A little bit of Chit-chat
This week, there was an alert for the Polkadot community after a scam was discovered trying to impersonate the CLV wallet on Google's Play Store. According to Clover's official statement, the official wallet is not available via the Play Store and to access it people need to download the APK from their Github repository.
This coming Tuesday, May 31st, the online WASMConf will take place with some of the community's leading voices talking about the present and future of WebAssambly. The event will have technical and business-oriented talks. You can get your free tickets here.
Applications are open for the Polkadot Hacker House in New York City, which will happen between June 23-28. There will also be $570K worth of prizes. The space is limited to 200 people, and the event will consist of workshops, networking, in-person support and mentorships.
Davos Wrap Up ✅
The Polkadot ecosystem made itself heard at Davos, right next to the World Economic Forum, to preach on the future of Web3 and the role Polkadot will play in this new paradigm.
The biggest headline for the event was the partnership between Polkadot and Project Liberty, founded by former L.A. Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, to run a decentralised social network, initially, as a parachain. There's also the possibility of the project becoming a common-good chain. As of right now, details are still in the works, but a token for the newly conceived network is probable.
Below, we are sharing some of the most relevant quotes from the event:
Dr Gavin Wood from Polkadot: For the global discourse in Social Media to avoid falling within the same arbitrary authority who determines where the boundaries are, we may need several, if not hundreds or thousands of Social Media platforms capable of interacting with each other under specific rules but ultimately sovereign chains.
Frank McCourt from Project Liberty: Social media should be prioritised as one of the main challenges society needs to fix because it's eroding trust at high speed. In contrast, trust is the base of all we do in our society.
We used to think technologists are the ones who need to solve the problems, but it's society who should create the frameworks (values, principles) and tell technologists what they need to build and for whom.
Web2 tools are great, but we need to build a system that people believe in rather than being suspicious.
Žiga Drev from OriginTrails: one of the benefits of the Polkadot parachain ecosystem is the networking effect. I just spoke two weeks ago with the formulator of the Law of Networks Effect, Robert Metcalfe, and he told me the value of the cluster of networks would grow at the square number of users within the networks. And Polkadot is not just a bunch of users; it's a network of objects, assets, and developers. So we're talking about a huge potential for driving value for the blockchains.
Chris Carmona from BitCountry: You don't have to be siloed in the metaverse. We are planning to have, once we launch on Polkadot, 100,000 lands which can potentially be 100,000 metaverses. There will be interoperability within BitCountry, but once other blockchains want to build using our technology, XCM enables anyone within the Polkadot ecosystem to freely develop their metaverse without security risks.
Oscar Franklin Tan from Enjin/Efinity: Technology is step one. People build tech, and people drive adoption. Everyone agrees it's going to be a multi-chain world. There's much room for multiple Layer-1 to succeed. There will be a lot of space for numerous ecosystems to thrive together; there's no monopoly on talent. If you want to see the quantitative side of things, we may think we, as Polkadot, are great because we're one of the Top10 projects in the world. But compare the size of web 3 to web2. It's still early days; it's still tiny, and there's room for everyone.
Derek Yoo from Moonbeam: I think there will be a consolidation around specific connectivity clusters as things move forward. Polkadot with XCM being one. But that's not going to be the only one. I am confident that the Cosmos ecosystem and its IBC based connections will be another cluster of connected chains. And for all the rest, the challenge is that they're so different.
Our bet was around using the EVM tech stack for interoperability because it's the easiest way to plug into existing bridging technology. I bet that there will be an increasing number of blockchains but consolidation around a smaller amount of tech stacks because developers can't keep in mind 12 different tech stacks. Polkadot technology, Cosmos SDK, and EVM are three I am confident will be here for the foreseeable future.
The World's First Virtual Reality Reality Series 🤩
A proposal was published on Kusama's governance portal requesting funds to create "The World's First Virtual Reality Reality Series" named Krowned In The Underground. The Dotsama Experience made the proposal, and it's looking to raise a little over $63,000 worth of KSM.
According to the official website, the series will gather Dotsama NFT creators in a virtual world. They will have to create digital artworks as determined by the show's production. A panel will eliminate them until only one remaining participant is Krowned In The Underground.
Unity needed 🤝
Bryan Chen, co-founder of Acala, posted on Github what he sees as the main challenges for the developer community using Substrate and how it's impacting the whole ecosystem. As highlighted by Chen, the current state of FRAME pallets, which are intended to be reusable modules for the entire ecosystem, is not optimal and makes developers focus on making their parachain operational rather than investing that time in creating innovative features.
Chen is proposing to change the whole collaboration process within the Substrate community to enable a better experience between Parity and Parachain developers. Another of the issues brought up in this post was the difficulty for contributors such as wallets, blockchain explorers and any other multi-chain tool to be able to work with all the different parachains which, at the moment, are using similar but slightly different implementations of the same code.
Chen calls on the whole developer community to build more generalised, reusable, and composable pallets.
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
Chaos Mask: Get a mask and expect chaos! Hide your inner daemon behind the mask or express your essence with it, do whatever it takes to make an impact. A collection of unique hand-drawn masks.
Wrap Up
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