Weekly news from Kusama&Polkadot #32
1. OriginTrail Parachain won the 17th auction on Polkadot
OriginTrail Parachain is the official winner of the 17th parachain auction on Polkadot Network by raising 754k DOT worth $7.5m. This amount of DOT was locked into the crowdloan by 1830 contributors. OriginTrail Parachain was leading from the beginning of the auction, so similarly to the winning of Polkadex in the 17th auction, even this one was without any surprise.
What is OriginTrail and why is it an important project for the Polkadot ecosystem? OriginTrail is not a blockchain as we know it, rather that it's a Decentralized knowledge graph (DKG) that couples and organizes together both the physical world and the digital one.
The physical world is the one in which we interact daily with things like art, fashion, healthcare, education, and supply chains. The digital world consists of things like blockchain, DeFi, metaverse, and NFTs. Thanks to DKG, all these digital items are much more discoverable, verifiable, and thus becoming even more valuable.
OriginTrail DKG is a mesh of data and assets, where the associations with each other can be then applicable in Web3 space. Think of it as a decentralized version of Google for Web3.
2. XCM is live on Astar, prepare yourself for DOT festival
XCM transfers are live on Astar, so you can now transfer your DOT from the Polkadot relay chain to Astar Network. XCM (Cross-consensus messaging format) was launched on the Polkadot network as the result of upgrade v9190 of the relay chain at the beginning of May. All the upgrades including this one were a result of a referendum on the on-chain governance.
XCM allows communication between the Polkadot relay chain, parachain, smart contracts, pallets, bridges, and sharded enclaves like SPREE-kind of trust wormholes. XCM is a generic and extensive message format designed to be a language for communication between two systems by using Horizontal Relay-routed Message Passing (HRMP).
The full-featured XCMP (Cross-Chain Message Passing) is still under development, it will allow parachains to exchange messages with other parachains on the same Relay Chain. So for this moment, kind of a XCMP-lite version is implemented known as Horizontal Relay-routed Message Passing (HRMP).
Because the XCM transfers are one of the main upgrades of the network, because it enables DOT holders to transfer and use them within the Astar Network, the Astar team decided to celebrate this option with specialized DeFi protocols and launch “the DOT festival”, which starts within just a few days. Astar promises the DOT holders to bring the highest APR in the Dotsama ecosystem.
For now, you just need to wait for the DOT festival to start and prepare yourself by unstaking your DOT tokens.
3. DotSama Prague conference is now open for ticket purchase
Last time we informed you about two conferences. The first one is taking place right now in Davos, and the second one, Polkadot Decoded 2022, is scheduled for June 29th-30th of this year.
There is another chance to get a lot of insights and info from developers of the Dotsama ecosystem in the one-day conference in Prague and its organized by the Kodadot team.
DotSama Prague will take place in Prague on 7th June 2022. There will be speakers from the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem and lots of networking opportunities. You can look forward for speakers such as Dan Reecer from Acala, Dima Zhelezov from Subsquid, Robert Arthur Williams from Centrifuge and many more.
Tickets can be purchased at eventbrite, for program check official website of DotSama Prague.
4. Kusama’s on-chain governance approved the liquidity bootstrap for Karura’s stablecoin aUSD
In Kusama’s referendum #198, the KSM holders agreed, after a very juicy discussion and many NAY votes, to provide 22,000 KSM of treasury funds as an aUSD liquidity/reward/bridge subsidy for a stableswap USDT/USDC/aUSD.
The KSM subsidy will use aUSD as a credit lever to bootstrap liquidity on multiple parachains and protocols. This will serve as a proof-of-concept for further programs to deploy KSM-based aUSD credit liquidity subsidies into multiple parachains and dApps to bootstrap Kusama’s multichain ecosystem. And once this concept will be functional, it can serve also Polkadot.
aUSD (Acala Dollar) is a native decentralized stablecoin of both Acala and its canary network Karura. It’s kind of a flagship for these two networks. aUSD uses KSM (on Karura/Kusama) and DOT (on Acala/Polkadot) as reserve assets and collateral to generate stable currency, which is used as a medium of exchange in the decentralized web.
5. Bifrost launched 2nd round of vKSM farming pool with bonus APY
On May 23rd Bifrost launched the 2nd round of the vKSM farming pool. You can get rewarded with incentive rewards of 500 vKSM. The actual APY of vKSM farming is 107.4% and totally there is a locked $2.01M to this date. This incentive will last just for another 7 days.
vKSM is the liquid staking representation of KSM tokens, which can be then used for various DeFi applications such as farming, but is redeemable anytime without an unbonding period of 7 days like KSM tokens. So go and grab the combination of base KSM Staking rewards of ~20.4% + vKSM farming rewards.
Consider supporting us by the nomination of your tokens to the Kusama or Polkadot validator going by the POLKADOTTERS name.
