Blog

Despite being a tough year for pretty much everyone (with the possible exception of Amazon and takeaways), the Polkadot network and community is coming out of 2020 with the wind very much behind its sails. So now that we’ve reached the end of 2020, for better or worse, let’s have a roundup of what we achieved and what we’re planning to do over the course of 2021… I tend to start these roundups with a few statistics, and this year seems no exception. Development has continued apace, with the Rus

The Rococo-V1 Parachains Testnet is live. Rococo is a public testnet, maintained by Parity Technologies and the community, aimed towards testing both the parachains consensus process itself and parachains built by the community.

Web3 Foundation has created a Thousand Validators Programme for Polkadot. Apply and follow the validator setup instructions, and you could be eligible to receive nominations from Web3 Foundation to help kickstart your Polkadot node.

Discover the ways you can get involved in the Polkadot and Kusama community and meet some of the people already contributing in those areas today.

In early 2021, Interlay will introduce Polkadot’s first trustless wrapped Bitcoin - PolkaBTC - an exciting step towards a truly interoperable ecosystem.

The new Bounty Extension on Polkadot and Kusama allows curators to autonomously allocate Treasury funds to projects that bring value to the ecosystem.

DOT and KSM are now integrated on Gitcoin. To celebrate, we created Hello World! by Polkadot to bring you on a journey of Polkadot development discovery.

Parachains are specialized shards of Polkadot that give projects and their communities agency over their respective goals.

To make sure the teams building on Polkadot have all the support they need, it is paramount that they understand the funding alternatives available. One good funding option is the Polkadot Treasury, which is already supporting a wide range of projects.

Swisscom Blockchain AG has received a Wave 5 grant from Web3 Foundation to develop a Kubernetes Operator for sentry nodes and validators for both Kusama and Polkadot.

Multiple bugs in code resulted in nodes dropping out from Kusama network and losing the database that stores which blocks they validated. Consequently, the same nodes double-signed those blocks on restart. The slashes caused by this issue have been reverted via Kusama Council motions.

Token transferability will be enabled today, exactly at block number 1,205,128. This will occur at approximately 16:40 UTC, though it is impossible to exactly calculate this time. This will not change the denomination of DOT (old) which still represents 10**12 Planck.