyalty, 35% without.

Moonriver Farms

• Sushi farms on Moonriver continue with decent strength, especially for blue chips.

• Solarbeam farms remain strong, especially in the Pool2s.

• RomeDAO is giving a 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking.

As we anticipated last week, Moonbeam has launched! 

And in doing so it became the first fully functional parachain on Polkadot. So after almost a week, where are we standing? Well the GLMR token is pretty widely available on centralized exchanges, and prices Moonbeam at over $13 billion FDV already!

And in the short time it’s been live it has already generated 60,000 wallets and 300,000 transactions!

But of course we’re mostly interested in DeFi here! And for DeFi we need bridges and protocols. On the former we’re already covered: Meter Passport rolled out support for Moonbeam, allowing you to transfer ETH, USDT and WBTC back and forth across the two networks. Anyswap also added Moonbeam but only on minor coins so far.

In terms of projects we can get a good idea on them by checking out the tokens that have been launched on Moonbeam so far. Among Moonriver projects we’re seeing Solarbeam deployed as Solarflare, making it the first DEX of the ecosystem.

So the gist is that we’re definitely moving! There are a number of DEXs launching, though other projects still need to come. In terms of integrations we definitely still need a few important pieces, such as more bridges and more explorers, apps and much more. One thing definitely worth noting is that Moonbeam launched waaay faster than Moonriver, owing to all that canary network experience!

We’ll continue monitoring the new networks as they launch. For now, stay tuned and start bridging!

• The Future of Privacy on Web 3.

The founders of the Web3 privacy projects, such as Manta, Obscuro, Railgun and Secret Foundation, discuss topics that should be addressed to push privacy on Web 3.0.

• HydraDX Crowdloan Update.

HydraDX’s team posted an update about retargeting their crowdloan for the parachain slot #9, where they are at the leading position, and providing information about rewards.

• Mosaic Integration With Moonbeam.

Composable Finance announces the upcoming integration with Moonbeam, which will allow $GLMR users to easily transfer tokens between Moonbeam and Ethereum, Moonriver, Fantom, Avalanche, Polygon, and more.

• Connext Integration With Moonbeam. 

New integration will allow users to transfer assets to/from Moonbeam directly from other L2s and sidechain systems. 

• (Polkadot) Motion 139 a proposal for a recurring payment (quarterly) to cover maintenance, operations and human resource costs for Polkassembly.

• (Kusama) Referendum 165, to approve Bifrost's HRMP channel request with Statemine.

• (Kusama) Referendum 164, to open a HRMP channel between Statemine & Moonriver. 

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

Time sure flies when you’re having fun! Our journey into the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems has reached Kusama’s 10th auction slot, won by Heiko, the canary network of Parallel Finance. 

Heiko: The Parachain Bank

This one’s interesting for us because it’s another application-specific parachain for DeFi. That is, it doesn’t want to be some generic smart contract platform, instead it’s a family of dApps rolled into a parachain. Parallel and Heiko leverage this very hard, to the point that they don’t seem to be taking third party projects at all!

So what does this DeFi parachain do? Fundamentally, both Parallel and Heiko aim to give DOT and KSM holders many extra options for earning yield and growing the ecosystem. This includes liquid staking, innovative borrowing mechanics and StableSwap-like pools.

Parallel/Heiko is also actively looking to provide financing for other parachains by expanding the options for participating in parachain auctions, for example by borrowing DOT/KSM for a flat interest rate, instead of diluting their token supply.

There aren’t many differences between Heiko and Parallel, so it makes sense to study the latter first. Let’s start! 

What is Parallel Finance?

Parallel Finance’s core function is a decentralized money market (think Compound, Aave) where users can deposit their DOT and KSM tokens and earn extra money on their assets. This is not as trivial as it seems because of the characteristics of DOT staking. 

Even with >50% of the supply locked in staking, returns are still on the order of 20%, which is much higher than the usual you’d pay to borrow some coin. 

There is also an issue of blockchain security at play here! We can expect that any DOT borrowing market would have an interest rate at least as high as the staking rate, which means that holders would be incentivized to remove their assets and make the network more insecure.

The solution is, you guessed it, liquid staking. When users stake DOT in Parallel’s pool, they receive a derivative called xDOT, which accrues the interest given by staking and at the same time ensures liquidity, as it’s freely tradable. The xDOT can then be supplied to the money market to earn additional interest from borrowers. 

One cool thing about Parallel is that it integrates an optimized AMM for redeeming xDOT with the regular DOT, based on the same “flattened curve” formula used by Curve. An xy=k AMM (Uniswap V2) is of course present as well.

Heiko, Parallel’s canary on Kusama

Like Parallel, Heiko aims to maximize usage of basically dormant capital. In addition to all the basic features of any DeFi platform, Heiko is currently focusing on supporting other project parachains in their bids.

As you may know, the core of Polkadot’s value lies in parachains, which can be acquired by locking up enough DOT and KSM in the system. Most projects today use crowdloans to source that liquidity from users, but that carries opportunity costs in that you can’t use your assets while the slot is leased. This means no staking and no management of your DOT/KSM, so that liquidity is effectively unusable for the time being.

With Heiko’s auction auction lending feature, users are able to lend their KSM and DOT to support both Kusama and Polkadot parachain auctions. This is a tease of the future parachain lending feature, and it carries plenty of benefits for participants! For one, you get to control your liquidity by holding cTokens representing your DOT/KSM. Plus, there are extra rewards in PARA or HKO waiting for you!

The Heiko lending platform has been quite successful so far! A large chunk of all Polkadot crowdloans had their liquidity come in from this platform. And it’s easy to see why, as you literally get the same benefits of contributing regularly plus PARA rewards plus a chance to use your money! 

HKO token Distribution

Heiko won Kusama’s 10th slot auction with a total of 202,793 KSM from over 10,000 contributors and is going to distribute 5% of HKO tokens total supply to its supporters. 

As many parachains in this batch, the HKO token isn’t quite live yet, so we can’t estimate returns, unfortunately. But the parachain itself is definitely obtaining traction!

All quiet on the parachain front! This week the auction itself wasn’t live, so we don’t have a new winner. Composable is still looking strong, so for now we shouldn’t expect major changes here. But the road to finishing all 6 slots is long, so the standings will almost certainly look different a few weeks down the line!

Current Polkadot leaderboard by parachains.info. 

On Kusama, Robonomics took the 20th and last slot of this current batch. We are still not even halfway through on finishing all announced slot auctions, so stay tuned!

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Composable

TL;DR: Starting out fast with a 12% supply offering. The platform aims to be an “everything VM” to hold every possible smart contract architecture on one chain. The nice thing is that you can also contribute with stablecoins to this one!

• Centrifuge

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply to connect Centrifuge Chain to Polkadot. Offers a whole bunch of early bird, referral, and double dip bonuses!

• Interlay

TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird bonuses too!

• Equilibrium

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses. Plus, it gives you an xDOT derivative to make use of your assets!

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 16% APR (or 23% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 15% APR (45% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 51%, 57% with loyalty.

A couple of new farms popped up:

• KAR/LKSM with 45%/230% APR

• kUSD/LKSM with 30%/150% APR

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 120% with loyalty, 35% without.

Moonriver Farms

• Sushi farms on Moonriver returned, with a few high yields on blue chips.

• Solarbeam farms see a strong return of the Pool2s but solid choices above 100% throughout.

• RomeDAO is giving a 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking.

We had a brief recap of Polkadot’s year last week, so with 2022 just started, let’s also hear it straight from the horse's mouth!

Gavin Wood published his own view of what 2021 brought, which focuses on technical progress, community and growth for Polkadot. One thing that immediately jumps to mind is the metric of code written. You may think that with parachains already kind of live on testnet in 2020, (now) last year was much lighter in development…

Most of the current Polkadot code base turns out to have been written in 2021, which is a showcase of just how hard it was to get this thing right! Obviously, standard caveats apply about lines of code not equaling quality or importance, and yadda, yadda. Still an impressive outlook!

Besides the basic parachain code, Polkadot saw a major delivery of XCM v2, which is the cross-chain messaging format key to gluing all the parachains together. We also saw improvements to how metadata works, which is once again crucial for all the diverse parachains to communicate with each other.

In terms of cool things that happened, Substrate is about to get its own Stack Exchange (developers will love this!) and we got some “Anti-Scam” group action going on. Basically, a group of people from Parity and Web3 Foundation worked over the year to shut down almost one thousand websites based on tips from the community. These mostly included various types of phishing schemes, of which there were more than 2300 so far. For this year, this whole process should become even more community-driven.

And as for Polkadot’s 2022, the hardcore buidling is basically done! With all the basic features live, it’s time to optimize and refactor the code while the community builds out the parachains, bridges and infrastructure. It seems that the goal is to decisively reach the promised land of 1000 TPS for each parachain, which is certainly quite ambitious! 

And oh boy, 2022 is already shaping up strong for Polkadot. Moonbeam is preparing for a  January 11 Launch. Next week we’ll see GLMR transfers and the launch of the EVM, and surely other parachains from the first batch will be launching very soon as well!

• Polkadot Dev Community.

Gavin Wood shares an extract from the Electric Capital Developer Report (2021), which places Polkadot as the second-largest dev community after Ethereum.

• NFTrade Integration With Moonriver.

Moonriver announces that from now on MOVR users will be able to easily create, buy, sell, p2p swap, farm, and launch NFTs on Kusama.

• Dot.Finance Migration

Dot.Finance will be migrating from Binance Smart Chain to the Moonriver Network.

• (Polkadot) Motion 137 a proposal about covering the maintenance costs of running a new RPC node Dwellir.

• (Kusama) Referendum 163, to open HRMP channel between Statemine & Karura.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

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We interrupt our regular series of parachain deep dives to celebrate the passing of this amazing 2021 for Polkadot! 

It goes without saying that it’s been a good year for everyone. We had a powerful bull market in the earlier part of the year, and then lots of time for buidling! Jokes aside, the latter part of the year was definitely not the standard definition of a bear market. Supercycle, anyone?

A steadily growing adoption cycle is where Polkadot is set up to shine with its large and very varied ecosystem. As you’ve hopefully seen with some of the parachains we covered, it all goes beyond the basic EVM chain to set up farms!

But let’s go back to January 2021. The Polkadot network was launched with transfers fully enabled by that point, but we were still waiting for the main value driver of this new network: parachains.

This year was all about the parachains: setting them up, testing them, auctioning them off and deploying them.

The first stage, the testnet, had already begun in August 2020. We saw a key update in late December, effective in January 2021, where Rococo V1 was deployed. This was the one that let developers use the testnet to connect their own parachain, which was pretty critical.

Fast forward through six months of testing and in June we saw the first parachain being officially launched on Kusama: Statemine. This was the first common good parachain that performs a function that is important to the entire community (in this case, token transfers). Parachain auctions for Kusama started immediately after in mid June, while Polkadot got started in November.

The road to get here was rocky at times. For example we had a small hack to a parachain and a few chain halts in the early days as the teams were still ironing out all the kinks. Plus, not all parachains managed to complete their launches on Kusama, so hopefully 2022 will be the year it all comes online!

More than anything else, 2022 is the year of Polkadot parachains. Though the first 5 are already live, it’s still going to take a month or so for them to be functional. Then in March we’ll see the next batch going technically live. Then it’s just about refining cross-shard communication (XCMP) and the Polkadot network can be considered fully launched!

A few metrics to behold

Sometimes a picture’s worth a thousand words, won’t you say?

Let’s look at a few figures to track DotSama growth this year. We’ll start with the obvious…

DOT started the year at $9.2 and quickly topped at $47 and $54 in the second part of the year. This year has been all about the layer 1 narratives, and DOT was very much in the lead for much of the year.

Of course, some competitors later took mindshare away by opening gigantic floodgates of incentives. Meanwhile, Polkadot hasn’t even properly launched! All the building and set up this year are shaping it up perfectly to become the L1 play for 2022.

The Kusama crowdloans ended up locking up a whopping 31% of total supply! Another 41.7% is currently staked, so in total only 28% of all KSM is currently circulating.

So Kusama parachains have attracted a fair amount of attention and brought devoted community members to each of the projects.

And that resulted in pretty amazing growth for Moonriver, which shows numbers comparable to a few other alt L1s. And consider that there are at least 20 of these here!

But let’s face it, KSM is worth less than 10% of DOT. As much as its community is strong, the market is clearly favoring Polkadot.

We’ve seen nothing yet.

Looking ahead for 2022

What kinds of predictions can we make about next year?

Polkadot parachains will launch. They’ll work, because we already know from Kusama that they do!

By the end of the year we’ll probably get a couple dozen parachains up and running. Likely with some form of XCMP already set up to transfer assets between them.

And then, who knows! But the Polkadot ecosystem is already alive and vibrant with original development, even going beyond the holy trinity of DeFi, NFTs and GameFi. We’re seeing identity, data storage, real world assets and many exciting primitives quietly flocking to Polkadot.

It’s certainly the ecosystem to watch for 2022!

Happy New Year from the DeFi Pulse team! 

The second Polkadot parachain batch is proceeding as planned! Efinity took the first slot with 7.6M DOT committed, which is lower than any of the other five! That makes sense, since the second batch only goes live in March.

The top-5 is looking fairly stacked with Composable most likely to take this second slot.

On Kusama, Crust and Sakura won the last two slots, while Robonomics is leading this batch.

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Composable

TL;DR: Starting out fast with a 12% supply offering. The platform aims to be an “everything VM” to hold every possible smart contract architecture on one chain. The nice thing is that you can also contribute with stablecoins to this one!

• Centrifuge

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply to connect Centrifuge Chain to Polkadot. Offers a whole bunch of early bird, referral and double dip bonuses!

• Interlay

TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird bonuses too!

• Equilibrium

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses. Plus it gives you an xDOT derivative to make use of your assets!

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 16% APR (or 23% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 15% APR (45% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 51%, 57% with loyalty.

A couple of new farms popped up:

• KAR/LKSM with 45%/230% APR

• kUSD/LKSM with 30%/150% APR

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 120% with loyalty, 35% without.

Moonriver Farms

• Sushi farms on Moonriver staying below 100% APR.

• Solarbeam farms offer plenty of choices with more than 100% APR and decent rates for blue chip tokens.

• RomeDAO is giving a solid 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking.

Astar Network published a very interesting rundown of the lessons they learned with Shiden, their canary deployment.

This is the stuff you learn the hard way when you go through with a launch and is yet another reason why Kusama is so useful! Testnets with no value only get you so far. Here the team experienced realistic conditions that set them up nicely for the Astar launch!

One of them was the sheer volume. The team didn’t expect to receive quite as much volume as they did, so the launch strategy wasn’t optimal for the blockchain’s state at the time. The team didn’t quite explain it in detail, but the timing of transfers here was crucial.

An important aspect is also the EVM module. The features available at launch are often key to creating the initial impression of a project. The team didn’t have the EVM enabled at launch, which likely wasted some of the initial momentum. For Astar, they aim to enable the Frontier pallet with the EVM as soon as they launch. As we mentioned in the Shiden deep dive, the Astar EVM also allows using Solidity dev tools like Truffle and Hardhat, so the race for the EVM platform will be heated!

Finally, a bit of centralization turns out to be helpful! Adding crowdloan participants into a database helps retrieving the list for later, when the rewards need to be delivered. Otherwise the team is stuck with running expensive and slow node queries! This will surely get better as more indexing tools reach maturity.

So if you’re just an honest farmer you can rest assured that the Polkadot teams have learned most lessons to be had with Kusama. After plowing through chain halts and launch complexities, Polkadot should be a breeze! Let’s see who will be the first parachain of the new batch to fully launch.

• HydraDX Omnipool

The HydraDX team explains how their Omnipool with HDX as the connector pair will avoid creating too many fluctuations, using LHDX to supply liquidity mining rewards.

• Moonbeam Begins Decentralization Process and Expands Collator Set

Moonbeam is speeding through the launch phases, now adding collators and decentralizing the network. Next step is the EVM!

• Introducing Taiga

Taiga Protocol aims to build a StableSwap exchange and synthetic in what may be the first project committing to build on Karura!

• (Polkadot) Referendum 48 to fix Statemint, which was launched with the wrong cryptographic scheme initially.

• (Kusama) Referendum 162, to unbrick Composable’s Picasso. The parachain stopped producing blocks after a bug in the configuration when porting to Kusama.

• (Polkadot) Treasury Proposal 79, submitted by Messari to contribute for reports on Polkadot

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

We’re now at Slot 9 of the Kusama parachain auctions, almost through the first two batches! This time we take a look at Altair, the canary network of Centrifuge.

Centrifuge is very interesting because it focuses on Real World DeFi. They’re the provider used by Maker to create their RWA vaults, so it’s definitely a good example of a multi-chain project that is based on Substrate and DotSama. Let’s see how it all works!

Altair: The Pre-Centrifuge

The core value proposition of the Centrifuge ecosystem is Tinlake, a lending platform for real world assets. It connects real world businesses looking to get a loan with DeFi users who want to earn some yield on their crypto. Pretty straightforward, no?

Underneath it’s a rather complex system both from a legal and technical perspective, so let’s unpack how it works! 

The Tinlake Asset Originators

The Centrifuge system relies on businesses looking for liquidity, called asset originators. These will take some real world form of collateral — which can be an invoice, mortgage, bond, or royalty contract — and then tokenize the documents as NFTs. The NFTs are put into a Tinlake pool that counts them as collateral to borrow DAI on the other side of the pool.

There are quite a few vaults on Tinlake right now, so let’s check out what kinds of deals you can get!

1754 Factory is a company that manages short-term cash advances for the users of Bling, an app offering micro-loans for primarily French consumers. So Tinlake lets you finance these deals for a minimum of 8% APY, plus the 25% CFG bonus. 

Branch is similar to Bling, but centered around Kenya, Mexico, Tanzania and other developing countries.

Next we have Harbor Trade Credit, which is a supply chain finance company that helps suppliers and clients to meet their liquidity needs. For example, suppliers can issue invoices and use them as collateral for loans, getting the liquidity faster.

Another interesting vault is New Silver, which is a company that finances real estate entrepreneurs in the “fix and flip” business. It’ll provide loans to both buy and refurbish a home, allowing businesses to operate with much more flexibility. This one offers a 4% base APY.

There are many more vaults but the common theme is the same: niche lending and fintech companies that probably have a hard time getting liquidity from banks due to how specialized their business is (or whatever reason, banks can be quite arbitrary in general!).

You know how in the early days of DeFi people talked about banking the unbanked and helping the real world with crypto finance? Well, most of DeFi is actually focused on trading. But Centrifuge isn’t! It’s an actual real world product offering utility to companies who can’t get served by banks.

Of course you’ll also need to temper your expectations. There are no Pool2s and degen farms here, the yield comes from businesses actually paying it. And in the real world, 8% is a lot! To put it in perspective, you’d end up paying about 240% extra for your house if you took a 30 year mortgage at these rates.

But why Altair?

Tinlake is Centrifuge’s main product, and it has existed on Ethereum for a while now. But the use cases envisioned by Centrifuge require extremely fast throughput and cheap fees, as well as privacy. While Ethereum is a good start, the team has decided to create the specialized Centrifuge Chain to optimize the uses it needs.

For the longest time, Centrifuge was a standalone blockchain based on Substrate. With the parachain auctions live, the team decided to spin up Altair ahead of the main Polkadot parachain slot that will turn the main Centrifuge Chain into a parachain as well.

Altair is designed to be the wilder and more experimental brother of Centrifuge. It will get new updates faster and support more experimental use cases, like using tradable NFTs (like CryptoPunks or BAYC) as collateral for Tinlake!

The Altair Crowdloan

Altair raised 187k KSM in its crowdloan and distributed 400 AIR for each KSM, which is about 15% of the AIR supply. But almost half of the total went to CFG holders through a snapshot.

Unfortunately AIR isn’t tradable yet so we can’t estimate returns for this one either, so stay tuned!

And the first Polkadot parachain batch is done! Clover took the fifth and final Polkadot parachain slot.

Crowdloans for the next batch are already live, so you can already start supporting your favorite parachain. But keep in mind that these ones will go live in March, so the waiting period may be a bit longer here.

On Kusama, Zeitgeist won last week’s slot. Sakura, the Kusama parachain for Clover, is leading this batch.

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Manta Network

TL;DR: Offering 15% of the supply to launch the main Polkadot version of Calamari. You’ll get extra rewards from the MantaPay liquidity bootstrap, and a bonus if you contribute from Binance.

• Efinity

TL;DR: An NFT parachain created by Enjin, offers 10% of the supply. You get fancy NFTs for being one of the top contributors!

• Composable

TL;DR: Starting out fast with a 12% supply offering. The platform aims to be an “everything VM” to hold every possible smart contract architecture on one chain. The nice thing is that you can also contribute with stablecoins to this one!

• Centrifuge

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply to connect Centrifuge Chain to Polkadot. Offers a whole bunch of early bird, referral and double dip bonuses!

• Interlay

TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird bonuses too!

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 20% APR (or 45% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 15% APR (45% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 65%, 95% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 120% with loyalty, 35% without.

Sushi farms on Moonriver have recovered a bit, but struggle to stay above 100% APR.

Solarbeam farms are strong with plenty of >100% APR choices for brave degens.

RomeDAO is giving a solid 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking.

After this week we finally know our 5 parachains to open the Polkadot season! We have Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Parallel and Clover. 

And all 5 can be DeFi parachains!

We’ve written about the canary deployments for the first three, which were Karura, Moonriver and Shiden. There aren’t many differences between them and their younger but beefier brothers, so they should give you a good idea of what to expect!

Parallel and Clover are relatively new entries! Parallel exists on Kusama as Heiko (and it’s next on our list of deep dives by order of inclusion). Clover never quite managed to get a Kusama slot until now, but it hit back hard on Polkadot. It’s a smart contract parachain targeted for DeFi, much like the others on this list. 

It will definitely be interesting to see how the lack of Kusama experience will set apart Clover from all the others. We can expect most parachains to be fully operational between January and February, although you never know what might happen!

And what could be better to celebrate this achievement than a new logo?

This week, that cute little blob replaced the basic “P” that we all came to appreciate. It was a nice P for sure, but it definitely makes sense to have a more abstract logo for such a project!

So while we had our fun with Kusama and its early deployments, Polkadot is what most people know and feel compelled to join. Once it launches the parachains next week on December 23, the Polkadot ecosystem will finally be ready to join the ranks of popular destinations like Solana and Avalanche. 

But it’s important to remember that here we have a whole 5 chains, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Acala and Parallel are likely to be the more “sober” alternatives as they focus on doing DeFi “in-house”. Moonbeam, Shiden and Clover may get crazier, it all depends on the devs!

🎄 PSA: We’ll be skipping the next edition for the holidays, but we’ll come back on New Year’s to close this amazing year for Polkadot! 🎄

• Acala To Initiate Its Launch Process on Polkadot: Here’s Our Approach.

After winning the first parachain slot auction on Polkadot, the Acala team can now start the launch of their network by enabling ACA transfers, lcDOT, EVM+ and more.

• Introducing Dolphin Testnet.

Manta has launched a testnet called Dolphin, which will include three main components for users to try: the Dolphin Signer to privatize transactions, the Faucet for obtaining testnet tokens and the testnet app.

• Remix Project on Moonbeam.

One of the most popular development environments for smart contracts on Ethereum, has created a plugin for Moonbeam, which will allow Solidity devs to quickly deploy on it.

• (Polkadot) Referendum 46 to upgrade Shell to Statemint, enabling generic tokens on Polkadot.

• (Polkadot) Referendum 45 to upgrade Polkadot Runtime to v9140.

• (Polkadot) Motion 133 a proposal for Polkadot to join the Messari Hub, a community-driven marketplace for independent research written by qualified contributing analysts and funded by crypto organizations.

• (Polkadot) Motion 132 a proposal to cover maintenance costs for all related Polkadot projects for the year 2021.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

Continuing our journey into Polkadot and Kusama universes, today it’s time to talk about Kusama’s 8th slot action winner: Basilisk. 

Basilisk is different from all the others in that it’s almost a HydraDX spin-off. Though it shares most of the resources, Basilisk has a different purpose and a (somewhat) different team. Let’s dive deep into what this DeFi-focused parachain is working on! 

Basilisk: The Liquidity Snek

Basilisk is basically a very independent head of the HydraDX, born as a natural consequence of its growth.

Developed on Kusama, Basilisk focuses on bootstrapping young projects with liquidity and a fair token distribution.

If you’ve ever built a project in crypto or anywhere else, you’ll know that the combination of limited resources and experience makes it really difficult to attract public attention at first. In crypto and DeFi, attention is basically the same as liquidity and investment, so a lot of platforms appeared over the years offering various liquidity bootstrap services. But most of them are centralized.

So, how could we create a decentralized liquidity bootstrapping service that is cheap and efficient? This is the question that the Basilisk set out to answer with their unique liquidity pool product wrapped in a Kusama parachain!

Basilisk’s Liquidity Pools

Basilisk offers projects the chance to raise money with the Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP), which is basically a token sale and an AMM liquidity seeding combined into one.

Liquidity Bootstrap Pools consist of two tokens: the project’s token and a collateral token (e.g. DAI) that are distributed with changing proportions. In the beginning, the project’s token makes up nearly the entire pool. As the LBP event starts, smart contracts decrease the target weight of the project token, which also changes the effective price at which it can be purchased. The idea is that the pool constantly tries to engineer sell pressure and ensure that everyone gets in at a fair price. It’s basically a Dutch Auction system where the price is lowered until it finds the right buyer. This is also why the initial LBP price is usually a humongously large amount that is way higher than what the team actually wants to sell at!

The end result of an LBP is that the contributors got the tokens at the price they wanted, while the project has all the liquidity it needs for launch (or development).

Basilisk’s AMMs 

The LBP is the main hook for Basilisk, but it’s not the only type of AMM it enables!

We also have your standard xy=k pools, much like Uniswap V2, with one important innovation: matched orders. Basically, instead of always trading with the pool, the protocol will actually facilitate a direct swap transaction if there’s one party selling and another buying for a similar amount. 

The stablers will also be happy to know Basilisk aims to support a “flat curve” AMM like Curve, enabling super efficient stablecoin swaps.

But Basilisk’s modular framework does not stop here: the platform supports vAMM-based pools like the ones seen in Perpetual Protocol or Siren. These are perfect for derivatives trading, which is not something you often see in a decentralized exchange!

Community is life

Basilisk’s roadmap is full and the path is still long, but the Snek team counts one of the most active and engaged communities in DotSama land.

Basilisk will return the favor and reward the most involved community members, who are going to be recruited as stewards, with a distribution of 5% of the BSX token allocation. 

So, if you are already tinkering with Basilisk, stay tuned! 

Why Basilisk is not HydraDX’s canary 

We’ve mentioned that Basilisk is not HydraDX’s clone on Kusama, so how are they different from each other? Well, for the most part it’s all about the Omnipool.

Like Basilisk, HydraDX focuses on revolutionizing the world of exchanges and liquidity pools. But it wants to do so with the biggest liquidity pool the DeFi ecosystem has ever seen! This Omnipool can be considered as an “ocean” of assets, instead of many separate pools.

Basically, HydraDX uses the fact that it can freely mint HDX to make it the base pair for every other asset. So you can provide liquidity with one token and the protocol will match that deposit with some new HDX. But since it’s all one pool, you can essentially trade a single token against the entire HDX supply in the pool. This reduces slippage and makes the exchange more efficient and friendly.

Anyone swapping assets for HDX will be effectively giving their assets to the protocol, so we see the idea of Protocol Controlled Value in full swing here!

Basilisk’s Crowdloan Stats 

Basilisk has won the 8th slot action on Kusama raising 222,221.915 KSM over a cap of 222,222 KSM, counting 11,891 unique contributors.

Contributors are rewarded with BSX tokens based on the size of their contribution during the crowdloan. After having won the parachain spot, 15% of BSX total supply is being distributed to contributors. Unfortunately the token is not tradable yet, so we can’t estimate the returns for crowdloan participants. But hopefully that should be solved soon!

As expected last week, Parallel took the fourth Polkadot parachain slot!

On Kusama, Subsocial quickly took the last round. For this one we have another dark horse instantly rising to prominence, Zeitgeist.

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Clover

TL;DR: Now in a strong lead at 5.49M DOT bidding for 20% of the supply. The parachain is a DeFi-focused smart contract platform largely backed by Bithumb Global.

• Manta Network

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply to launch the main Polkadot version of Calamari (see above for an explainer). Collected 3.7M DOT.

• Efinity

TL;DR: An NFT parachain created by Enjin, offers 10% of the supply. Took second place with a 4.5M DOT contribution so far.

Active Crowdloans (Kusama)

• Zeitgeist

TL;DR: Offering 12.5% of ZTG supply, Zeitgeist wants to build a generalized prediction market using Substrate.

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 20% APR (or 45% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 15% APR (45% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 65%, 95% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 120% with loyalty, 35% without.

Sushi farms on Moonriver continue to lose profitability, seeing a 10% APR even! But there are still a few decent pools with 80% or so.

Solarbeam farms are still running strong with plenty of >100% APR choices for brave degens.

RomeDAO is still giving a solid 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking (yeah that’s a lot!)

Moonriver had a pretty busy week with a major protocol upgrade and a few new projects deploying!

With Runtime Upgrade 1001 the protocol introduced a few changes to how its staking mechanism worked. As you may know, parachains don’t need to have validators but they still require dedicated collators to produce blocks. It’s kind of similar to the role of a sequencer in rollups.

One change is largely cosmetic as the platform changed any use of the word nominator to delegator. This is mostly to avoid confusion with Polkadot nominators and because the collator selection model is much closer to that of Delegated Proof of Stake. Hence, any action where you’d “nominate” collators is now called differently, even if it does the same thing as before. This barely changes anything on the EVM side, as you’re quite unlikely to be using delegator-related functions in your DeFi protocol code.

More significant is the fact that you now have 48 hour delays for delegating and withdrawing your stake, which was bumped from 2 hours. This is important to increase the stability of the network, which is always useful! The more important benefit is that Moonriver might see an increase in gas capacity soon, as the more stable it is the safer it is to increase its limits. But no guarantees there just yet!

Beyond that, we saw two new protocols landing to Moonriver: MAI (MiMatic) and Mochi Market. MAI is a stablecoin protocol like DAI and as such becomes the first native stablecoin on Moonriver. While Mochi is a cross-chain platform for NFTs, which are definitely all the rage these days!

MOVR unique addresses are steadily growing in the meantime, so things are looking quite good!

• #19 Referendum Proposal | Bifrost mainnet v0.9.12 upgrade, online vsBond market.

Bifrost announces its runtime upgrade to v0.9.12, which will include vsBonds, certificates representing the parachain auction period and vsKSM/vsDOT redemption rights.

• Introduction of Fat Contract.

Phala Network has launched a powerful smart contract, Fat Contract9, which will support computation-intensive tasks, provide low-latency real-time computation and access Internet services, while granting confidentiality and irreversibility to the users.

• ‘Mural’ — Our Cross-Layer NFT transferral protocol.

Composable Finance has introduced “Mural”, a bridge for the NFT ecosystem that will allow NFT movements across various chains like Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Moonriver.

• (Kusama) Referendum 160 to upgrade the Kusama runtime to v9130, passing unanimously.

• (Kusama) Referendum 159 to upgrade Statemine runtime to v601

• (Kusama) Motion 410 Nova Wallet proposal: dApp browser, Statemine/Statemint integration, NFT support, Staking & UI rework and improvements.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

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After last week’s highlight on Kilt, we move ahead with the 7th Kusama slot auction winner: Calamari, Manta’s canary on Kusama.

Calamari is a privacy-focused protocol for payments and DeFi based on zero knowledge proofs, an exciting field of research in crypto that could revolutionize the way we do privacy and scalability for computations. It’s different from the likes of Khala because it uses math and software to guarantee privacy, instead of specialized hardware. Using ZK tech is much harder, but the payoff is very much worth it.

Calamari, The Private Protocol for cross and parachains

Calamari (and Manta) is an open-source and user-friendly protocol built on Substrate that aims to fill in the gap of privacy protection most blockchains still suffer from. 

It’s probably obvious to anyone using DeFi why we need privacy protection. The blockchain is completely transparent and traceable, even if we can’t always assign wallets to identities. That creates a lot of problems ranging from doxing, Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and so on. 

Of course transparency is not all bad, in fact we want to be able to monitor a protocol’s health with on-chain stats! And ultimately, the market clearly doesn’t care about privacy that much. The public chains we’re used to, e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum and so on, are easy to use and offer high liquidity, even if they’re hardly private. But eventually, the weak protection of pseudonymity just won’t be enough.

If you just stop to consider a world where everyone does business on a blockchain, would you really want a store clerk to know you’re an elite degen earning more yield in a day than they make in a year?

And if you’re the CEO of a company, how would you feel if your competitor hunted down all your suppliers and bribed them to reject you? Point is, lack of privacy is a serious issue to tackle in blockchain.

Of course we have various private cryptos like Monero and ZCash, but these seem a bit out of place in today’s crypto world. They have almost no cross-chain support, very little liquidity in DeFi and in general just don’t mesh well with smart contracts.

So, how can we improve privacy coins? Calamari and Manta are one way.

What’s different about Calamari 

Manta is quite unique in the privacy coin world as it’s a generalized private token platform. You can think of it as Zcash, but for tokens. With MariPay you can mint private versions of various tokens on Kusama, including stablecoins and WBTC, and transact with them fully privately.

The technology is based on zk-SNARKs, quite similar to that of Zcash. The idea behind zero knowledge cryptography is that for each transaction you make, you can prove that it respects the rules of a proper transaction — that the sender has the right to send tokens, that they’re not double spent, and that no new coins are being created — without revealing the amounts or sender and destination.

Calamari also aims to build MariSwap, a fully private AMM exchange. Bye bye MEV!

The best thing about Calamari is probably the fact that it’s a parachain. That’s a game changer for actually using it, as people who want additional privacy have an easy way to get it. Privacy computations are obviously an additional cost that not everyone wants to pay, so by integrating as parachains, Calamari and Manta can provide privacy to the entire DotSama DeFi ecosystem.

Crowdloan stats and KMA

If all these privacy features sound exciting to you, you’re not alone! Calamari was one of the more successful crowdloans on Kusama, raising more than its cap of 200,000 KSM. They eventually ended up getting 218k KSM because the cap simply meant the team wouldn’t reward any more contributions, but they decided to reward these late comers as well.

Calamari offered up to 30% of supply to contributors, ultimately generating about 21.8%, or 2,182,470,000 KMA tokens. The tokens were recently listed on Kucoin and are currently trading at around $0.03, giving a theoretical return of 83%! Not all of the tokens are immediately unlocked though, which is common in crowdloans.

KMA is used to pay transaction fees, part of which gets burned by the system. KMA also has governance utility for the parachain.

This is just the beginning for Calamari and Manta. The team is planning to launch a private lending platform in the future as well, and that feature is likely to land on Calamari first!

Astar Network took the third slot in a pretty heated battle with Parallel. We’re now rounding out the top three on Polkadot with exactly the same results as on Kusama, curiously enough. Parallel is likely to take the fourth slot though!

On Kusama, auctions have restarted with Subsocial quickly capping out its entire allocation of 100k KSM. Most likely they’ll take this round!

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Parallel Finance

TL;DR: Bidding for 15% of the supply, your bonus is 25 PARA per DOT on the standard interface and 33 PARA through Parallel’s Auction Loan interface. Parallel is a DeFi parachain planning to run AMMs, money markets and more.

• Clover

TL;DR: Closest competitor to Parallel, offering 20% of the supply. The parachain is a DeFi-focused smart contract platform largely backed by Bithumb Global. Sitting at 3.8M DOT.

• Manta Network

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply to launch the main Polkadot version of Calamari (see above for an explainer). Collected 3.5M DOT.

• Efinity

TL;DR: An NFT parachain created by Enjin, offers 10% of the supply. Currently slightly lagging the others with just over 3M DOT contributed.

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are around 20% APR (or 45% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 15% APR (45% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 65%, 95% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 120% with loyalty, 35% without.

Sushi farms on Moonriver are decreasing in profitability, with most farms below triple digits APR.

Solarbeam farms offer a lot of >100% APR choices for riskier pool, while the usual staples are below 100%.

It’s official, Moonriver has its first OHM fork! It’s called RomeDAO Finance and it looks pretty sleek. 

The cool thing about it is that it’s also going to be an RPG game centered around the Roman Empire (obviously). The game is called Warmap and it will feature a campaign map with various minigames and NFT drops (not much else is known at this point).

Of course, the basic mechanism of Rome is the same as Olympus: get a bunch of protocol-owned liquidity through bonds and use it to support the Moonriver ecosystem.

In the meantime, honest farmers can stake ROME to earn 10% every 5 days, which is a gajillion percent in APY terms (186,500%). To buy bonds you need to supply FRAX-ROME LP tokens, or just MIM or FRAX separately. 

Overall this looks like a strong DeFi 2.0 play for the Moonriver ecosystem, so we’re getting there! OHM forks are definitely some of the most popular farms in recent months, and RomeDAO looks like it’s adding something to that base design.

But it probably won’t be the last of its kind!

• Chainlink Price Feeds Are Live on Moonriver.

Moonbeam has implemented Chainlink Price Feeds on Moonriver. It will allow developers to leverage Chainlink’s oracles to build flash loan-resistant DeFi smart contracts

• Moonbeam Wins the Second Parachain Auction and Increases the Rewards Pool by 50%.

Moonbeam has won the second parachain auction on Polkadot with more than 1,000,000 DOT (approximately $1.4 billion USD) contributed worldwide. As a thanks for the community’s support, the Moonbeam Foundation has added 50 million GLMR tokens to the reward pool.

• SubQuery Network to Launch on Acala’s EVM+, Decentralizing Polkadot’s Leading Data Indexing Service.

SubQuery, a data indexing solution for Polkadot, has chosen Acala’s parachain for the launch of the SubQuery Network on Acala’s upcoming EVM+ launch.

• The 3x.

HydraDX announces the successful Council election, passing of the first community referendum, as well as the upcoming vote to multiply by 3 the balances of all HDX wallets, excluding those of the HDX Treasury and Founders & Investors.

• Referendum 156 on Kusama

Referendum 156, proposing to upgrade the Statemine runtime to v600, is currently failing unanimously due to an error in the XCM config that would prevent teleports from Statemine to Kusama.

• The Talisman Extension

The DotSama wallet ecosystem is expanding with a more user-friendly option in Talisman, which launched an Alpha release this week.

• (Kusama) Referendum 158 to register the Encointer chain as a common-good slot on Kusama Network.

• (Kusama) Motion 407 a motion to reject Treasury proposal 112 to fund CHAOS 2021 - Kusama Conference (Virtual).

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

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We’re now up to slot 6 of the Kusama parachain auctions, the first of the second batch! As you may remember from our edition at the time, this one was quickly snatched up by a bit of a dark horse, Kilt Protocol. The project is not exactly DeFi-centric but it’s still important for us because of its interesting implications for the space.

Kilt Protocol: The Identity Blockchain

Kilt is a generalized protocol for issuing self-sovereign identities for Web 3.0. It aims to change the way we deal with personal data, so that companies can’t use it without our permission or lose it to hackers.

You may be thinking “it’s just KYC but on-chain,” but Kilt is actually much more flexible than that through its Credentials system. Each user can request to generate a set of Credentials based on whatever data they may wish to divulge (so not just government ID and the like). These Credentials are created by an Attester, an entity that is trusted by service providers and the community for whatever it is trying to attest.

The hash checksum of the Credential is stored on the Kilt blockchain, while the Credentials themselves are kept safe by the user. From then on the user can prove that their credentials are valid with anyone requesting them by revealing some or all of the Credential and comparing its checksum with the data stored on the blockchain. 

The Kilt white paper makes a useful comparison with the way we process government IDs for something like an age check at a club. We (the user) generate a Credential (license) from an Attester (the DMV) that we then have full control over. To prove our age we can show the ID card and the Verifier (the bouncer) can check if the person is over the age limit. With documents we can also choose to hide some information that is irrelevant to what is being requested, for example by putting our finger on our name when showing the ID. The Kilt system allows for something very similar!

How is this useful, you may ask? Kilt actually aims to use its credentials in the place of a username and password combo, rather than a replacement for a KYC procedure. But the system is really flexible — you can create whatever kind of credential you want with whatever attester you wish. This even goes beyond what you’d associate with credentials! Thanks to the Token-Curated Attester, we can create any arbitrary entity that would be able to enlist and remove Experts (who are motivated economically to not screw up) to verify or execute certain actions.

The implications of such a system could be huge. TCAs could for example power “truth oracles” where the blockchain could learn about a major event (for example, who won the US elections) or even some sort of crowdsourced survey like “where can you find the best pizza in the world?” (duh, it's Naples, Italy). 

Kilt envisions TCAs as a kind of bridge between the blockchain and the real world, where for example DAOs can be recognized by a government if they get certified through some conditions outlined in a particular TCA. 

In short, Kilt enables lots of cool things for the future, though right now it’s all very early stage!

KILT in the DotSama Ecosystem

The Kilt Protocol demonstrates exactly how flexible parachains can be. You have your DeFi, NFT, or asset parachains that form the backbone of economic activity. But each of them may need verifiable identity in some way, for example DeFi protocols may want to only give one airdrop to one person, or even introduce some sort of democratic governance! Kilt will be there to serve these parachains, who can then verify a user’s attributes through the XCMP system. 

For Kilt, staying on DotSama allows them to pay much less to operate a blockchain with excellent security, while its block space isn’t cluttered by MEV bots and NFT mints.

One unique thing about it is that there’s just one Kilt — no canaries or double parachains! The platform is live on Kusama right now, but the community may decide to port it to Polkadot when the slot expires.

The KILT token is the shared currency for all interactions in the ecosystem. Mostly you’d use it as a Claimer to pay for attestation, though this isn’t mandatory. Attesters do need to use KILT for the Angel’s Share, basically a fancy name for the Kilt gas fee.

The token launched just a few days ago, with only one exchange where it’s available. At a price of $10, KILT contributors already made an 80% ROI!

As expected, Moonbeam officially took the second parachain slot! After last week’s race to the top with Acala, Moonbeam was still in the top-2 by a wide margin. The battle is now between Astar and Parallel who are currently neck and neck with 8.2M and 8.7M DOT, respectively. 

On Kusama, auctions are smooth. Genshiro won this week’s slot with just 47k KSM, once again the cheapest anyone paid for a slot so far. This is actually the last parachain of this batch, so we have roughly a week’s respite until the next set of 5 slots launches.

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Astar Network

TL;DR: Offering a nice 20% of the supply, Astar is the main network for the Shiden canary we covered in the past.

• Parallel Finance

TL;DR: Bidding for 15% of the supply, your bonus is 25 PARA per DOT on the standard interface and 33 PARA through Parallel’s Auction Loan interface. Parallel is a DeFi parachain planning to run AMMs, money markets and more.

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are now 23% APR (or 46% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 14% APR (47% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 65%, 93% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 120% with loyalty, 36% without.

Sushi farms on Moonriver are quite stable, most farms have dipped below the triple digits but still a few solid choices with >100%.

Solarbeam farms remain strong with a lot of triple digit Pool1s, often beating out Sushi for the same pools!

Moonbeam became the second parachain to join the Polkadot ecosystem!

The result was a bit obvious after Acala took the first slot, so the team eventually decided to close the crowdloan from any more contributions. According to the team, 190,000 people joined the launch (potentially this includes exchange users and the Take Flight distribution).

With 35.75M DOT raised, the Moonbeam crowdloan totals a cool $1.2 billion right now! This also means that contributors will receive about 4 GLMR for each DOT, since the project is distributing 15% of the supply.

We can even derive a potential valuation for these GLMR tokens! How, you may ask? Well, the crowdloan contributors are getting the tokens for free, but they do need to pay the opportunity cost of not being able to regularly stake their DOTs. Doing a quick and dirty estimation, with around 18% APY and around 2 years of staking, this results in a price of $500 million for that 15% of GLMR supply.

Expanding to the entire supply gives us a fully diluted value of $3.2 billion — which actually feels a bit low! Moonriver has the same FDV, so either the market is saying that they’ll be worth the same, or maybe it’s just that crowdloan apes are not that efficient!

We also got two major integrations going live for Moonriver this week, including a native implementation on the Ledger app, allowing its users to just sign Moonriver transactions without any extra configurations. Plus, the collaboration with Lido is progressing with a testnet version deployed this week. Once live, you’ll be able to create liquid KSM derivatives with Lido.

We can already hear the eternal question, “wen defi?”

That mostly hinges on the team launching the parachain and onboarding as many partners and infrastructure providers as possible. The parachain launch should be quite quick, as officially it begins on December 23. That’s definitely not the period where you’d expect 24/7 shifts to get it done fast, but a January full launch with transfers and the EVM enabled seems quite realistic.

• Big News| Bifrost DApp goes live with ETH 2.0 derivative vETH.

Bifrost has launched the vETH function module on the dApp, which will allow users to participate in ETH 2.0 Beacon chain staking and receive liquidity derivative vETH (Voucher ETH)

• OriginTrail To Launch on Acala, Bringing Its Decentralized Knowledge Graph to Acala’s Developer Ecosystem.

OriginTrail intends to integrate its multi-chain Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG) on Acala. The DKG creates connections and associations between all of its accessible physical and digital assets and will have multiple implementations in the ecosystem, improving Acala’s economy.

• Parallel Finance Partners with Gauntlet for Dynamic Risk Management on Polkadot Ecosystem.

Parallel Finance has partnered up with Gauntlet in order to improve liquidation dynamics, cross-parachain liquidity and cross-network liquidity with Gauntlet’s well-tested techniques.

• (Kusama) Referendum 156 to upgrade Statemine runtime to v600.

• (Kusama) Referendum 155 to decrease the maximum number of validators in the active set by 150, unlikely to pass.

• (Kusama) Motion 397 a proposal to fund an interactive virtual museum dedicated to the guided education and awareness of the entire Kusama & Polkadot ecosystem.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

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We’re rounding out the first batch of Kusama parachains with Bifrost, a parachain devoted to unlocking liquidity. This one’s very interesting because Bifrost is very specialized. 

Bifrost: The Liquid Staking Parachain

The core idea behind Bifrost is that it wants to unlock liquidity. Which kinds? Well…

The biggest application is of course Proof of Stake liquidity. As we’ve covered in the past for Karura, Polkadot aims to have around 60% of its entire supply tied up in staking. Now that’s a lot of tokens not available on the market!

The unfortunate consequence of having vast portions of your supply locked is that when people do begin to feel like they need to sell their assets, the market will feel a deluge of new supply that will overwhelm even the bravest of liquidity providers. Volatility will spike, people will want to dump even harder… It’s a vicious circle of liquidity.

There’s also the pesky little thing that you can’t use staked assets anywhere else, so it becomes a choice of either staking yield OR crowdloans, farms etc.

Removing liquidity to chase the next 1000% APR farm is not a good thing for the network, and indeed there is an inverse relationship between the security of a PoS network and the amount of free liquidity it has available.

Bifrost Liquid Staking

This is where Bifrost comes in. It features a nifty system of essentially trustless liquid staking powered in part by the BNC token. As a user, all you need to do is to stake your DOT/KSM into the Bifrost system to obtain vDOT or vKSM, the staking derivative token representing staked DOT.

The assets supplied into Bifrost pools are then used by Bidders who run the blockchain nodes and use the assets within the pool as their stake. In order to access them, they need to stake BNC which is liable to get slashed if the node performs poorly or misbehaves.

This is a very useful feature as many liquid staking protocols ultimately rely on a centrally-curated list of validators. The BNC bond ensures that Bidders behave properly and are incentivized to keep their nodes operating smoothly.

Bifrost initially focuses on Polkadot and Kusama, but it aims to cover most other PoS blockchains as well. The Bifrost parachain acts as the central hub of this system, making it essential that the platform remains at least as expensive to break as the assets it is securing. This is why Bifrost chose to become a parachain, as this enables it to piggyback off Polkadot’s entire security budget and offload this crucial task.

Unfortunately, the liquid staking system isn’t live yet. But remember how we said that Bifrost wants to unlock everything? This goes for crowdloans too!

The SALP Protocol

Standing for Slot Auction Liquidity Protocol, SALP is a liquid staking system for crowdloans. As you may know, a crowdloan locks the contributor’s KSM/DOT for the entire duration of the lease, which is around 1-2 years. This means they can’t sell it or do anything else with the tokens, which can be an issue given how fast crypto moves!

Instead, you can contribute to crowdloans through SALP and receive two derivative tokens for it, vsKSM/vsDOT and vsBond. This effectively splits your contribution into two parts: a generic derivative token that can be sold on the open market, and the vsBond, which is used to redeem the underlying tokens one-for-one when the parachain slot expires. The bond is connected to a specific parachain and lease, so it’s not quite as fungible as the main vsKSM token.

Initial minters of the bond receive the token rewards from the project, and they can sell the vsKSM at any point to unlock part of their value. Its price will of course be lower than one full KSM, so it’s a risk that you need to calculate: will you be able to buy back vsKSM at the same price? Can you make up for the difference with staking or farming?

SALP is currently running on most Kusama and Polkadot parachain auctions, and it needs to be set up specifically for each right now as XCM is still unreleased. The team is generally quite fast at it and you even get bonuses in BNC or the project’s tokens for using SALP! 

Crowdloan and deployment

Like with Phala, Bifrost plans to have only one token. Its rewards for the Kusama auction were 7.5% of the total supply, after initially putting up just 3.75% (the race got heated!). Overall, the community will get 50% of the entire supply.

The ROI for crowdloan contributors is around 23%, which sadly quite low for the first batch. But with the release of DOT/KSM liquid staking the platform is likely to get a burst of activity!

Acala won the first slot! The race with Moonbeam was extremely tight but Acala ended up snatching the historical first slot by a hair (More on this below).

On Kusama, things are proceeding steadily. Quartz became the latest parachain to join this round with 54k KSM. This is by far the cheapest slot yet!

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Moonbeam

TL;DR: Crowdloan participants receive 10% of the GLMR supply. Learn more about it in the Moonriver deep dive.

• Astar Network

TL;DR: Offering a nice 20% of the supply, Astar is the main network for the Shiden canary we covered in the past.

Active Crowdloans (Kusama)

• Genshiro

TL;DR: The DeFi-focused parachain is now in a comfortable lead of 34k KSM. Contributors are bidding for 12.5% of the supply.

• SubSocial

TL;DR: This social media platform (kind of like a crypto Facebook) is offering 16.5% of supply for its crowdloan. Quickly collected 9.2k KSM after entering the race this week.

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are now 22% APR (or 45% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 13% APR (45% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 63%, 90% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 133% with loyalty, 39% without.

Sushi farms on Moonriver are stable with a few low TVL >500% APR pools, but steady triple digits overall.

Solarbeam farms returned in strength this week. Quite a few Pool1s actually yielding triple digits, more than the Pool2 now!

Acala is the official winner of Polkadot’s first parachain auction!

The race was extremely heated between Acala and Moonbeam. There was barely any distance for most of the race, and ultimately the winning margin was just 0.056% of their total raise!

Acala won despite losing the lead later in the run because of the candle auction mechanism. Sadly for Moonbeam, the system ended up randomly choosing the period in the middle of the auction when Acala maintained the slimmest of leads!

So Acala won, but it was mostly an honor thing. Parachains start at the same time on Polkadot, so nobody has any advantages here. Moonbeam still towers over everyone else left, so most likely they’ll take the second slot.

The folks at SubQuery compiled a pretty useful economic analysis of the crowdloans. The gist is that it was a bit of a whale tussle!

There were four addresses that together contributed over 70% of all DOT in the crowdloans (so far). In particular we had 1xhXb5ZjsKpN1xcvTNMuThndfb1WP9saLKMpNxofGm64U2X who we’ll call the enjoyooor (or hedgoor, take your pick), who contributed 23.5 million DOT ($987 million) to basically all crowdloans. Moonbeam got the largest allocation (9 million DOT) but the enjoyoor also sent a few millies to Clover, Acala, Parallel, Astar, Litentry and Manta.

Then we have 132zsjMwGjNaUXF5XjUCDs2cDEq9Qao51TsL9RSUTGZbinVK, codename cheerleadooor, who was both the largest single contributor and a 100% Acala fan. The chearleadoor sent a whopping 24 million DOT (basically $1 billion) just to Acala, basically pushing them to victory.

But overall there were 67,000 unique addresses participating in crowdloans so far, with a median contribution of 12 DOT and a 467 DOT average. This is definitely not a bad result especially if you consider that the enjoyoor might just be an exchange contributing for its users!

• Bifrost SALP Supports the Acala Polkadot Crowdloan.

Bifrost added support for staked DOT derivatives for the Acala crowdloan (as well as Astar and Moonbeam).

• RMRK 2.0 Logic Coming to Moonriver.

Moonriver teams up with RMRK, a Kusama-native NFT protocol, in order to provide advanced features for NFT developers, creators, and collectors across the Kusama ecosystem.

• Project Venkman to Launch Brand Loyalty and NFT Platforms on Acala; theCHIVE Set To Debut to 10 Million Monthly Users.

Project Venkman chose Acala to launch a variety of brand engagement solutions using on-chain loyalty points and NFTs. All Acala crowdloan participants with a registered email on the Acala newsletter are eligible for a future Venkman and theCHIVE NFT drop. 

• Parallel and Acala Collaborate to Offer Multi-Token Bonuses on All Acala Crowdloan Contributions.

Parallel Finance has launched a crowdloan product to incentivize crowdloan participants.

• (Kusama) Motion 396 a proposal for the phase 2 of an educational video on Polkadot and Kusama Networks elements, dynamics and protocols in place to visualize the Polkadot ecosystem structure, by NubbleBits.

• (Kusama) Treasury Proposal 119 a proposal to obtain funding for the continued operation, maintenance and development of the Parachains.info website.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

Our parachain tour continues with Khala Network, the canary deployment of Phala Network. In a nutshell, Khala is a privacy blockchain based on Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) hardware. We’ll uncover what this means and everything else worth knowing about Khala!

Khala: The Decentralized Cloud Computer

Khala and Phala aim to be a generalized computation platform, taking a stab at the original promise of Ethereum as a world computer. Like Shiden, our previous entry, Khala focuses on WebAssembly smart contracts, which as we’ve seen are far more ambitious in scope than the EVM.

The kicker with Khala is that it also supports data privacy by relying on TEEs, or Trusted Execution Environment cells. While the tech sounds fancy, in reality many Intel-based home computers feature these cells in the form of the Intel SGX, a TEE enclave system that’s been around since 2015.

The benefits and drawbacks of trusted hardware

The TEE is an encrypted region of a computer’s processor that can’t be tampered with by any other software or hardware. In theory, TEEs are an amazing solution for trusted computation and blockchain privacy. 

In Khala, a special TEE operating system called pRuntime allows executing arbitrary smart contract code without having to leak its inputs and outputs. This could enable use cases like private token transactions, private DeFi trades and much more! And the best thing is that it’s all essentially live now, and doesn’t require “MoonMath” breakthroughs like with zk-SNARK technology. 

“But wait, we’re expected to trust an external piece of hardware?” we hear you say. And the concerns would be justified, we definitely shouldn’t just trust that some remote hardware is behaving properly! 

In the case of the TEE chips, cryptographic signing methods give us a reasonable guarantee that we’re interacting with a particular TEE enclave, thanks to a process called Remote Attestation.

All SGX enclaves feature internal private keys that should be inaccessible to anyone but the TEE itself. These keys are then used to verify the TEE’s proof of execution, so it is absolutely vital that they remain inside the chip.

You can see where this is going: there have been several instances of confirmed vulnerabilities that could leak the keys. Sgaxe is the most famous, but there have been others. Now, this isn’t all as bad as it sounds. The hardware can be patched in most cases, while unpatchable vulnerabilities so far only affect a few specific chips. The attacks have also been purely theoretical so far.

How Khala tackles security

The developers behind Khala are aware of these issues, which is why they chose to combine TEEs with a blockchain-based verification system. In Khala and Phala, the chain is mostly  maintained by Gatekeepers, a unique spin on basic Kusama/Polkadot collators. 

Collators usually don’t need to stake assets or participate in some form of consensus, on Khala they do. This is necessary to maintain the security of the TEE nodes. Becoming a Gatekeeper requires staking an amount of PHA dictated by your “CPU score,” a kind of reputation system. You also need to have the proper hardware, including the SGX cell.

The PHA you stake as a gatekeeper will be slashed if the results of your TEE calculation do not match that of your peers, which should hopefully localize any potential attack to the TEE hardware. Also, gatekeepers are selected randomly by the system, so a potential attacker would need to break a lot of them to compromise the network. 

Regular desktop computers can run Gatekeeper nodes, though you may need to beef up your storage with high-speed NVMe SSDs. So far, more than 1200 nodes have signed up for gatekeeping tests on Phala.

Crowdloan and deployment

One unique aspect of Phala is that it didn’t create separate tokens for its Kusama version. For Phala, Kusama is a way to deploy a “pre-mainnet”, so Khala’s token is simply called K-PHA. The team allocated just 1.5% of the combined maximum supply for the Kusama crowdloan, though it’ll take a while to reach full dilution.

The ROI for crowdloan contributors is around 30%, which is comparatively lower than other parachains in its batch. But Khala’s time’s yet to come — its focus is not so much on DeFi but on general computation.

All eyes on Polkadot this time as the auctions officially started. (Woooo!)

While some of the crowdloans had already begun last week, now we have a more complete picture of the participants. 

For Kusama, everything is proceeding as planned. Bit.Country became the latest parachain with 209k KSM committed (a surprisingly large amount!).

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Acala Network

TL;DR: Acala is offering 17% of supply for the crowdloan of its DeFi hub. Check out our deep dive on its canary Karura to learn more about the project.

• Moonbeam

TL;DR: Crowdloan participants receive 10% of the GLMR supply. Learn more about it in the Moonriver deep dive.

• Astar Network

TL;DR: Offering a nice 20% of the supply, Astar is the main network for the Shiden canary we covered last week.

Active Crowdloans (Kusama)

• Quartz by Unique

TL;DR: Offering 8% of supply, now first place with 45k KSM. The project is an NFT platform for Polkadot/Kusama.

• Genshiro

TL;DR: This DeFi-focused project collected a decent amount this week to reach second place at 29k KSM. Contributors are bidding for 12.5% of the supply.

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are now 21% APR (or 42% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 12% APR (40% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers APR is 53%, 76% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 137% with loyalty, 41% without.

Sushi farms on Moonriver are now live! Topping out at 220% APR for the MIM pool, with the rest staying between 110% and 30% APR. You’ll be earning both SUSHI and MOVR on all of them.

Solarbeam farms hit a major snag. Now only the Pool 2 earns triple digits APR, the rest are around 50%.

Parachain auctions on Polkadot started yesterday, November 11. We’re officially in parachain season!

So the main network is now accepting bids for crowdloans and parachains. You can learn more about how it all works and how to contribute in our previous edition focused on Kusama’s auctions.

Right now we’re looking at a relatively predictable top-3 made of Acala, Moonbeam and Astar, actually the same order as on Kusama! Only this time, it seems that Moonbeam may take the first slot. 

This shift is likely caused by the amazing performance of MOVR on Kusama, which was by far the most successful crowdloan in terms of returns for holders. Keep in mind that the token economics of GLMR are quite different, for example in terms of free supply and crowdloan rewards!

Still, Polkadot parachains are different. Everyone in a given batch launches at the same time, so you’re gucci as long as you make it in the top-5. But the next question is, when will we actually be able to use the DOT parachains?

That’s the billion dollar question! Kusama parachains took around one-two months to be properly launched, some faster than others. Since they can onboard to Polkadot only from the end of December, realistically we’re looking at January-February.

Still, the Kusama testing must have served something! With most of the kinks ironed out, the teams having more experience etc. it’s quite possible that we’ll see the first parachains live in early January.

HydraDX November Update.

HydraDX’s team explains why they’ll sit the first round out, plus a few more project updates on their Omnipool.

Kusama reaches 1000 Validators

A referendum upped the number of active Kusama validators to a neat 1000.

Polkadot’s 4th birthday.

Polkadot is now 4 years old, starting from the first github commit on November 7, 2017.

Moonriver reaches 5M transactions

The milestone means that Moonriver is the most active Kusama parachain, so the team has high hopes for Moonbeam.

SubQuery on Moonriver

SubQuery’s deployment on the Moonriver Network will allow both Ethereum and Polkadot devs to query historical Substrate & EVM data with GraphQL.

• (Polkadot) Treasury Proposal 73 Merkle Science proposal to provide a solution for cases of scam victims and other illicit activities in the Polkadot community.

• (Kusama) Referendum 152 executed to lower the cost of opening HRMP channels to just 5 KSM.

• (Kusama) Referendum 154 to refund lost KSM from XCM attack to the Karura reserve account, likely to pass.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

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This week it’s the turn of Shiden Network, the canary deployment of Astar (formerly known as Plasm). This one is a smart contract platform as well, with a stated goal of building Ethereum 2.0 on Polkadot — let’s see how they want to do that!

Shiden: The WebAssembly-first Parachain

We’ve covered Moonriver in the past edition, which prides itself as the main gateway to Polkadot for Ethereum developers. Shiden and its Polkadot parent Astar are much more focused on Polkadot-native apps and WebAssembly smart contracts, though it does support the EVM as well.

The claim of “Ethereum 2.0 on Polkadot” comes from the fact that Shiden aims to scale primarily through L2 technologies. The initial vision included Plasma, though now the focus is on deploying Optimistic and zero knowledge rollups to Shiden/Astar. 

More on WebAssembly

Shiden is a great opportunity to talk more about this WebAssembly thing! It is spearheaded quite strongly by Polkadot as the supposed next evolution of the blockchain virtual machines. But Polkadot is not alone, as Cosmos is also working on something similar through CosmWasm. Also, the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap used to have the eWasm (or Ethereum WebAssembly) as a future item, though it was eventually dropped due to the popularity of the EVM.

What’s so great about WebAssembly? It’s probably the most generic framework for running complex programs out there. As its name suggests, its primary purpose is to enable fast apps entirely within browsers. The most famous example of an app using Wasm is Figma, a cloud-based vector graphics editor. Google Earth also switched to Wasm in 2020. Oh and Decentraland runs on Wasm through Unity3D.

Wasm essentially offers comparable performance to native computer apps, all while inside a browser (or blockchain, or anything else). You can imagine how powerful it could be for blockchain applications! With years of development behind it and a large community of Web2 developers, Wasm definitely has a decent starting position as the default VM for smart contracts. The Astar team is of course way more categoric about it:

Considering the matured ecosystem of Ethereum and its accessibility for new people, the EVM as it is today will be obsolete in the future. But the ecosystem won’t be going away. Instead, it will be a portal to the future. Similar to how the Internet Explorer is a portal for downloading better browsers.

So, what can you do with Shiden?

Burns aside, Shiden aims to have quite comprehensive support for the EVM — MetaMask, Remix et al. included. The support is live, and it even has a friendly drag and drop interface to deploy dApps.

One of the cooler innovations in Shiden are the dApp Store and dApp Staking features, which are a nifty way of perpetually funding developers building on it. Basically, users can nominate their SDN tokens to their favorite projects, which grants both them and the dApp a portion of Shiden’s 10% inflation (with the rest going to treasury and collators). 

This is a very useful feature for bootstrapping community-led projects, who could just receive staking income from the network instead of having to raise major funding rounds. It’s quite close to running a continuous Gitcoin campaign, though most users will probably expect to receive the dApp’s tokens in return for their support. Some projects can also decide to run kickbacks and give nominators a portion of the rewards meant for them.

So far the dApp store doesn’t seem to have any exciting offerings. The few DeFi projects on it aren’t actually deployed on Shiden, which is a shame! But with time, interesting things may come out of it.

Astar vs. Shiden

Much like Acala vs. Karura, there aren’t that many differences between the canary and the “main” network (for now). Shiden is basically like Kusama for Polkadot — mostly the same thing but launched earlier. 

The two communities are meant to coexist, so participants of the earlier Astar lockdrops get a significant portion of SDN tokens. Both networks include a small team share, though SDN doesn’t have allocations for seed investors or the foundation. Shiden distributed a pretty generous 22% of the supply in the first crowdloan and returned 60%, the second best of the first batch.

We got one more week left until the Polkadot auction craziness starts! You can already start to “pre-order” crowdloans through the project’s websites or some exchanges. Just today we got the first “official” crowdloans via the Polkadot JS interface. Meanwhile we still got some Kusama action ongoing.

As expected, Picasso ended up becoming the 12th project parachain with 115k KSM committed. It’s the lowest amount we’ve seen yet, which isn’t surprising as the parachain supply has increased drastically!

Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)

• Acala Network

TL;DR: Acala immediately attracted over 3.3 million DOT ($170M) out of its 50M DOT hardcap! It’s offering 17% of supply for the crowdloan and is leading the charts so far. Check out our deep dive on its canary Karura to learn more about the project.

• Moonbeam

TL;DR: Sitting in second place with 1.1M DOT ($57M) bidding for 10% of the GLMR supply. Learn more about it in the Moonriver deep dive.

Active Crowdloans (Kusama)

• BitCountry Pioneer

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply, right now in first place with 152k KSM. The project is essentially a Decentraland on Polkadot.

• Quartz by Unique

TL;DR: Offering 8% of supply, second place with 28k KSM. The project is an NFT platform for Polkadot/Kusama.

• Integritee Network

TL;DR: Offers 10% of supply, currently third place with 9k KSM. It’s a network promising privacy through Trusted Execution Environment hardware. Keep in mind that there is a referendum to cancel this crowdloan (more on it later).

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are now 23% APR (or 47% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 16% APR (54% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers APR is 47%, 68.1% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 116% with loyalty, 35% without.

Moonriver’s farms continue steady. As before, the following section is not vetted. Rug risk is high on Moonriver, though the farms below have been around for weeks. Still, fundamentals are basically absent. Proceed at your own peril.

• Earn SOLAR in a classic Pool1/Pool2 arrangement, Pool2 yield is mid triple-digits, but there are a few juicy Pool1s with 100-200% APR.

• Earn MOON in another Pool1/Pool2 set of farms. Yields at 500% for the Pool 2s, a few 100% Pool1s here and there.

Sushi is live on Moonriver, y’all!

And also we now have Etherscan on Moonriver, though it’s called Moonscan of course.

So now you can use the basic Sushi features on Moonriver, which is swapping and adding liquidity. Sadly no farms, xSushi, Kashi or anything else just yet! But this is just the beginning.

The farms will come soon enough, we already have a list of tokens that will receive 25,000 MOVR ($10M) in liquidity mining rewards.

These are MOVR, WBTC, BNB and USDT paired with WETH, a USDC/USDT pair, USDC/FRAX and MOVR/MIM. The team also mentioned that KSM and KAR will be added for liquidity mining after XCMP is launched on Moonriver.

Unfortunately the farming isn’t live yet, so for now you can just get ready by bridging through AnySwap or Meter. Sushi prepared a handy tutorial to cover the process from A to Z. 

Sushi project will also receive 2.5 million GLMR for the eventual Moonbeam deployment, which is roughly the same percentage of total supply as on Moonriver.

Sushi has definitely been a trailblazer of new deployments, with now 13 different versions pushed to most EVM-compatible chains. Their core remains tethered to Ethereum, with mainnet and Arbitrum holding by far the most TVL. We’ll see if the launch of the farms will bring the long-awaited frenzy of activity to Moonriver! 

The launch of Moonscan is also really important to support DeFi, as every experienced farmer will surely know. 

So that’s it, we can officially say that Moonriver is ready to start DeFi season!

Last call for starting Astar Crowdloan Event — Part III.

A detailed post from the Astar team explaining how to participate in their crowdloan and what happens after staking DOTs.

Astar Welcomes Commonwealth Labs & Webb Technologies as Core Companies Behind the Protocol.

Astar Network had a mini-merger by joining forces with Commonwealth Labs,  the company behind Edgeware, and Webb Technologies, a zk R&D company, primarily to gain presence in the USA.

Acala Crowdloan Details — The Path to a Community-Backed Launch on Polkadot.

Dan Reecer lists different ways to participate in Acala’s crowdloan, how to get additional bonuses from contributing, as well as featuring the Acala’s dedicated podcast event. 

Parallel Finance — October 2021 Updates

Parallel Finance shares their past milestones, such as securing the 10th Kusama parachain slot, as well as the upcoming ones, such as launching Heiko on Kusama, Polkadot crowdloan, product updates and more.

• (Polkadot) Referendum 42 to upgrade Polkadot Runtime to v9122.

• (Polkadot) Referendum 41 to add Shell as the first parachain on Polkadot, which will eventually become Statemint.

• (Kusama) Referendum 151, aimed to help Bifrost with upgrading to version 0.9.12.

• (Kusama) Referendum 150, a community initiative to remove the Integritee crowdloan. Due to low turnout and not unanimous voting, it looks unlikely to pass for now.

• (Kusama) Referendum 149, fixing an issue with the XCM version subscription between Kusama and Statemine.

• (Kusama) Motion 391, makes the case to lower the cost of opening HRMP channels to just 5 KSM.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

This time we’ll be covering Moonriver, the canary deployment of Moonbeam on Kusama. Unlike our last deep dive with Karura and Acala, there are meaningful differences between the two networks that are quite interesting to uncover!

Moonriver: EVM on Polkadot

The basic analogy we can apply to Moonriver is that it’s an Ethereum emulator on Substrate. This is a major difference with many other EVM chains that propped up in the past few years, as these will usually be simple Geth forks with a few custom changes to consensus (Geth is the primary Ethereum 1.0 node software, basically what defines the Ethereum blockchain as we know it.)

What this means is that Moonriver is a Substrate blockchain that incorporates all user-facing aspects of Ethereum to make it functionally indistinguishable from it. Underneath, though, it’s a very different architecture.

Moonriver supports nearly all features of the Ethereum RPC (basically, the node API), it supports the same H160 addresses and, consequently, it has full support for MetaMask, Truffle and all the other Ethereum development tools. You can deploy Ethereum smart contracts to Moonriver with very few changes, and they will work with existing Ethereum wallets and libraries.

Since it’s still a Substrate chain, Moonriver will also support all major Polkadot features like staking, governance or indices (Polkadot’s wallet nickname system). In fact, you can still use Substrate APIs and Polkadot JS to interact with Moonriver.

Moonriver and Moonbeam position themselves as the friendly “gateway drug” into Kusama/Polkadot for Ethereum users and developers. Any asset on Moonriver should be fairly easy to port into the wider Kusama/Polkadot ecosystem, so eventually you’ll be able to start on Moonriver and gradually accustom to whatever else is on the Kusama ecosystem. For now though, XCM and interoperability functions aren’t live yet.

A note on performance

Without going too much into the technical details, the fact that Moonbeam/Moonriver is an emulation of Ethereum will probably cause additional overhead compared to a native implementation, but the Substrate EVM is based on SputnikVM, which is supposed to be faster than Geth. There isn’t much information available for now, so the jury is still out on this one.

In practice, right now Moonriver is operating with a block time of 12 seconds and a 15M gas limit, which is roughly equal to pre-EIP-1559 Ethereum. The network is still fresh and the team is likely playing it slow, but they are promising to increase the gas limit 4x and reducing the block time by 2x, eventually.

The good news is that you can already launch rollups and other L2s on top of Moonriver, so it will directly benefit from Ethereum scalability research. This is also a nice showcase of the idea of Polkadot/Kusama as a layer zero that simply glues together different L1 blockchains.

Moonriver vs. Moonbeam

The biggest difference between the two networks lies in the token allocations.

MOVR, the Moonriver token, has no team or investor allocation. All tokens are either distributed to the community or held as a general reserve for future parachain auctions and liquidity incentives.

The MOVR crowdloan was one of the most generous in terms of supply allocated at a whopping 30% (consider that this is just one crowdloan). It is also the most successful crowdloan so far with a 1300% ROI for participants.

Moonbeam’s Glimmer (GLMR) token, by comparison, has about 47% of the supply devoted to investors, early backers and future employees. Overall you can see why MOVR has one of the strongest communities for any parachain project so far!

The DeFi offering

So far Moonriver’s got a couple of Uni V2 forks with decent and by now quite stable farms (more on them below). Beyond that there really isn’t that much to see unfortunately. A couple of multi-chain projects made their way to Moonriver, a few rugs here and there… 

We’re mostly just waiting for the promised Cambrian explosion after the liquidity incentives begin. With 10% of the MOVR supply promised so far, that’s $380 million in incentives!

We’ve got a lot of Kusama auction action this week! Motion 384 effectively established continuous auctions with over 24 slots expected to be made available in the coming months.

As detailed in the proposal, a batch of 5 auctions will begin with each new lease period, so each 6 weeks. The first one already began on Monday, with Picasso currently in a commanding lead of 92.8k KSM. Then again, there are only 9 parachain candidates left, so everyone should be able to get in eventually. This mega-batch will keep us occupied for about 6 months, so we should be able to see new contenders in the later rounds! 

Active Crowdloans

• Picasso Crowdloan

TL;DR: Offering 20% of supply, you can contribute with ERC-20 stablecoins. The project is a kind of “everythingVM” that aims to connect all protocols in one chain.

• BitCountry Pioneer

TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply, right now in second place with 40k KSM. The project is essentially a Decentraland on Polkadot.

• Quartz by Unique

TL;DR: Offering 8% of supply, third place with 17k KSM. The project is an NFT platform for Polkadot/Kusama.

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are now 23% APR (or 47% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm has 16% APR (54% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD offers APR is 47%, 68.1% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 116% with loyalty, 35% without.

Moonriver’s farms continue steady. As before, the following section is not vetted. Rug risk is high on Moonriver, though the farms below have been around for weeks. Still, fundamentals are basically absent. Proceed at your own peril.

• Earn SOLAR in a classic Pool1/Pool2 arrangement, Pool2 yield is mid triple-digits, but there are a few juicy Pool1s with 100-200% APR.

• Earn MOON in another Pool1/Pool2 set of farms. Yields at 500% for the Pool 2s, a few 100% Pool1s here and there.

Polkadot is set to do a partial rebrand via a stakeholder vote. The name will stay the same, as well as the overall color scheme, but the community is being asked to vote on a new logo and “brand identity”.

The motivation is that according to the team’s research, the Polkadot logo is not particularly memorable, while the existing design identity is not “deep” enough to allow a consistent artistic expression across many different content types.

The design identities are based on doing things with dots, either as a kind of modern Pointillism or by using dots as the main design “module” of sorts. You should check out the video presentations, a picture is definitely worth a 1000 words here!

The logos each represent the Polkadot network structure, the first one using the Relay Chain as the foundation (bottom) for the communities (top), while the second represents the idea of parachains connected with no real center between them.

Still, not everyone likes these.

Artistic debates aside, the proposal is a pretty cool expression of the spirit of community governance for Polkadot. The vote will be weighted with a quadratic formula that gives more weight to each individual stakeholder, instead of rewarding the rich.

To achieve this and avoid sybil exploits (one wallet splitting up into many), the team made a snapshot of all existing balances just as the poll was launched. Splitting up your stash now is pointless as it won’t be counted.

Bifrost will support Picasso Kusama Crowdloan through SALP Protocol.

TL;DR: Bifrost is supporting Picasso by enabling users to back the crowdloan while obtaining liquid vsKSM derivatives with the SALP protocol.

Allocation and Rewards Details Announced for the Moonbeam Crowdloan.

TL;DR: Moonbeam Foundation offers detailed information on the key points of Moonbeam Crowdloan, ways to contribute, rewards distribution, the parachain deployment and more. 

Epsilon, The Curve.Fi AMM on Kusama and Polkadot is Live.

TL;DR: Equilibrium has brought a “semi-official” Curve AMM implementation to Kusama, to be later integrated with Polkadot. 

Kusama Proposal 51

TL;DR: It’s a governance proposal with a rich backstory. The community is asking to end Integritee’s crowdloan due to pulling what they consider is a “bait and switch” on the participants.

• (Polkadot) Referendum 39 made it official: Polkadot parachains will begin on November 11.

• (Kusama) Referendum 146, the Calamari team’s request to upgrade their chain to the next runtime via governance has been executed.

• (Kusama) Referendum 145, a referendum to increase the ideal number of validators.

• (Kusama) Motion 384, which scheduled the auction schedule for Kusama from lease 17 to 21.

• (Kusama) Motion 383, a proposal for a recurring payment (quarterly) to cover maintenance, operations and human resource costs for Polkassembly.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

For this and the next few weeks we’ll be running spotlights on the parachains currently live on Kusama (and who might plan to go on Polkadot too), based on their order of inclusion. 

You know how Kusama is always mistaken for a testnet? As we explained in the past, it’s a canary network — a valuable but chaotic blockchain where deploying unaudited code is considered the normal state of things. Real-world usage will always beat any kind of audit or testing, which is why the Polkadot versions of these parachains will likely be far more stable and reliable.

Karura: the DeFi parachain hub

Our first spotlight goes to Karura, the canary deployment of Acala Network. Karura was the first parachain and collected 501k KSM, by far the highest amount of any parachain ($186 million at current prices). 

Its native token, KAR, is used both as the parachain transaction fee token and for governance. With a current price of $8.8, crowdloan participants have earned roughly 50% of their initial KSM commitment, which generated 1.145M KAR. Of these, 30% were immediately usable and the rest linearly vested through the duration of the lease of 48 weeks, or 11 months.

KAR has no value capture mechanisms beyond fee payment and governance, but the Karura treasury is a much more advanced concept than we’re used to with other protocols. For one, it features a “Decentralized Sovereign Wealth Fund” governed by KAR holders. The fund collects any surplus revenue from Karura’s protocols or transaction fees and invests them through staking or through discretionary investment decided by the community. 

The primary goal of the Karura treasury right now is to collect enough KSM reserves to bid for the next parachain slot without using crowdloans. 

What can you do with Karura?

As the first parachain to ever launch, Karura is probably the most developed of them all. It aims to be the DeFi hub of Kusama, incorporating many popular DeFi primitives into the parachain itself. Since its launch it has already integrated many of the elements of its wide roadmap, which includes a Maker-like stablecoin protocol, Karura DEX and Liquid KSM. 

Honzon (at least that’s its Acala name) is the stablecoin generation protocol. On Karura you will be minting kUSD, which works almost exactly like multi-collateral Dai — deposit collateral in a vault and borrow kUSD from it. Currently only KSM and LKSM are enabled for this, but as the network matures we can expect more options! The differences with Dai lie in the core architecture — for example the protocol automatically auctions underwater positions without relying on keepers to trigger the auctions. 

Karura Swap is an AMM decentralized exchange, which works almost exactly like Uniswap V2. On Karura, the DEX is deployed as a runtime module, basically a native blockchain function. Besides KAR, kUSD and KSM, the DEX is starting to add new pairs of tokens from other parachains. 

One cool thing about the DEX (and in general any Karura app) is that you don’t need to actually hold KAR to pay for transaction fees. The system is set up to automatically swap KSM or other tokens into KAR when you’re performing a transaction, benefitting the protocol while ensuring great UX!

Homa is the liquid staking protocol. As we mentioned in the last edition, liquid staking is an absolute must on Polkadot as it’s designed to have at least half of its supply staked at any given time. Liquid staking means that you get to benefit from the staking yield while still being completely free to sell your assets or use them in any other DeFi protocol. Liquid KSM (or DOT) acts as an IOU token for your stake, so you can redeem the underlying tokens whenever you want (for a fee).

What’s next for Karura?

The Karura parachain is still in the process of fully launching. With liquid staking gradually coming online though, the parachain’s core protocols will be all ready!

The next big item on the Karura roadmap is the “EVM+”, an Ethereum-based environment where you’ll be able to deploy Solidity smart contracts while using MetaMask and all the other tools for Solidity development. 

Here, Karura will be competing with Moonriver/Moonbeam, the parachain that placed all its bets on being Ethereum-compatible. To be fair it’d compete with most other parachains too, as Substrate features an EVM pallet that makes it very easy to add Solidity support. Karura and Moonriver are definitely the frontrunners for full support though, as the basic Substrate pallet won’t let you use MetaMask or Ethereum addresses.

Once the EVM+ is deployed, we will most likely see a strong push to onboard other development teams to launch their protocols on Karura. Will developers do that, though? That remains to be seen, as Karura is quite obviously not “neutral” — any aspiring DEX or stablecoin protocol will be competing with the parachain’s core protocols. 

The benefits may still outweigh the risks as Karura is currently leading in terms of cross-parachain support. The liquidity available on the parachain will probably be significant, so it may make sense to deploy “add-ons” to Karura — DeFi legos that aren’t AMMs and stablecoins. The protocol currently has no plans to deploy any other DeFi primitive, so the ecosystem is definitely wide-open in terms of what else you can build on it!

No auctions currently live, stay tuned for Polkadot auctions starting on November 11!

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX

• Yields are now 24.5% APR (or 48.7% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• KSM/LKSM farm appeared with 14% APR (46% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD now offers kUSD surplus as well. APR is 52%, 75.1% with loyalty.

Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC 

• APR is 181% with loyalty, 51% without.

Moonriver’s farms continue steady. As before, the following section is not vetted. Rug risk is high, fundamentals are basically absent. Proceed at your own peril.

• Earn SOLAR in a classic Pool1/Pool2 arrangement, Pool2 yield hovering in the mid triple digits, but there is a Pool1 with over 100% APR.

• Earn MOON in another Pool1/Pool2 set of farms. Yields at 500% for the Pool 2s.

• A few more assorted UNI V2 token farms in this list.

In the past week we had what is possibly the first ever DotSama exploit, but thanks to the quick work of Kusama governance (and one unique Kusama/Polkadot feature), nobody lost any money!

The whole thing started when the Karura team discovered a mismatch between the KSM the parachain’s account was holding on the Relay Chain, and what its internal balance said it should have held. A mismatch to the tune of about four million dollars, or 11,000 KSM.

Naturally, this warranted a deeper investigation, and the Karura team quickly found some suspicious transactions that extracted tokens from Karura’s account. The team quickly notified centralized exchanges to ensure they wouldn’t let the attacker cash out his tokens, while disabling the feature that allowed the money to be siphoned in the first place.

The issue was a combination of a bug in an older version of XCM (the cross-chain messaging format) used by Karura, and a slight but critical misconfiguration error. XCM v1, the one used by Karura, contained a bug that would allow external entities to escalate privileges on an account. For general safety reasons, XCM v1 didn’t allow handcrafting XCM messages, so the bug wasn’t exploitable, but on Karura this safety check was removed.

Kusama is now operating on XCM v2, which was audited and is expected to be more robust. This limited the damage the attacker was able to do, as Karura was the only vulnerable parachain.

Recovering the lost funds

Here is where we uncover one way that Polkadot is different from many other blockchains.

On Ethereum, this story would have mostly ended here with the attacker disappearing into the mist. Maybe there would’ve been some drama on Twitter as the team tried to establish negotiations with the attacker (or threaten with doxing/calling the IRS on them).

On Kusama, this story is very different. Its governance has the very special power of being able to transfer tokens from any account, or even mint new ones. It can essentially nullify the results of any hack or mistake, and that’s exactly what it did here!

Motion 373 and Referendum 143 were quickly launched (after a few failed attempts with bad parameters) and voted on to take away 9,999 KSM from the attacker’s account. Another 1000 KSM were burned by the attacker, so now a new proposal will need to be voted on to re-mint those tokens and give them to the Karura account. The proposal accidentally left the attacker with 1 KSM, though the amount can be considered as a finder’s fee.

This event is a clear sign that hacks can’t be successful on DotSama, as governance holds immense power over the blockchain. Polkadot and Parity would’ve loved to have this feature on Ethereum back in the day. 

In fact, the belief that governance should be able to mutate the state is probably the biggest philosophical divergence between the Polkadot and Ethereum communities.

• Moonbeam’s Crowdloan Pre-Registration is Open.

TL;DR: The Moonbeam Foundation is opening up “pre-registrations” for the Moonbeam crowdloan on Polkadot.

• Milestone | Khala — Ethereum Bridge Launched Officially

TL;DR: Khala Network approved and launched the Khala-Ethereum Bridge. This opens up one more channel between Kusama and Ethereum.

• Bifrost Launches on Karura Swap With Over 200k BNC in Liquidity Mining Rewards

TL;DR: Karura Swap listed the first asset from another parachain, BNC, shortly after launching the bridge. 200,000 BNC and 25,000 KAR are available as liquidity mining rewards. 

• Introducing Equilibrium’s Fluid xDOT Staking

TL;DR: Equilibrium has launched xDOT staking, a crowdloan derivative that mints liquid DOT tokens on Genshiro and thus making them immediately useful for DeFi.

• Polkadot Treasury

TL;DR: Gavin Wood is not-so-subtly inviting people to make use of the Polkadot treasury, which now contains a whopping 18,936,300 DOT ($814 million, if you do the math).

• (Polkadot) Treasury Proposal 72, a detailed report from OnFinality about its scalable free public API service.

• (Polkadot) Treasury Proposal 71, a proposal from Pinknode, a node-as-a-service platform specialized in providing API endpoints for Polkadot, to improve their front-end for better user experience.

• (Kusama) Referendum 140, a referendum cleaning up XCM versioning for Statemine was approved and executed.

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All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

This week we’ll take a slightly deeper dive into staking on DotSama from the perspective of the average user. There are many ways to earn a pretty significant staking yield on DOT or KSM (right now about 14%). It’s all quite simple, but you do need to take a few quirks into account!

Coming back to our previous edition regarding Polkadot consensus, when you stake your tokens without actually validating the chain you become a Nominator. This means you “nominate” validators you like and lend them your stash, and in return they might earn a commission on your staking rewards.

Nominating is quite easy, and it can be done through Polkadot JS or other wallets like Fearless and Ledger. We’ll be showing it through Polkadot JS (kind of like the Polkadot Metamask).

Nominating, The First Steps

Obviously, the first stage to staking DOT/KSM is to send them to your wallet. We’ll assume you’ve already done this.

With your Polkadot JS extension added, head over to the Network -> Staking -> Account actions tab. Make sure you’ve selected the correct network (we’ll be doing this on Kusama).

Account actions is the tab where you can set up a nominator, or change your Stash settings (a kind of staking cold wallet). You can also set up a full validator if you have the resources required, though in that case you should be able to figure it out without us! 

As an aside, Polkadot JS may be very complex as a wallet, but as a developer tool it’s probably the best anyone has ever seen. Setting up validators, crowdloans, registering parachains… This kind of stuff would usually require a lot of command line-heavy interactions, while on Polkadot JS it’s just a few clicks.

For our purposes we need to click on Nominator, which will open up a tab to set up our staking. You will need to pick the Stash and Controller accounts for staking. The Stash is your token repository, designed to act as a cold wallet. The Controller will perform the actual nomination, and it can be considered as the hot wallet. You can set a single account for both, which is less secure but somewhat easier to manage. 

Next, choose the amount you want to bond (stake), and the Payment wallet for sending the staking rewards (can be the stash wallet itself). 

Make sure to not stake your entire balance, as you’ll need some liquid tokens to pay for transaction fees! If you’re using different Controller and Payment addresses you also need to fund them with the Existential Deposit. On Kusama it’s a few millionths of a KSM, but on Polkadot it becomes a whole 1 DOT. Also, on Polkadot you’ll need to nominate more than 120 DOT due to a temporary performance limitation.

The Existential Deposit ensures your account is kept in the Polkadot state. If the balance falls below that amount, the blockchain will destroy your account and any tokens it may hold. You can still reactivate the account afterwards, but you won’t recover what you lost.

Choosing Validators

Once you fill in the account information you’ll be sent to the next tab, where you’ll get to pick the validators to nominate. This is not a selection to do lightly as if they get slashed, your stake will too. 

You want to strike the right balance between a validator who’s reliable, profitable and not too popular. This is because each validator has a limit to how many Nominators they can pay out to, which is currently 256. Any Nominator beyond that won’t get any rewards, so pay attention to not stake to Oversubscribed validators. 

It’s also just good practice to avoid giving too much stake to any one validator, so make sure to spread the love around!

You can check out the list of validators here, helpfully organized by profitability, commission, existing nominators and own stake. Once you’ve chosen a few, click on Bond & Nominate and you’ll be ready to go. Your stake will start earning in the next era or two, so it’s a few hours to days depending on which chain you’re using.

Beyond the minimum staking limits, your bond also suffers a time lock of either 28 days for Polkadot or 7 days for Kusama. This means you can’t withdraw your stake for at least that long, as any request to unbond is delayed by that amount of time. Keep it in mind if you want to join crowdloans!

Liquid Staking

If you want to avoid the unbonding limitation you can use a liquid staking service, which will take your DOT/KSM and give you a derivative token that can be redeemed for the underlying assets. You can then keep using your assets in DeFi to earn additional yield on top of the staking rewards.

Currently liquid staking is live with Karura, while for Bifrost this feature is expected to come soon. Other protocols have also announced some kind of future liquid staking program, and for good reason — around 70% of the DOT/KSM supply is meant to stay staked. Liquid staking is almost a must for a vibrant DotSama DeFi!

Staking with third parties

It’s worth mentioning that there are some centralized staking providers and exchanges who will stake the DOT/KSM for you. They allow you to withdraw and unstake with no delays, and are generally simpler to use — at the obvious cost of losing custody. If you feel like that’s your kind of jam, Kraken and Binance are good options.

Kintsugi became the 11th Kusama project parachain, closing this parachain season on Kusama. But don’t fret, we’re about to enter the main event, Polkadot parachains! More on that below.

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking into the KAR/KSM pool on Karura DEX

• Yields are now 24% APR (or 49% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• A new KSM/LKSM farm appeared with 14% APR (47% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD now offers kUSD surplus as well. APR is 49.8%, 71.8% with loyalty.

Moonriver’s farms are now holding a few dozen million in TVL, but most projects are Uni V2 forks. As before, the following section is not vetted. Rug risk is high, fundamentals are basically absent. Proceed at your own peril.

• Earn SOLAR in a classic Pool1/Pool2 arrangement, Pool2 yield hovering in the mid triple digits.

• Earn MOON in another Pool1/Pool2 set of farms. Yields at 500% for the Pool 2s.

• A few more assorted UNI V2 token farms in this list.

We finally have a date for Polkadot parachains!

Gavin Wood and Robert Habermeier, the Polkadot founders, declared that Polkadot parachains are now technically ready to go after the success of Kusama. Speaking at the recent Sub0 event, they proposed that the first Polkadot parachain auction would start on November 11, pending governance approval.

The referendum to launch parachains is currently standing at near 100%, so it’s pretty much guaranteed that we’ll see auctions in November. Much like Kusama, the first batch will feature 5 back-to-back auctions lasting 7 days. A second batch is already planned for December 23, with 6 more parachains set to join the fold. This second batch will only be rolled out once every two weeks, though the auctions themselves will still last 7 days.

Unlike Kusama, the parachains will need to wait quite a bit to actually launch. The first batch will only be able onboarded on December 17, while the second batch will need to hold steady up until March 2022. This sounds worse than it is — in both cases they’ll be launching about a week after their auction batch is over.

The slow release is typical for Polkadot, which compared to its cousin is slower in almost everything (by design). The team considers parachains to be ready but not yet mature, with subtle bugs still likely to eventually creep up. For this reason, the launch is very gradual and staggered.

As an additional precaution, the team advised to always keep the number of Polkadot parachains below 75% of Kusama’s count. This requirement would basically guarantee that there will also be new Kusama parachains between now and January, when the 8th Polkadot auction will begin (or March at the latest). Kind of a wide net but we’ll take what we can get!

In the meantime, if you want to join the crowdloans it’s best to start unbonding from staking now. With a 28 days delay you’d just about squeeze in for the first slot now!

• Introducing Polkadot & Kusama Gifts: The Easiest Way to Send DOT & KSM to Friends & Family.

TL;DR: Polkadot and Kusama now have a new Gifts feature, which will hopefully attract new users to the networks.

• Referendum proposal: Enable Swap module and kUSD transfer, Bifrost mainnet upgrades to v0.9.2

TL;DR: With it’s v0.9.2 upgrade, Bifrost has launched the Swap module and kUSD transfer function, announcing upcoming rewards for Zenlink participants as well.

• Khala Transfer is Available Now. 13,000+ Workers Currently Online! | Phala Weekly Vol.53

TL;DR: In this weekly update, Phala Network’s team talks about the launch of Khala Transfer, the success of Khala Secure Worker Mining, dev updates and more.

• Acala Announces Liquid Crowdloan DOT (lcDOT) to Give Polkadot Crowdloan Participants Ongoing Access to their DOT Liquidity

TL;DR: Acala adds a new derivative, Liquid Crowdloan DOT (lcDOT), in order to enable its crowdloan participants to maintain liquidity, resolving the issue of the DOT lock up.

• Looking Back On Equilibrium’s September 2021

TL;DR: Equilibrium/Genshiro team share their major September milestones, such as Genshiro’s closed beta, Fluid DOT staking, DeFi Llama listing and more.

• An issue with teleporting to Statemine from Kusama

TL;DR: Asset teleportation on Statemine broke this week due to incompatible XCM versions. Thankfully, the referendum to fix this has now passed.

• First successful inter-chain asset transfer on Polkadot

TL;DR: Gavin Wood announces the successful asset transfer, using the new XCM format, which he explained in his article series.

• (Polkadot) Referendum 38, Referendum 37, and many others were proposed and eventually passed to upgrade Polkadot to Runtime v9110. Some mishaps were involved as the initial version did not have the proper compressed hash.

• (Kusama) Referendum 138, executed to force Kusama to only send v0 XCM messages to Statemine.

• (Kusama) Referendum 139, a proposal to upgrade Statemine’s runtime to v4.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

Subscribe now to receive regular updates about Polkadot development, crowdloans and parachain auctions, new exciting DeFi projects, and anything else worth knowing about Polkadot.

Subscribe now

This week we will learn more about Statemint/Statemine, the basic common good parachain  for Polkadot and Kusama. 

For a bit of an intro, common good parachains are a class of “free” parachains onboarded by governance without having to go through the auction process. They are divided in system level chains, which are designed to perform core Relay Chain features like governance or staking, and public utility chains, which perform some function that is useful to the entire ecosystem.

Right now the only active common good parachain is Statemine on Kusama. It falls into the public utility part of the spectrum as a “generic asset platform”. Basically it’s the parachain for fungible and non-fungible tokens, with KSM as its native asset.

What can you do with Statemine?

Statemine is extremely optimized for transacting with tokens, which means that this feature is ingrained in the runtime instead of using smart contract standards. 

Statemine and Statemint are ten times more efficient for KSM/DOT transfers than the Relay Chain itself. This translates into lower fees and a lower existential deposit, a unique Polkadot/Kusama quirk. Essentially, Polkadot will eliminate inactive accounts to keep its state from bloating. The existential deposit is a dust amount of KSM that needs to be held in order to not kill the account and its state. Currently it amounts to about 3.3 microKSM, or 3.3 millionths of a KSM (in Ethereum terms this would be 3333 Gwei). Some assets may become “self-sufficient” and allow the existential deposit to be held in the token itself.

Unlike with Ethereum or smart contract parachains, Statemine doesn’t allow any kind of DeFi use for the tokens. The only thing you can use Statemine for is transacting with NFTs and fungible tokens, for example sending to a friend or to a centralized exchange. If you want to use your assets in DeFi, you need to “teleport” them to another parachain that enables smart contracts.

Right now Statemine doesn’t have much use. Ironically, the most active Kusama NFT project, RMRK, doesn’t use it for the NFTs themselves for now. Since the team developed the project before parachains were a thing, they rigged the Relay Chain to support NFTs through a trick involving system.remark, a kind of on-chain note or graffiti system (quite similar to how you’d use the OP_RETURN data field on Bitcoin to create tokens). The RMRK platform token is however available on Statemine, and centralized exchanges will create Statemine deposit addresses for it.

As more cross-parachain connections develop, Statemine is likely to become a kind of settlement layer for payments and CeFi platforms supporting the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem. Tether has pledged to bring USDT to Statemint, for example. More common good parachains will likely come soon, including a WebAssembly-native smart contract parachain where the native tokens are DOT or KSM (contrast this with project parachains, where the native token is their own).

As expected, Parallel Heiko ended up taking the 10th and final slot of this parachain auction batch. Or was it?

A council-led motion was fast-tracked this week to trigger a new slot auction. This 11th slot allows setting up a new parachain within the existing lease period, which means that the current crowdloans all remain active. It’s amazing news for Kintsugi, which reached its crowdloan cap of 200k KSM last week and is likely to become the 11th project parachain. 

Of course, the event sparked debates on the role of Kusama governance. The last-minute addition throws a wrench into the game theory behind the previous rounds, as parachains like Parallel and Kintsugi probably campaigned for way more KSM than they ultimately needed to. 

Some raised concerns that this should’ve been put to a tokenholder vote, instead of being a council motion. But this approach wasn’t perfect either — for one because parachain slot activations do not modify the protocol and hence never required referendums. But there were also issues in terms of timing and who could vote on the proposal, as the people most interested in it had their KSM locked in the crowdloans themselves.

Active Crowdloans

• Kintsugi’s Crowdloan

TL;DR: Reached the 200k KSM cap, can’t accept any more.

• PolkaSmith’s crowdloan

TL;DR: PolkaSmith is the closest to Kintsugi at 27k KSM, but in all likelihood they’re ngmi (for this batch).

• Most of the others have their crowdloan caps below 200k KSM.

Active Farms

Some new farms on Karura popped up:

Earn KAR by staking into the KAR/KSM pool on Karura DEX

• Yields are now 24% APR (or 49% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM. 

• A new KSM/LKSM farm appeared with 29% APR (98% with loyalty)

• KAR/kUSD now offers kUSD surplus as well. APR is 53.76%, 76.8% with loyalty.

Moonriver’s farms are now holding a few dozen million in TVL, but most projects are Uni V2 forks. As before, the following section is not vetted. Rug risk is high, fundamentals are basically absent. Proceed at your own peril.

• Earn SOLAR in a classic Pool1/Pool2 arrangement, Pool2 yield hovering in the mid triple digits.

• Earn MOON in another Pool1/Pool2 set of farms. Yields at 500% for the Pool 2s.

• A few more assorted UNI V2 token farms in this list.

The biggest news this week allows us to demonstrate the value of parachains and how DeFi will look like in parachain land.

A thread by Acala’s CTO, Bryan Chen, explains how the team launched the first Horizontal Routed Message Passing channel between Karura and Bifrost. The channel is currently single-direction — Bifrost can send messages but not receive them from Karura. The second part of the channel will be launched as soon as Bifrost governance approves Karura’s request to open it.

HRMP is the “XCMP-lite” cross-shard communication framework, which uses the Relay Chain to pass messages between parachains. The primary use for this is token transfers, with BNC and vsKSM set to make it to Karura. This will allow listing them in the Karura DEX, their first decentralized market. 

Eventually, Karura aims to take assets from Statemine, Khala and all the other parachains. This requires setting up HRMP channels with all of them, which is quite a tedious task. Each bidirectional channel also requires a 268 KSM ($93k) bond, which easily becomes a lot of money if you need to do it ten different times!

Of course, this kind of expense or work is nothing compared to bridging two separate chains altogether. This is arguably the largest benefit of making it as a parachain — the ability to use HRMP to get your token into all the others. For example, USDT on Statemine or Kintsugi’s BTC will be usable on Karura or Moonriver without much extra work. 

A fully fleshed-out Polkadot/Kusama would probably feature a number of hubs for DeFi, NFTs, payments etc. Parachains doing other things (what, there’s more to crypto than DeFi?!) would open channels with them to benefit from DEX liquidity, lending integrations and other kinds of usage for their tokens. But who knows which of today’s contenders will become these hubs!

• XCM Part III: Execution and Error Management.

TL;DR: Gavin Wood published the 3rd part of Polkadot’s XCM design, covering the XCVM execution model and error management.

• Weekly Update #22 from Sota Watanabe

TL;DR: Astar Network’s founder recaps major updates like Astar 2.0 and dApp staking.

• Transak Integration Enables Direct Transfers of MOVR and GLMR via Debit/Credit Cards

TL;DR: The Moonbeam Foundation announces its collaboration with Transak, which will allow eligible users to buy MOVR and GLMR tokens with fiat.

• Acala Ecosystem Update — September 2021 Acala Launches Liquid Staking for Polkadot & Kusama, etc.

TL;DR: Acala team announces opening of the Crowdloan Waitlist, launch of KSM Liquid Staking, new liquidity mining program and more in this update.

• September 2021 Reflections

TL;DR: Composable Finance recaps its September updates, including the Picasso Crowdloan journey, the Mosaic cross-layer liquidity solution and more.

• (Polkadot) Motion 113, a relaunched proposal to fund a Polkadot book for blockchain beginners failed to get approval.

• (Kusama) Referendum 135, recently launched to upgrade Kusama Runtime to v9100. Likely to pass.

• (Kusama) Motion 362, which enabled the 11th Parachain Auction.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!

If you’re a humble farmer looking to learn more about Polkadot’s DeFi opportunities, or even if you’re a seasoned DOT/KSM staker, this newsletter is the place to find all the latest events in Dot land.

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Following last week’s deep dive into consensus, we can move into another core aspect of Polkadot: governance.

Polkadot was designed with a very formalized governance system right from the start, and together with the parachains it is perhaps one of its most defining features. Contrast this with Ethereum, where there is no clear definition of who “rules” the protocol, so every major decision is a fairly informal and sometimes chaotic attempt at reaching unified consensus between all parties involved. In Polkadot, power clearly resides in the DOT/KSM token holders, who vote on most major decisions pertaining to the protocol’s development.

Referendums and Proposals

Polkadot governance relies on two major “chambers” of political actors: direct voting by DOT stakeholders and the Council.

Direct voting is expressed through Referendums (or “referenda” if you want to be fancy), where DOT holders express a simple Yes or No opinion on some specific proposal. These may include runtime upgrades, parameter updates, but also requests to recover lost funds.

There are several ways of creating referendums depending on who you are. The open method, available to anyone, involves creating a Proposal, which can be seconded by other accounts. Creating a proposal requires bonding an arbitrary amount of DOT/KSM, and anyone who seconds it must add the same initial amount. The proposal with the largest bond will be tabled to become a referendum, and the bond will be released.

The Polkadot/Kusama councils can also make proposals that may become referendums. These exist in a separate pool from the public proposals, and feature different voting mechanisms depending on how unanimous the council is on the issue.

Referendums are held every 7 days on Kusama and 28 days on Polkadot. After one referendum ends, the system picks another either from the public queue or from the council-led queue. The two queues are alternated, unless one is empty.

Counting Votes

Polkadot’s governance has a few additional complexities in how it counts votes and quorums.

Referendums are weighted according to a combination of the DOT bond and a conviction factor. If you are willing to keep your DOT/KSM locked for more time, your DOT will count more. The formula advances with doublings of the lock periods, which are 28 days in Polkadot and 8 for Kusama. As an example, 10 DOT locked for 4 weeks are worth 10 votes, while 10 DOT locked for 16 weeks are worth 30 votes. The conviction factor allows passionate advocates for a particular proposal to make their voices heard, so referendums can be quite dynamic!

Referendums are also a bit complex in how they define quorums and pass thresholds. Public proposals operate according to Positive Turnout Bias, which means that proposals with low turnout must have a very high proportion of Yes votes. Council-led proposals, if they were unanimously accepted by the council members, operate according to Negative Turnout Bias. This means that a proposal with low turnout must be very controversial to fail.

Finally, council proposals where the council itself wasn’t unanimous operate with a simple majority.

What is the Council, anyway?

The Polkadot and Kusama councils are on-chain groups of elected representatives. DOT/KSM holders who don’t want to vote on each issue can simply pick a few council members to take most of the decisions for them. The Council is reelected on a near-continuous basis with each term lasting just one day on Kusama and seven on Polkadot. 

Besides having special powers over referendums, the Council is tasked with approving treasury spend proposals. The Polkadot treasury is continuously filled with transaction fees and some of the staking returns, and a portion of it gets periodically burned to incentivize quick spending. The treasury is designed to promote ecosystem development, including technical grants for supporting stuff like block explorers, wallets, as well as community events and content creation.

Anyone can submit a Motion to the Council to receive a treasury grant, as long as they provide 5% of the value they’re asking as a bond. The bond will be burned if the proposal fails, so you need to be very serious about making these requests!

There are a few more details involved in Polkadot governance, but now you should have all the basics covered to properly understand our Governance Watcher.

The action on this week’s slot was something else! Altair ended up winning it with 187k KSM locked, which was a major upset as by the time the auction ended they were no longer in the lead.

Why did this happen? This is the Candle Auction mechanism at play, where the winning moment is randomly decided after the actual auction has finished. The system ended up picking the moment right before Heiko had a major boost, giving Altair the slot.

Sadly for us spectators, the final slot of this batch seems to be a done deal. Parallel Heiko is sitting at 200.4k KSM, which is just about 400 KSM more than Kintsugi’s crowdloan cap. Kintsugi had a quite amazing run in the past two weeks, going up from 30k KSM to almost reaching its cap. Alas, Parallel ended up rallying more support and all but confirming this slot.

Active Crowdloans

• Parallel Heiko’s Crowdloan

TL;DR: Parallel Finance on Kusama (leveraged staking, lending) distributes up to 5% of max supply in the crowdloan.

• Kintsugi’s Crowdloan

TL;DR: Interlay’s Kusama deployment (trustless BTC bridge) offers 10% of supply to crowdloan participants for its more experimental chain.

Active Farms

Earn KAR by staking into the KSM/kUSD and KAR/KSM pools on Karura DEX

• Yields are now get 64% APR (or 90% with loyalty bonus) for KSM/kUSD farming, or 26% (51% with loyalty) for KAR/KSM. 

Moonriver’s farms are now holding a few dozen million in TVL, but most projects are Uni V2 forks. As before, the following section is not vetted. Rug risk is high, fundamentals are basically absent. Proceed at your own peril.

• Earn SOLAR in a classic Pool1/Pool2 arrangement, high-risk yield holding around 800%.

• Earn MOON in another Pool1/Pool2 set of farms. Yields at 700% for the Pool 2s.

• A few more assorted UNI V2 token farms in this list.

This week in Polkadot land we’ve witnessed something quite unique for crypto: a team retroactively slashing their token’s valuation.

HydraDX had a Balancer LBP event in February where they distributed 5% of the HDX supply to raise initial liquidity for their platform. The team thought they’d get at most $3-5 million DAI, and instead they ended up raising $22M. This put the implied valuation of HDX tokens at over $800M, which was a problem because the team didn’t have that much of a warchest for development.

As crazy as the crypto investment atmosphere is these days, it seems that nobody wanted to fund a yet-unreleased project at $800M valuation. Accepting further investment meant accepting a lower valuation and stabbing the community in the back.

So HydraDX decided that the only sensible thing to do was to boost the LBP allocation to 15% of the total supply and retroactively increase the share of those early participants. This will have deep consequences for the protocol as now the team and investors have an equal stake to the LBP participants, so the community overall has more control than before.

The proposal hasn’t been activated yet as the team needs to test HydraDX’s governance system. It probably will pass as the team decided to abstain from this vote (so basically only the LBP community in question would be voting).

HydraDX is a multi-chain liquidity protocol aiming to increase capital efficiency for LPs. It’s designed to have an Omnipool that would hold each pair in the protocol and allow further use of the assets locked in the pools. Its canary network Basilisk has recently won a parachain slot on Kusama, and it focuses heavily on supporting new projects with Liquidity Bootstrap Pools.

• Bifrost will support Parallel Heiko Kusama Crowdloan through SALP Protocol.

TL;DR: Potential contributors will receive BNC tokens as a reward for joining the derivative mining of Heiko, Parallel Finance’s Kusama chain.

• vsKSM Farming is live, Get Slot Bidding Farming Bonus

TL;DR: Bitfrost has launched vsKSM farming to provide vsKSM and vsBond holders with mining revenue.

• Acala Launches First Liquid Staking Product for Polkadot & Kusama in Partnership With Blockdaemon

TL;DR: Blockdaemon will support Acala’s staking derivatives for DOT and KSM.

• Genshiro’s Closed Beta Is In Full Swing!

TL;DR: The Genshiro team celebrates it’s closed beta (invite-only) and outlines what’s next for the team and users.

• Take Flight Token Event is Finalized

TL;DR: Moonbeam raised $24.5M with its open Take Flight token distribution event.

• (Polkadot) Motion 114, Klever Wallet is requesting funding to expand to Polkadot.

• (Polkadot) Motion 113, a relaunched proposal to fund a Polkadot book for blockchain beginners, accounting for previous feedback.

• (Kusama) Motion 359, someone published a Council motion without providing any additional information, so the motion got disapproved.

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!