A little bit of Chit-chat
Kusama topped the headlines this week. First, the $KSM token was listed on Coinbase on June 2nd and once it started trading, it increased by 487% in traded volume. Meanwhile, the Nomination Pools (NP) feature went live, allowing smaller token holders to delegate to a pool to earn rewards. After this model is proven on Kusama, NPs will also eventually be added to Polkadot. You can find the instructions on how to use this new feature here.
The Moonbeam ecosystem is booming. The recent 4x increase on StellaSwap Liquidity Pool rewards on the $USDC - $GLMR, $ETH - $GLMR and $xcDOT - $GLMR pools proves it. Also, to earn rewards, you can stake your $GLMR to us here.
The Astar community speaks up 📣
There was a controversial post made on behalf of the Council by 0xRamz, an Official Project Ambassador. It described a timeline of events that led to a sell-off of the ASTR token and a backlash on community channels.
According to the post, Starlay Finance, one of the ecosystem dApps, carried out some questionable practices on their IDO. The post also called out Starlay to deliver a set of solutions to avoid a vote on delisting them from the Astar app store. As described by 0xRamz, the issues causing distrust and discomfort among community members were the following:
The Starlay team allowed a whale to buy the $LAY token after the sale ended. Starlay remediated this shortly after due to the community backlash on social media and Discord.
They publicised higher price targets for their token. There was an 80% difference between the first and second IDO.
They provided a small amount of liquidity upon listing.
The Astar's council post drove an all-time high number of comments (around 4.4K) and prompted the Starlay team to come up with a proposal to remediate the situation. Although explicitly described as initial ideas, Starlay's proposal contained some radical measures to gain back the trust of the community:
A 1.5x LAY airdrop to all addresses participating in the second token sale.
A buyback of LAY tokens with the 4M ASTR raised on the IDO (~242,120 USD)
A new incentive mechanism in which Starlay will use all the ASTR earned as rewards to buy back LAY and distribute it among users.
The hiring of a new director to handle communications
And a perpetual communication channel with the Astar core team to keep the community updated about important decisions.
The first reactions were mixed. Some community members supported the measures, while participants in the first sale complained that they were not being compensated for their losses.
Bug bounty tested 🪲
The Moonbeam team received a security issue alert by a white-hat hacker, which prompted the emergency runtime upgrades 1503 & 1504 for both Moonbeam and Moonriver. According to the official statement, the vulnerability was on the Frontier Pallet, which provides core Ethereum compatibility features within the Polkadot ecosystem. Other parachains who may be affected were notified.
The vulnerability, fixed 12 hours after receiving the report, presented a potential medium-sized risk to the security. The affected features were smart contracts allowing arbitrary calls to external smart contracts. Here is a message from the team about what could have happened had it been exploited:
"This is the case of some smart contracts allowing callbacks. In those situations, a malicious user could make a DEX execute a call to the malicious smart contract that would be able to access the precompiles pretending to be the DEX and possibly transfer its balance to any other address."
This was the first issue detected by white-hat hackers participating in Moonbeam's bug bounty program, which was launched last year through Immunefi.
Beyond just sharing a token 🪙
Since XCM launched, we have seen a growing number of parachains connecting, allowing users to use their native tokens almost anywhere within the Dotsama ecosystem. However, this week, a particular use case put the importance of XCM for interoperability beyond just sharing tokens.
An XCM channel opened between Crust Shadow and Moonriver, allowing CSM and MOVR to move between parachains. But such a channel will also enable open access for Moonriver-based DApps to gain access to Crust's Substrate-native decentralised storage. Thanks to XCM channels allowing messaging to flow between parachains, we could see in the future a storage functionality for smart contracts on top of Moonriver.
This week's crowdloans
To keep the community informed of one of the unique features of the Dotsama ecosystem, starting this week, we will report on the active crowdloans for parachain auctions on both Kusama and Polkadot.
Weekly Spot: A recently spotted Polkadot /Kusama native NFT
Subs the Social Shiba: Subs loves to talk about Web3 and all the technologies it brings. He loves to talk about it so much that he was sent into a space expedition to spread the word about Blockhain across other worlds.
Wrap Up
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