A little bit of chit chat
Acala plans to focus on five areas in the next 6-12 months: security and monitoring, product development, institutional integrations, and governance. The company will work to improve network security and incident response capabilities, double down on native DeFi innovations, and focus on institutional product development and integrations. Additionally, Acala will continue to advance its network governance system and renew its parachain slot in Q4 2023. Specific plans include the development of a Substrate multi-chain testing suite, XCM policy pallet, Acala Apps 2.0, institutional DOT Liquid Staking, and integration of Governance v2.
A business-friendly multisig
Talisman is seeking treasury funds to develop a user-friendly multisig web application to lower the difficulty for new teams and businesses who wish to join Polkadot and build on Parachains. The current user interface used for managing multi-signature addresses and transactions in Polkadot is the developer tool PolkadotJS. However, its multi-signature UX assumes participants understand the technical implementation of the multi-sig pallet and associated cryptography, making it intimidating and challenging to use.
After initial user research with leaders in different parachain and dapp teams, Talisman has identified the following issues which impact business operations due to inefficiency or safety and risk such as a human error in transaction creation, difficulty to verify/validate multiSig transactions, length of time for the signing process, difficulty building extrinsics and difficulty in understanding balances and tx history.
The proposed solution is to design and build an open-source front-end for the multisig pallet focused on providing an intuitive and inclusive experience for all users and treasuries who need a multisig in the Dotsama ecosystem. This will be an optional part of the workflow to speed up the process of passing and validating calldata. The software will be hosted in a Talisman Github repository and deployed as a dapp on Talisman's domain.
Governance and Price Swings
In the Polkadot Forum, a user posted a thread looking for feedback on an important topic for governance. Proposal creators "lock in" a KSM/DOT amount at proposal creation. However, while a treasury spending referenda is going through the voting process, markets may swing either way, meaning that sometimes the value of the KSM/DOT paid out to the proposal beneficiaries varies significantly in its USD value from the funds requested.
During the bear market, the swings were usually downward, which resulted in the funds received not being enough. The council was mostly sympathetic in these cases and granted a top-up of the difference through a tip request. However, we currently have the opposite happening, with payout amounts being 40% above the value requested due to a sharp increase in KSM/DOT price during the past two weeks. To put things into perspective, we are talking about bonus amounts of 25k USD for some of the current referenda.
The proposal opened up some questions regarding this issue. Should proposers pay back excess funds to the treasury? Can proposers ask the treasury for extra funds in case of KSM price drops? How should we go about it all? Setting guidelines and holding proposers accountable would be beneficial in managing the treasury effectively.
Polkadot for dummies
This week's crowdloans
Weekly Spot: A recently spotted Polkadot /Kusama native NFT
Parachains Mascots: Centrifuge is the head of the Real Estate Agent guild of the Parachain Land. Being a Smart Robot House itself (its IQ is above 183), Centrifuge helps other inhabitants of the Parachain Land to pick fine houses and to earn money via lending their DeFi coins to real estate funds from the Country of Humans. Humans and parachain inhabitants love Centrifuge because he’s cool, and he makes good cocktails, even though he breaks glasses and bottles with his robotic legs sometimes.
Wrap Up
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