This month’s highlights include 1 million blocks on the test net, an awesome demo from Patrick at Clovyr, and Gavin Wood’s interview on Bloomberg. August was a strong month for Polkadot news!

August 1st – Decentralized Web Summit – San Francisco

People from W3F and Parity attended the DWeb summit in San Francisco. Luckily, the conference was streamed and is available on YouTube (see below).

Track name: The journey to Web 3 – the Builders, the Protocols, and the Challenges Ahead.

Speakers: Peter Czaban, Jutta Steiner, Fredrik Harrysson, Mihai Ciucu, Patrick Nielsen, Andrei Grigorean, Dimitri De Jonghe, Aaron Kumavis

Coolest part: the demo from Patrick Nielsen. He showed the deployment of a Polkadot test net node using Clovyr!

August 1st – Polkadot San Francisco meetup

Peter Czaban, Executive Director of the Web3 Foundation who made his presentation about how Polkadot fits into the Web3 technology stack. Also, Jutta Steiner, CEO of Parity Technologies, talked about the current status of Polkadot’s development.

Event Link

Community member Ali Sheik has posted his summary notes on Medium: Link

August 8th – 1,000,000 blocks sealed on Polkadot!

“1,000,000 blocks, two blockchain protocols, numerous validators and 51 peers – all on @polkadotnetwork ‘s Krumme Lancke test net.”

1,000,000 blocks, two blockchain protocols, numerous validators and 51 peers – all on @polkadotnetwork 's Krumme Lancke test net pic.twitter.com/KhA5KrrmEb — Gav “No Giveaways” Wood (@gavofyork) August 8, 2018

August 11th – Polkadot Bangalore meetup

The first Polkadot India meetup was held in Bangalore where the web3 tech stack was presente and what the W3F is doing to build it.

Speakers:

Jack Platts, Communications at Web3 Foundation,

Fabian Gompf, Business Development Manager at Parity Technologies

Aparna Krishnan, Co-Founder of Mechanism Labs

Dr. Michael Egorov, CTO at NuCypher

Arthur Falls, Head of Communications at Dfinity

Jaynti Kanani, CEO of Matic Network

Event link

August 20th – Polkadot Runtime Environment (PRE) grant

Pleased to announce the Polkadot Runtime Environment (PRE) grant. Web3 Foundation is funding the development of an alternative implementation of PRE, which is a core component of Polkadot.

Learn more and apply here: Link

August 27th – Gavin interviewed by The Stalwart live on Bloomberg

Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood discusses cryptocurrencies with Bloomberg’s Lisa Abramowicz, Joe Weisenthal and Caroline Hyde on “What’d You Miss?” (Source: Bloomberg)

He mentioned the evolution of ICOs, the wallet hack, and Polkadot.

View the video here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-08-27/ethereum-co-founder-wood-sees-icos-evolving-video

August 29th – Polkabot Launched!

Polkabot, created by community member Chevdor, has been launched today. Its job is to monitor the @polkadotnetwork and alert when interesting events occur.

You can see it in action in the following RiotChat: Link

August 30th – Polkascan Launched!

Community member Emiel has created Polkascan. An open source block explorer for Polkadot. This is part of a request by W3F to create such a tool. You can view more information on W3F’s GitHub collaboration repo: Link.