Polkadot News /// by ZKV #15
Moonglade Oak
A little bit of Chit-chat
We're excited to share some big news: the ZKValidator has been awarded a grant from the Moonbeam Treasury to help bring privacy to Moonbeam! We will carry out an event series to attract talent who can build privacy applications on Moonbeam. Our goal is to be able to create a content library and an online workshop for interested developers to learn how to build on Moonbeam and leverage Polkadot XCM interoperability capabilities. This will lead to an IRL Hackshop, where we expect teams to submit privacy solutions for the Moonbeam ecosystem.
Starlay seems to be cooperating 🤝
Two weeks ago, we described how Starlay, a dApp on Astar, had been called out by the community and the Astar core team because of how they handled their token sale and how it affected investors and the broader Astar community.
As an update, we have learned that the Starlay team has made some promising steps to fix this issue. They seem to be honouring their commitment to buy back LAY tokens with all the revenue generated from their IDO and staking rewards. They are proposing to add $1M on liquidity to the ASTR-LAY paid on ArthSwap to stabilise the price. To do that, they were trying to get financial support from Astar in the shape of a loan.
The Astar core team, including co-founder Sota Watanabe, said they would support a community vote on Starlay's proposal of lending LAY to Astar for them to be the ones to inject the liquidity into the pool and earn the rewards. The Astar team and some community members also advised Starlay to be transparent with their buybacks.
A new EVM on Polkadot 🤖
With Wormhole's multi-chain bridge now live on Kaura, Acala's canary chain, the process to officially launch the so-called Acala's EVM+ started. EVM+ is Acala's bet to mix the Ethereum development environment with Polkadot's modular blockchain framework to boost innovation outside the confines of the EVM.
The launch of the EVM+ will have three phases on both Kaura and Acala. The process will occur as follows
Alpha: Wormhole multi-chain bridge launch on Kaura/Acala and creation of 3 stablecoin pool, 3Pool on Kaura only.
Beta: Closed set of DApps launch in the EVM+ on Karura/Acala
Public: Open, permissionless EVM+ release on Karura/Acala
Teams who want to build on top of the EVM+ are also eligible for the $250M aUSD Ecosystem Fund.
An oracle has arrived ⛓️
Moonbeam keeps adding big names to the list of applications deployed on top of its EVM. This week the team announced that Chainlink had deployed its Price Feeds on the network, allowing Polkadot builders to access one of the top oracle providers.
This integration will enable developers to source price information from many exchanges. For example, one use case already active is Moonwell Artemis, a collateralised lending protocol on Moonbeam, which uses Chainlink Price Feeds to power lending and borrowing with price data from a wide range of tokens available on the Polkadot ecosystem, including DOT.
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
Moonglade Oak: This Oak was planted in January 2022 by RMTerra for RMRK to showcase the power of RMRK NFTs and make the Earth just a little bit a better place.
Wrap Up
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