There was a marked pick up in communications from the Polkadot team in June (see previous blog). In part due to the hiring of Jack Plats into the Web3 Foundation team, which increased capacity but also saw better internal alignment.

July saw the release of PoC2 and a major milestone in the evolution of blockchain technology: the first ever on-chain upgrade of a public network. Also the deployment of the first parachain!

July 3rd – Polkadot won the “Hottest Blockchain Protocol” award at the Europas

Polkadot obtained a recognition at Europas Awards carried out in London after being nominated as Hottest Blockchain Protocol. Judges said: “The biggest project out there to link the world’s blockchains.” The awards were based on thousands of votes gleaned from a round of public voting, combined with industry judges drawn from founders and investors.

July 5th – Polkadot’s global test net went over 500,000 blocks

The blocks are coming out quickly!

July 12th – London Polkadot Meeutp: Presentations on Polkadot’s roadmap

The Polkadot Business Development Manager Fabian Gompf made a presentation about interoperability and what broard functionality Polkadot enables. On the other hand, Robert Habermeier, Polkadot co-founder and Thiel Fellow, gave a technical update and discuss Polkadot’s development roadmap.

Link

July 13th – Substrate Technical riot channel opened

Follow this link to begin discussing Substrate: Link

Substrate is a product created by Parity Technologies and is their implementation of a Polkadot Runtime Environment. Substrate, like any other PRE, can be used to create standalone blockchains, while also allowing connectivity to the Polkadot network. When such a blockchain connects to Polkadot it is known as a (native) parachain.

Source: W3F wiki.

July 16th – W3F collaboration repo launched!

W3F launched a public repository to help coordinate its collaboration efforts with teams working in the Web 3 ecosystem. In order to build a better web, the Web3 Foundation will help to coordinate the efforts of teams working towards this common goal.

The coordination of efforts will include helping to connect teams, cross-promote the products and protocols, as well as provide strategic grants.

Repo Link

While the repo is public and was created earlier (July 9th), today marks the launch with the first issue. A request for meetups in London: Link

July 17th – A live governance-based upgrade from POC-1 to POC-2

At 18:49 (London), 17 July, the network stakeholders successfully performed an on-chain governance-based upgrade of the global testnet from PoC-1 to PoC-2. Polkadot founder Gavin Wood said, “As far as I know, this marks the first major attempt at an on-chain protocol upgrade in the wild.”

July 17th – Blog: Polkadot PoC-2 is here: Parachains, runtime upgrades, and Libp2p networking

Two months after Polkadot’s first proof of concept went live, PoC-2 is here. This major milestone reached by the Polkadot team provides the working testnet with many new features to be included in the final release, including parachains, staking rewards and slashing, a Libp2p implementation, and much more.

Link

July 18th –Polkadot Berlin Meetup

Another great meetup in Berlin organised by Parity Technologies, with the participation of Peter Czaban from the Web3 Foundation, who made a presentation about how Polkadot fits into the Web3 technology stack. THis was followed by the presentation by Rob Habermeier, Thiel Fellow and Polkadot co-founder, on the current status of Polkadot’s development.

Link

July 24th – Blog: A Syncing Node in under 30s

Community member Chevdor released a blog about how to set up a syncing node runs in under the 30s. The post explains how running a Polkadot node is made easier with the new Polkadot Docker image.

Link

July 25th — On-chain Governance Workshop in Berlin

This was the first day of the on-chain governance workshop at the W3F offices in Berlin. Featuring people from Polkadot, Cosmos, Colony, PoA Networks, Dfinity, Tezos, DAOstack.

There is a video from the meetup event that happened in the evening: Link

26 July 2018 — First parachain deployed!

Rob Habermeier deployed the first parachain to the PoC2 network. [Link]

First @polkadotnetwork parachain deployed on a local testnet with the same logic as the Krumme Lanke PoC-2 Testnet. Stay tuned for more in the upcoming days! pic.twitter.com/Cbmwmlz8J1 — Robert Habermeier (@rphmeier) July 26, 2018

July 27th – Tallinn Meetup: Polkadot and Fluence

Fabian Gompf presented on Polkadot and Evgeny Ponomarev presented on Fluence.

Link