Recovering the Chaos & Treasuring DotSama! (August 12th - August 18th)

What is up, my friends! We continue to see plenty of news and content coming through WagMedia even though the top-up to bounty 12 is yet to be resolved. In the meantime, creators may want to consider checking out the bounties available via one of our active treasuries.

Bifrost is a fantastic example of a treasury leveraging the content generation power of WagMedia. Since onboarding, they have awarded a significant amount of content created through three specific bounty campaigns. This past week alone, a dozen pieces of content have been created, and this doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

How about some appreciation for languages, as Solarbeam has recently rewarded German, Japanese, and Portuguese translations?

This past week, Astar has awarded creators for content that helps build awareness of their summer “DeFi Raising” campaign.

RMRK continues to be a long-standing champion of WagMedia; just remember to react with that iconic “R” in the NFT channel category.

Try your hand at creating some content for a VC with Scytale Ventures. This unique treasury has a number of projects in its stable. You may have heard of Kilt (recently revealed as parathread 2057) which has been looking for new content on their newer projects such as GameDAO, MyNFT, Jur, and Public Pressure.

Remember that writers get awarded $SUB by creating original content with the Subsocial app. The app now gives you the choice of using either the markdown editor or the regular editor which is easier for new users.

Other treasuries that are still active are Moonbeam and Crust, regularly dishing out rewards for awesome content. You can check their channel or any other treasury channel that you are interested in.

As always, keep your eyes peeled. The WagMedia announcements channel provides updates on new treasuries onboarding and the latest on bounty campaigns. In addition to treasuries, there are a number of teams regularly posting news. For instance, the new GM Parachain is looking to provide a weekly summary to the DotSama community via WagMedia.

There are plenty of projects within DotSama interested in WagMedia. Whether you choose to focus on a particular bounty or simply post news, the objective is simple: share the story of DotSama.

Here are the emojis used to react to your awesome content!

TOP NEWS OF THE WEEK

No surprise here, given the news flash in last week’s edition, that this week’s top news story is about aUSD.

Acala’s aUSD exploit shows us how quick action resolved a potential $3B mistake. August 13th, @0xTaylor first reported the aUSD attack. Within 4 hours, Acala pushed through an “urgent governance” referendum that paused all on-chain activity, preventing a dramatic loss of value from the network. The issue stemmed from the recently launched iBTC/aUSD pool that erroneously minted aUSD to wallets.

On August 17th, two trace reports identified 2.9B aUSD that had been transferred to 16 wallets through error mints and token swaps. 7,700 ACA had already been transferred to exchanges. Two referenda (21 and 24) were passed to quickly burn this pool of aUSD on Acala and return any original assets to wallets that had taken advantage of trading opportunities. Essentially, steps were taken to roll back the aUSD transactions–resolving 99% of the problems.

A third trace report, on August 18th, identified 177K DOT (roughly $1.5M) had been transferred to the Polkadot relay chain. While 41K DOT had been transferred to an exchange. The rest remains in the original Polkadot addresses that received funds from Acala.

Acala governance cannot burn funds that have left the network. Instead, Acala released a bounty for any wallet that returns at least 95% of the transferred assets back, and no further actions will be taken against wallets that comply.

A fourth trace report identified the last major portion of error mints and swaps, totaling 11.21M aUSD. This resulted in the passing of referendum 25, on August 21st, which burned this 3.6M aUSD and returned ACA assets to addresses that took advantage of error mints. The remaining 7.5M aUSD involved in complex arbitrage trading is yet to be resolved.

Through quick action to halt the chain and expedited governance, Acala community has recovered over $2.9B worth of assets. The team is continuing to solve the remaining <$10M loss of value from aUSD. This has resulted in a rally of the aUSD token to $0.91 USD. We’re confident the aUSD peg will be restored in the near future. The team will release a post-mortem report, however, a summary of trace results to date can be found HERE.

UPDATE - here is Acala’s report.

Speed Reading

Parathread 2057 is revealed as Kilt, this signifies a future switch from Kusama to Polkadot

Nitty Gritty

• According to Messari, Polkadot has the lowest energy consumption among the top Crypto projects. Placing it in the lead in terms of the green energy movement.
• Since winning a slot GM parachain has been hard at work. The team is aiming to share a weekly update via WagMedia. This week’s update posted on discord gained a record number of upvotes and was subsequently shared via WagMedia’s Twitter with an epic thread.
• Here is the past week's Polkadot ecosystem roundup from the official Twitter handle.
• Have you heard web3alert (a blockchain notification service)? They have integrated with Kintsugi, you can now receive various personalized alerts, such as staking rewards, governance motions, etc.
• Check out the detailed OriginTrial blog post on the process of teleporting $TRAC from Ethereum to Polkadot. This essentially has replaced the previous approach using bridges due to all the recent issues concerning them.
• Cross-chain transmission between Khala and Crab using the subbridge is enabled.
• SubDao a multichain protocol that allows for the swift creation and management of DAOs has been successfully audited by Slowmist.
• Pendulum has had their amendment for their Web3 Foundation grant relating to the spacewalk bridge accepted. Check out more details here.
• Gafi Network (up and coming gamefi chain) announces a partnership with Subsocial. Check out the comprehensive thread. As the team outlines the need for a censorship-resistant social media platform for their key documentation. Additionally, in their development pipeline is a bridge that would allow for secondary trading of NFTs on Subsocial.
• HRMP channels open between Robonomics and Crust.
• Check out Energy Web's Biweekly recap. If you have never noticed before they present it cleanly using an infographic.
• Take a look at Crust's Biweekly development report, which is well laid out and to the point.
• Oak Network's Turning Canary Network has had quite a bit going on with HRMP Channels. The list includes Shiden, MangataX, Bifrost, Crust, and more follow. Find out more here.
• Chaintroopers' audit on Zeitgeist is completed, 14 issues were identified and addressed, and re-checked. Check out the blog for more details.
• Check out InvArch's latest weekly updates in VR, from runtime upgrades to token distribution and even updates on YoudleDAO!
• ITrust Capital, a US-based crypto retirement fund has opened up beta testing on POLKADOT staking with retirement funds. Huge news as Polkadot is the only coin currently being offered for staking through their platform.
• Gear Protocol is Integrating with Bounce Finance. This will allow Bounce Finance to utilize WASM to extend its comprehensive decentralized auction platform.
• Lemon Network is in the process of migrating to Moonbeam Network. Previously on the Energy Web chain, the protocol offers a number of dApps including DEX, NFT Marketplace, Pay to earn social media app, etc. There will be a migration for existing $LMN token holders.
• Announced winners of Phala x AmsterDOT Hackathon 2022. Marl0wl created an interface for a simple account-based voting mechanism and was awarded 3,500 $PHA). And realsoptq created an on-chain 2-FA using Phala Fat Contract and was awarded 5,00 $PHA.
• Check out the interview featuring Crust Co-founder Luke Fan. Lots of insight including an overview of decentralized storage platforms, how are Crust positioned amongst platforms, existing adoption profile, and future growth markets.
• Polkadot Hackathon: North American Edition has announced the winning teams for the main challenge categories:

1. Overall Winner Grand Prize - XCM DOT Autostake.
2. Interfaces & Experiences – 1st Moonbridge, 2nd Subsocial Substrate StackExchange, 3rd Polkadot Point of Sale Terminal.
3. DAO & Governance – 1st Diora Network, 2nd Rooster DAO, 3rd Shivarthu.
4. Web3 & Tooling - 1st PostThread, 2nd Next Step, 3rd SamaritanOS: A DID-based Web3 Cloud Access Layer.
5. DeFi – 1st RoboFi, 2nd Polkadot Acala aUSD Credit Card, 3rd Humidefi.
6. NFT – 1st KodaDot: Moonsama, 2nd Sociable Weaver, 3rd Ventur NT-NFT Pallet.
7. Community Choice - Sociable Weaver, Rooster DAO, NUSIC: Fractionalized Music for a Short-Form Economy.

• Check out the awesome DotSama Deep Dive report made by the SubWallet team.

Lots of insightful information in the DotSama Deep Dive Report by the SubWallet team

Content creation

• The Bifrost's Rainbow Boost program is about on-chain reputation and may become useful for access to airdrops and whitelists on Dotsama. This is covered by @TheFVK in another of his awesome threads.
• @pnp provides a brief thread on the KMA airdrop stage of Bifrost’s Raindrops.
• Check out @DustinLee doing a cool freestyle rap over BIRB Tapes Vol 2.
• @Everythingblockchain follows up his Bifrost staking guide and tutorial video with a Bifrost staking Tutorial Thread.
• Not finished and not for reward consideration, but do check out the teaser video that @usafmike is working on in relation to Oak Network Crowdloan. Actually here is the final thing watch, listen to, and enjoy!
• @JimmyTudeski created this epic thread covering Energy Web development and news. He follows this up with a thread about Green Proofs for BTC.
• If you want educational content then check out the videos by @DrCAO. This week includes: Polkadexstaking tutorial, a quick look at aUSD moments from the de-peg, DotSama ecosystem update (includes article), deciphering parathread 2057 which was Kilt, and a DotSama crowdloan update.
• @kryptoschain covers Moonbeam connected contracts, Manta, and Basilisk in the video here.
• aUSD may have de-pegged and some might be thinking UST, but there is a difference as explained by @pnp.
• @johnrhodel drops a few threads about Bifrost. He covers the importance of Rainbow boost, answers some questions on it, and 5 reasons why Bifrost is a solid project.
• More awesome Bifrost content with this video created by @Everythingblockchain that covers Bifrost Raindrop Program.
• @YuliKay drops a video covering basic information about Bifrostthat would be useful to newbies.
• @MaxTheo makes a video covering some of the latest Polkadot News. It includes Acala aUSD Update, Kilt Moving to Polkadot, OAK Crowdloan, Amplitude, and Skybreach.
• Here is the second article in the series covering the Polkadot Ecosystem by @Everythingblockchain, it covers Polkadot’s canary network – Kusama.

Plenty of Bifrost content being generated through WagMedia

Messages From the Treasuries

• Moonbeam continues outstanding updates with their Connected Contracts Hackathon which is open until September 26th. They are encouraging further development of smart contracts that can reach across multiple platforms and even plug in to EVM to XCM, which you can learn more about here.
• Take some time to listen to a few of their audio updates. Check out their multi-chain session with DAM finance, a workshop on how to integrate Talisman, and an introduction to the Pocket Network team.
• Sub.ID now supports NFT Banners! Starting with only their collection, they will soon be expanding to more banners. Get ready for their twitter space with DotBullsDAO coming up this week!

Crowdloan Updates

• Snow has kicked off their phase1 airdrop for ICON holders (snapshot from December), thereafter, will be geared toward the Kusama crowdloan. The team had also introduced a protective Kusama auction bid (parathread 2129). It is a self-bid that should not last longer than the current auction period. The intent is to act as a safeguard to their previous erroneous bid (parathread 2127) from winning a slot, and in terms of being only active for 1 lease period instead of 8.
• Parathread 2057 who has won a Polkadot slot has been revealed as Kilt. Congratulations to Kilt for winning the 24th Polkadot slot.
• Nice clean look with agood summary on what’s happening on Parachain auctions in a thread by @brhnk61.
• Did anyone pay attention to the extra slots, as GM Parachain stormed towards winning a Kusama auction? GM Parachain wins Kusama's 48th auction and produces its first block.

GM parachain win a Kusama slot and produces its first block

What's in Your Wallet?

• Here’s the Nova Wallet session recording where you can learn more on how to use Parity Signer with Nova Wallet.
• GM parachain is now available in Nova Wallet. It was added to the Nova Wallet dApp browser.
• Upcoming feature on Nova Wallet that allows you to see your portfolio in different currencies.
• In this past week, new Kusama cross-chain transfers have been made available in Nova Wallet, including Karura, Bifrost, and Moonriver with a number of other parachain tokens. Additionally, new cross-chain transfers for MOVR are available.
• Managing custom ERC20 tokens is super easy with Talisman, check out the clip.
• Talisman now supporting Nodle. The move allows Nodle holders to manage their accounts on a desktop, which also supports ledger.

Nova Wallet rapidly supporting the new GM parachain

AMA and IRL Events Round-up

• Moonfit host an AMA on their discord with Dustin from the Darwinna/Evolution Land team on August 14th.
• Do remember to check out the Mangata Mondays this past week on August 15th Zeitgeist was on.
• You should be able to watch the crowdcast recording from August 17th. To recap the Moonbeam workshop featuring Talisman's co-founder & head of technology Nipsey.
• Some top figureheads from the Hydra/Basilisk team did a call to recap their journey on August 17th on discord.
• @bLd759 shares the playlist for various talks/panels at ParisDotComm.
• Check out the full interview from August 15th of Explore the Paraverse series featuring members of the Oak Network team.
• @mariana_dot shares an older interview of Subsquid’s co-founder, Dima Zhelezov on Talisman’s Explore the Paraverse.

Translating DotSama

Some excellent translations and non-English original creations, which you may find fitting to share with family, friends, and neighbors around the world.

• You can find most of the Non-Anglo Content generated through WagMedia here.
• And here is a great piece of non-English content by @Krypto_Dudes as they interview Moonbeam's Germany ambassador.

NFTs and the Metaverse: The Heartbeat of Dotsama

Can you tell in the above image which NFTs projects were mentioned this past week? 

• Evrloot team asks for users to fill out a survey to help craft the best experience possible and also provides an update about in-game legendary weapons and armor that did not get minted during the soul reveal. Legendary items will be distributed in the game's item pool after Version 1.0 (MVP) with monthly drop rate evaluations. Will you be one of the super lucky ones to find a legendary piece of gear? Prepare your souls
  
  of Evrloot is also just around the corner.
• You can now upload custom tiles to your Skybreach land plots.
• Do you want to know the advantages of developing a Web3 game? Ajuna explains.
• Minting of Exiled racers boosters is live, with several partners offering a 1/1 Legendary prize to participants.
• The Bit.country 100 metaverse competition has come to a close. The winners will be announced soon.
• Archiverse released a banner item in collaboration with Buddies.
• Kusamahub is trying to bring analytics to Kusama NFTs. Check out their discussion in polkassembly here.
• DPS new concept art of Flagship sprites is released.
• Content creators make things easy for normal people to understand. A nicely paced example on the RMRK channel was created by the Alpha Airdrop team explaining Dynamic Rarity. A minor update on skybreach to have adjustable zoom settings.
• First WASM based game on Dotsama coming soon.
• Referendum 218 NFTs are revealed and in wallets that voted. New Snapshot date for evolution of Toddler to Adolescent dragon Governance rewards is 19th August 1pm UTC. Check your eligibility here.
• Have you seen the updated roadmap from Unique Network? One exciting addition to the roadmap is the Sapphire mainnet, which is closely tied to Quartz.
• A new Archiverse pyramid is coming.
• The DEO Arena Game of Sora finishes the test phase, and on Monday it will start with real prizes in $XOR.
• Kodadot's white version for mobile devices is coming.

Content creation

• @Sanchez wrote on myNFT, a new multi-chain NFT marketplace. He discusses auction models used by NFT marketplaces and the novel GBM auction model myNFT will use. Read the article here
• @DiscLoser Highlights the Kusamarauder/KuSamari/KuSpartan collections.
• @TheFVK covers GLMRApesas a case study.
• @kryptoschain creates a video on rumors around Skybreach’s Winds of Navis OST collection.

And don’t forget the daily RMRK Recaps from @MARI0:

Aug 12, Aug 13-16, Aug 17.

DeFI

Acala's aUSD headlines as the top news story this week

• Plenty of Acala’s aUSD updates from the fallout being posted this past week, here are all the on-chain trace results.
• Projects and participants across DotSama take action to mitigate the effects of aUSD exploit on Acala: Starlay, Bifrost, Astar, Polkadot, and Alice und Bob.
• The Defiant releases a great overview of aUSD situation, highlighting the importance of governance and substrate.
• Despite all the recent adversity, the Athos Finance IDO kicked off on StellaSwap. Here is a summary post-IDO.
• Check out the infographics that explain SALP and SLP on Bifrost in a nutshell.
• Parallel releases a security overview of their network.
• Interlay explains the security and DeFi opportunities with holding your Bitcoin in iBTC vaults.
• Mangata's take on censorship and deep dive into Themis architecture.
• Here's the latest on the Starfish (built on Astar) IDO hosted on the Tokensoft platform.
• Check out Astar Farm’s campaign to get Vegepoints.
• Tapio explains how we can mint cross-chain tDOT on Acala, while protecting DOT liquidity across parachains through XCM.
• Celer reports potential DNS hijacking of cbridge frontend. However, revoking approvals returned 100% of the funds for affected users. Good news, there was no major smart contract exploit.
• Temporarily boosted APR for wstKSM-xcKSM pool on Solarbeam.
• New trading pairs on Genshiro (WETH, WBTC, HDOT, and BNB).
• Polkabridge scams again, this time blaming Sirius Finance for loss of user funds. This thread sheds light on the actors running the Polkabridge Scam.
• Five projects on Astar run a stablecoin campaign, Hexa Farming.
• Now, holders of LP nASTR/ASTR on Kagla can receive ALGM and KGL incentives from Algem and Kagla respectively.
• TUR (Turing OAK) is bootstrapping on MangantaX!

Content creation

• @DrCAO provides valuable educational videos and complementary articles covering a number of things. Keeping us up-to-date with on parachains auctions, Kilt moving to Polkadot, and covers the latest DeFi and roadmap updates of several parachains.
• @PNP will cover anything Polkadot, again bringing us the weekly update for Astar, diving into Tapio Protocol, and covering XY Finance.
• @Blinkin.chaos shares one of the most detailed DeFi strategies, which includes trading between KSM and DOT while building a long-term HODL portfolio with BTC. Check it out!
• @kryptoschain was one of the first to cover the aUSD incident on Acala, follows the quick recovery of aUSD, and details the loss of DOT on Acala.
• @goku explains the difference between aUSD error and UST exploit.
• @MaxTheo summarizes Acala’s issue with iBTC/aUSD LP.

Governance

Referendums 222 and 223 focus on Statemine with the latter set to bring changes to NFTs

• Interlay has passed a referendum to open up HRMP channels with Parallel Finance.
• Referendum 222 has passed to renew the common good chain, Statemine for an additional two years. This was in preparation for the upgrade of Statemine’s runtime to v9270. Learn more about the details of this upgrade through this polkassembly post.
• Yield Bay is awaiting further council votes to determine the funding of their Dotsama native yield aggregator. Show your support by responding to this post.

Rumors & Alpha

Do Your Own Research! These finds are unconfirmed alpha in Dotsama

• Here’s a rumor about a partnership between EWT and Amazon.
• In this fantastic interview Crust co-founder, Luke Fan drops a hint about new encryption services yet to be announced. They are working in collaboration with several others, and Zero-Knowledge privacy was mentioned NOTE: as you own the data yourself you can always encrypt it.

Beginner’s Guide

New to Polkadot? Or maybe you have some friends who keep coins on a CEX but haven't become a part of a community yet? Share this with them to get them started! It will be updated weekly with new content and is open for changes. Feel free to leave a comment and I'll add content that's needed.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Dotsama

Another mind-blowing week! Our WagMedia discord is the primary source for most of the content in this newsletter – thanks a ton fam! These are just the highlights, for more in-depth news join the discord and get incentivized to learn more about the ecosystem and provide news, alpha, and content to us all. As always, I’m open to feedback and I hope you find this helpful. Looking forward to yet another week of exponential growth in the DotSama ecosystem.

What is WagMedia?

WagMedia Discord.

Jay Chrawnna’s The Kusamarian channel provides us all with extremely entertaining updates on everything DotSama. Here is the playback listing of the past week:

1. USA Sanctions Tornado Cash - Can we get some Privacy on Polkadot and Kusama? - SER, Have ya Heard?
2. WagMedia Bounty #12 Top Up from the Kusama Treasury - AAG Ep. 1.
3. Can NFTs Change Without a Transaction? - P-Ninja in da' Streets.
4. Project Liberty's Social Graph & Frequency Parachain - Csaint's Alpha Shots.

Looking for more to read, why not check out the other works by the Wag Weekly Squad: Pnin, Csaint, Jb_blah, and Dodow.

Tips appreciated

KSM

GL85fwNiFfUqkCcmtrq7eD5DphB1QWJrxkgMme5qdSuFfap

Metamask

0x66b9f30B38Cb6d61374D15D8A9D220561E715995

Get ready for KodaDot content as they are latest treasury to on board