Translate & Incentivise the Chaos! (August 26th - September 1st)

What is up, my friends! Crypto is international and incorporates many different languages, cultures, and ideas. This is why translations have always been an important part of the makeup of WagMedia and have been in place before any Kusama treasury bounty was introduced.

Whilst many people understand English, to truly reach a mass audience, translations are key. Once non-Anglo communities gain traction, having something like Gbaci's Polkadot Beginner's Guide translated, for instance, provides great value.

Approval of Bounty 12 came with the added responsibility from the council to deal with spend proposals in relation to content creation. Thus, the first proposals within WagMedia were about dubbing and translation and sparked a heated debate. In order to move things forward, the translation channels based on sign-up quorum were formed.

As with everything in Web3, things are constantly evolving. This has resulted in a vast amount of DotSama content being translated in a relatively short period of time. Progress is being made on refining awards through tier and priority lists, using collaboration via establishing language units to ensure quality.

There currently exists 11 translation channels (expected to grow), covering the majority of the top list of languages such as Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese, as covered in the Wikipedia link here. Whilst translations have been temporarily paused, you can check out some of what has been produced via the Translating WagMedia Subsocial space here.

Furthermore, the translation movement has ignited creators to build their own media channels. For example, there is WagMedia en Español, which has only been around since early August. Their organic grassroots approach has yielded over a dozen dubbed videos, and even more translations of articles.

In terms of impact, whilst it is still early, it is great to see that Gbaci’s Polkadot Beginner’s guide has been translated into many more languages via WagMedia. It is befitting that this valuable booklet is supplemented such as per the linktree here.

WagMedia’s treasuries are also interested in creating translationed content. For instance, KodaDot’s first bounty campaign provides incentives for translations of their Github. It is clear that the recognition of value is there, and it is only a matter of how best to incentivize and utilize communities for this much needed content.

KodaDot's first bounty campaign about translations has recently ended. Do look out for their next bounty campaign! 

TOP NEWS OF THE WEEK

Did someone mention incentives? It has been clear this past week that incentives have paved the way for the two teams that have led Polkadot and Kusama auctions. Both Aventus and Snow hail from different networks yet have managed to obtain reasonable crowdloan support.

Whilst auctions have seen lower contributions during recent times, we witnessed rapid raises from Amplitude and Heiko due to strong incentives. Check out the timeline chart from parachains.info, where you should notice the big upward lines.

Aventus had a similar experience on Polkadot, as their hard cap was reached in less than 24hrs after opening its crowdloan. Hardly surprising, as they already have enterprise adoption, and it will be interesting to see how existing parachain teams react.

We have also seen the same rapid raise with Snow Network on their 3rd Kusama auction entry. Sure, they had an erroneous bid and a protective bid, yet conjuring an early contribution incentive has been effective.

Wrapping up the auction situation, Polkadot has Crust and OmiBTC slowly attracting diehard followers with their respective 0.1% incentive pools. Whilst Oak has announced incentives and an expected crowdloan opening date of September 20th.

Regarding Kusama auctions, did you notice Bitcountry Pioneer with a self-bid imitating Subsocial, who although were early for renewal, they secured a slot with the lowest KSM contribution. Parathread 2130 has still yet to be revealed, speculation on the Wag discord is it could be a parachain from the next Kusama renewal batch.

We shall keep our eyes peeled as teams require lease renewals and new entrants transition during the bear. It will also be interesting to see how things shape up if KICRA (Kusama Innovation Cost Reduction Act 2022) passes.

Now on to the usual flurry of news & content!

Speed Reading

Subsocial win a self-funded Parachain slot, migrate away from their solochain, and introduce Energy. NOTE: Sub was burnt to get energy for this article

Nitty Gritty

• Nodle got listed on the following CEXs this past week: MEXC, Gateio, Huboi, and Kraken.
• Check out the post about Polkadot in Forbes Advisor (Money guidance platform). It provides a nicely laid out succinct overview, and even covers the situation for accredited investors:
• Those who have taken part in staking within DotSama may have heard of Blockdaemon, well they are now involved with Astar. With their global leading institutional-grade node infrastructure, they are to become a collator providing reliable infrastructure for builders developing Astar dApps.
• With Kilt transitioning to Polkadot by the end of September, here is a dev update with technical details.
• Light clients are now becoming available. Invarch’s Tinkernetand GM Parachainwere amongst the first to have the option.
• Payout information for Totem’s Pledge and Crowdloan is now available. TL;DR you can expect payouts by mid-September.
• Here’s a beautiful thread highlighting the main difference between the traditional multisig pallet and InvArch's multisig technology from the INV4 protocol.
• XCM transfers between Crab and Moonriver, Crab and Karura are now available in the bridge aggregator Helix.
• GM everybody, here’s the GM update:

1. Light clients: Amongst first to implement, helping other parachain partners with it, and successfully had a Pull Request merged into the polkadot JS repo.

2. Kusama Governance discussion on KICRA - Kusama Innovation Cost Reduction Act: The goal is to lower the deposit fees associated with typical extrinsics that must be executed by parachain teams. With a lower set-up for parachains and HRMP channels, then this could attract more teams into the ecosystem. For example, based on the 1-year moving average prices of KSM and DOT, it has actually been ~21% more expensive to launch on Kusama versus on Polkadot.

3. Collator program: ongoing work with some of the top independent validators in dotsama to develop educational content.

4. Wen launch: currently fixing the last few minor issues.

• Darwinia becomes the first to have a live connection between Polkadot and Kusama using their LCMP cross-chain message protocol. Routes and endpoints between the two networks and external chains, as well as an SDK to make implementation easy, are coming next!
• Build faster EVM applications with Subsquid, check out this thread for more details.
• Crust partners with Bware Labs. Crust will utilize B-labs API, which provides a secure, reliable, decentralized infrastructure.
• Energy Web has put out an article detailing their advancement in Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), with its deployment of “Switchboard”. The team believes SSI will play a pivotal role and get into the details of their Switch solution. Future development includes a decentralized universal resolver service for identity data across different blockchains or databases.
• Robonomics answers to its community on discord ahead of some important governance proposals. Questions about the use of subscription (RWS) and staking (XRT) were raised and answered.
• SubBridge is now live between Phala and Ethereum, it was previously battle-tested on Khala.

Content creation

Plenty of Bifrost content being created. Here is @paulll infographic on BNC staking

• @DrCAO provides valuable educational videos and complementary articles covering a number of things. This week, an update on Nodle, a look into Invarch’s innovations, alerts us to the YoudleDAO discord, insight into the latest Snow crowdloan, a tutorial on contributing to Aventus CL via Parallel, DOT APY update on Parallel, and he shares his experience of different platforms for crowdloans.
• You may have heard of the Bifrost grant program, if not then check out the article by @johnrhodel.
• @kryptoschain makes a video that explains Gear Technologies.
• Check out the solid thread by @Cris_Pap on DOT.
• @paulll created a nice infographic covering BNC staking.
• The Snow crowdloan is back Kusama, here’s a video by MaxTheo that gets into it.
• @GatorKorps interviews Astar’s Hoon Kim and Maarten Henkens at ParisDotCom.
• Here is @DustinLee’s tutorial playlist on Darwinia’s Helix Bridge using Talisman Wallet.
• @paulll also created an infographic on how to stake KSM on Bifrost.
• A fantastic engaging approach by @pnp as he created a thread based on answering questions collected from the DotSama community about DOT.
• @kryptoschain covers Acala updates and Oak’s fiat on-ramp in this video.
• Check out the thread by @Ramo that aims to research international communities on Web3 in conjunction with Talisman.
• @ChrisKam created a presentation article that covers the winners of each Polkadot Parachain.
• Show some appreciation to the thread written by @Everythingblockchain about our dear Kusama.
• @MaxTheo drops some Polkadot News in his video that covers Bitcountry listing, Bifrost’s Rainbow 3.0 completion, TUR trading on Mangata, and Spacers NFT collection.
• The Polkadot PromoTeam @JohnMental shares some news videos from May 24th, June 2nd, June 12th, June 21st, and June 30th.

Messages From the Treasuries

• Check out RMRK’s latest video on the power of Multi-Resource NFTs!
• Moonbeam releases a deep dive on the main differences between proof of stake and proof of work and highlights the main differences between Ethereum and Moonbeam, even post-merge. They also take time to highlight the biggest developments in Moonriver over the past year!
• Don’t forget! Moonbeam’s connected contracts hackathon is still ongoing. You can check out this YouTube video to get started or review these three documents. More interoperability news as Layer Zero is now connected with Moonbeam which allows for seamless interoperability with projects like Eth, BNB, Avax, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and more. To catch up on what else is going on with Moonbeam, check out their recent Multi-Chain Session via twitter.
• Subsocial is alive and well and have secured 6 new lease positions on Kusama, moved their solochain all the way over to their parachain, and will be releasing a new NFT collection called the spacers soon.

Crowdloan Updates

• @brhnk61 provides us with a solid status update on what is happening in the auctions. He manages to capture all the new entrants into the auction. Did you notice Bitcountry going for a slot on Kusama?
• Subsocial has won a Kusama slot with a self-funded bid and will extend their parachain lease by 36 weeks.
• Snow Network has partnered with Bifrostso that users can contribute to their crowdloan and remain liquid.

Snow partners with Bifrost for its crowdloan

What's in Your Wallet?

• Are you a Moonbeam holder considering a hardware wallet? SafePal is doing a giveaway, check out the thread here for more details, including a guide.
• There has been a lot going on with Talisman in August! Recap on the exciting new integrations, treasury proposals, community events, user interviews, and more in the monthly recap.
• Some Nova Wallet updates this past week: more Kusama cross-chain support, Amplitude now supported, and here’s a recording of the demo session from August 26th (focus is on Ledger integration).
• Solerbeam users can now use it with SubWallet.

AMA and IRL Events Round-up

• Did you join Robonomics Town Hall 2022 on August 28th?
• Looks like SubWallet’s Polkadot Deep Dive Talk on August 30th with Parity, JSquare, Moonbeam, Astar, RMRK, & Bifrost, got canceled!
• Check out Phala’s August community call recording on Twitter spaces from August 31st.
• Save your spot for Kodadot's crowdcast with Basilisk, on the Basilisk NFT pallet on September 8th.
• On September 1st on Ajuna’s discord, there was a deep dive of Ajuna and Evolution Land!
• Set your reminders as notable DotSama NFT projects (Evrloot, EXR, DPS, and PhalaWorld) get into Blockchain gaming on September 7th.

Blockchain gaming to be discussed by notable DotSama NFT projects!

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.
• Here’s a Portuguese translation by @Panegali on a very new Robonomics blog “The Intersection Of Cybernetics And Economics”.

NFTs and the Metaverse: The Heartbeat of Dotsama

Any NFT or Metaverse news that caught the eye?

• Check out this guide from the RMRK team on identifying and avoiding NFT scams.
• Kusama Dragons Gamma-ray-shield and further reveal. The team plans a new website, gitbook, mentions Skybreach as well as the utility of certain items.
• Latest track by Rich Valentino comes with a gift single.
• New Governance shelves available for sale. NFT Reward for voting on Kusama Referendum 222 is out.
• KodaDot is running a charity around the fires in Portugal. They also have a “supercharged” search bar coming. Learn more about KodaDot Guilds and about Kodadot's road to EVM.
• GLMR Jungle's game The Great Escape has launched publicly. Top players each week will be rewarded with $GLMR and $BANANAS.
• Archiverse has a new legendary item for sale.
• Raresama has launched.
• Moonriverbayc announced Mintathon From Sep 1st to Sep 8th to incentivize mints.
• Meta Dojo Tibet Metaverse Exhibition starts on 31 August 2022.
• Bitcountry’s Kucoin partnership was put into a thread. Gate.io will also launch their MetaVerse on Bit.Country. There’s a new podcast out as well.
• Materia Prima tweeted an interesting overview of the different NFT projects in the dotsama ecosystem. A good starting point if you are into NFTs or want to know more. Materia Prima launches a website with info on what they are building (NFT RPG w/ rmrk).
• Neoncrisis and hoglordz partnership is hinted at.
• PhalaWorld’s Shell customization is discussed.
• Rare Gems launches an NFT Market on Darwinia’s Crab Smart Chain.
• Cosmize (Metaverse on Astar) went public, and hosted an AMA with Astar Troopers.
• Dequest is partnering with RMRK to create soulbound NFTs that represent gamified user learning.
• Spacers are announced by Subsocial.

Content creation

• @MaxTheo has released a youtube video on Bitcountry, with Pioneer launching next week as well as NEER Transfers and Staking.
• @DrCAO shares his experience exploring the YoudleDAO discord.
• @bahu makes a twitter thread on Kucoin metaverse in Bitcountry Pioneer which is launching soon.
• @Tomitzu writes an amazing article on middleware and KodaDot.
• @kryptoschain makes a video on Bitcountry and Kucoin’s partnership.

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

Aug 25, Aug 27, Aug 29, Aug 30.

DeFI

Waggers are on board and ready to compete in Equilibrium's Closed Beta Competition!

• Equilibrium began their Closed Beta Event! And… WagMedia put together a team to compete!
• Composable Finance details a cross-chain blockchain experience via their XCVM strategy.
• Talisman integrates with bothBeamswap and Stellaswap DEX’s on Moonbeam.
• Maker publishes an update on their 3-year partnership with Centrifuge and makes a case for RWA (real-world assets) in DeFi.
• Acala identifies the remaining $52M in aUSD error mints. They’ve started initially planning to restore the aUSD peg.
• Did you join Mangata’s liquidity bootstrapping event for Oak’s $TUR token last week? A total of 32m $MGX and 1.3m $TUR were contributed.
• Zenlink’s stable AMM passes auditting from PeckShield.
• Athos Finance is live on Moonbeam.
• Revoke Cash is available on Astar & Moonbeam.
• Parallel & Heiko have launched a short-term APY multiplier for selected pairs to incentivize liquidity.
• Starfish Finance (on Astar) IDO has opened and the team released the potential benefits of holding their $SEAN token.

Pendulum looks to facilitate fiat-to-DeFi trading through their PMM (Proactive Market Maker).

Content creation

• @PNP brings us news from across Dotsama; of course, details with the Astar weekly update, dual mining on Starlay and Kagla, vKSM on Bifrost, and overview AstridDAO’s stablecoin $BAI.
• @Blinkin.chaos demonstrates how aUSD on Kusama is maintaining its peg and is having a giveaway of Subsocial’s NRG.
• @yoshida2 writes a short thread about Zenlink DEX.
• @pitcoin shares a guide to on-chain swapping $SDN to $KSM on the Relay Chain and StarFish’s proposal to create sDOT Liquid Staking on Astar.
• It’s been a while, but @usafmike is back in the Degen Studios to show how to contribute $TUR to Mangata’s bootstrapping event.

Governance

Various governance activity being reported this past week!

• Referendum 226 has successfully failed as the Snow network allows their erroneous bid to simply run out of time.
• KICRA discussions are alive and well as members of GM main team propose lowering the barrier to performing basic functions on Kusama’s relay chain including registering an ID for a parachain, opening up HRMP channels and more. Check out the full discussion here to learn more.
• Robonomics’ community is currently voting on a proposal to burn 7 million XRT tokens that are locked in a contract on Ethereum
• Gear has integrated with Polkassembly! With this integration expect more user friendly updates with Gear’s WASM solutions.
• Darwinia is preparing to open an HRMP channel with Litmus.
• Astar is requesting funds from the Polkadot Treasury to support Polkadot Summit which will be an event that brings together multiple parachain teams in San Francisco. Learn more about the proposal here.
• @DrCAO cover’s Centrifuge’s governance call which he regularly take part in.

Rumors & Alpha

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

• Here's a quick alpha leak of the GitArch dApp (design still pending ), a fully decentralized and client-side dApp to access and manage Git Repos from parachains that implement the INV4 protocol.
• Enterprise adoption is expected in Japan for Astar (NOTE: this was Sota's response to a comparison table put out by Aventus who were leading the Polkadot auction 26).

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. Inflation, Hitting Rock Bottom, DeFi on Polkadot, NFT Viruses, & Crypto Music - SER, Have ya Heard?
2. Learn How to Use your KSM and DOT Tokens to Vote on Kusama and Polkadot On-Chain Governance.
3. MAKE CHAOS with Hoon Kim, CTO of Astar and Shiden - Space Monkeys Podcast 066.
4. Recession Gaming w/ NFTs - Demonology on Moonriver - P-Ninja on the Road.
5. Watr Protocol, ESG, & Supply Chain transparency - 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

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Metamask

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Here is some of the changes that have been introduced when it comes to Finding and Creating