Kusama News
The Kusama Digest has been off for a couple of weeks, so this will be a high-level review of some VERY exciting times in the Polkadot ecosystem.
There has been quite an upsurge in scams recently. Please be aware, THERE IS NO DOT AIRDROP.
It was announced that the Rococo V1 parachain registration opening will occur today, January 11th, 2021. Follow the #rococo:matrix.parity.io channel on Matrix for up-to-date information.
On Kusama, there have been a few proposals made for referenda with no details given about what they do. Remember to discuss in Polkassembly! https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Fkusama-rpc.polkadot.io#/democracy
The Kusama 1KV Program Leaderboard shows that many people want to run validators on Kusama. https://thousand-validators.kusama.network/#/leaderboard
Kappa Sigma Mu now has 44 members and 5 candidates. https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Fkusama-rpc.polkadot.io#/society
There is a Treasury Proposal for Polkashots to host Kusama database snapshots (they already host Polkadot snapshots). https://kusama.polkassembly.io/treasury/63
Kusama Referendum 97 appears to be simply a test of someone seeing how Kusama and Polkassembly interact. https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referendum/97
Kusama Referendum 96 has failed. There was no discussion on Polkassembly on what it was trying to do. https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referendum/96
The proposal for the Phase 2 implementation for the Validator Resource Center has been posted here for feedback: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/427
A Treasury proposal has been passed to Council to sponsor "Virtual Niche" - The World's First Crypto Art Exhibition with Kusama Network" - https://kusama.polkassembly.io/motion/250
The current referendum, which was declared a test, is failing, ~ 179'000 KSM to 0 KSM. (weighted) https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referendum/97
Four additional bootnodes have been added to the Polkadot and Kusama chain specs. https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/pull/2204
There has been quite a bit of activity on Web3 Foundation's Open Grants Program, even during the break. It has now reached the 200 Grants Milestone https://medium.com/web3foundation/web3-foundation-grants-program-funds-over-200-projects-ff499f438820. If you are interested in building on Kusama or Polkadot, check out the grants program here: https://github.com/w3f/Open-Grants-Program/
K Tips & Tricks
If you are interested in gathering data on your staking rewards over a particular time period (for Polkadot or Kusama), Jonas's "Staking Rewards Collector" is very useful. https://github.com/w3f/staking-rewards-collector
See the Validator Resource Center to get on-chain information about validator performance: https://validators.kusama.network/
The new Validator Stats script can tell you (among other things!) the lowest nominator to get into the active set. Very useful for staking! https://github.com/w3f/validator-stats
There have been lots of improvements to the Polkadot{.js} extension - Thibaut Sardan explains them here: https://medium.com/polkadot-network/polkadot-js-extension-release-update-3b0d2d87edb8
The call for proposals for Polkadot Decoded 2021 has begun! If you are interested in giving a talk, please see here: http://bit.ly/0x3i3h8T6
Keep up to date with the news on Kusama with Twitter, Telegram or Element.
