Partnerships and team members

Bison Trails will support Polkadot at launch and will continue to support node operators on Kusama.

Bison Trails is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service company, based in New York City, specifically focused on blockchain participation. It’s a platform for anyone who wants to participate in new chains effortlessly (e.g. by running Cosmos Validators, Tezos Bakers, and Libra Validators, etc.) — without having to invest time and resources into developing any of the engineering, protocol, dev ops, or security competencies in-house.

By running ten active Kusama validators, Bison Trails gained deep experience with the network while enhancing their secure infrastructure offering, onboarding processes, alerts, monitoring, graphing, and other services.

When Polkadot launches, Bison Trails will be ready to provide unparalleled infrastructure service with their proven technology including resilient and redundant validators and their distributed software suite. They’ll also be introducing another proprietary innovation in blockchain technology by mainnet launch: double-signing protective software to ensure that a block is not double-signed.

Kusama participants will be rewarded with 1% of DOTs allocated to incentivize participation. These DOTs can be used for validating, bonding parachains, and participating in the governance system.

Bison Trails appreciates Kusama’s long-term value. Kusama will remain relevant as it continues to function as the Polkadot proving ground. New teams with untested projects will be able to launch their parachains and parathreads on Kusama, where experimentation is encouraged. This setup parallels the history of the internet’s evolution, driven by developer iteration.

Because Kusama simulates Polkadot’s economic conditions, it’s also the perfect place for aspiring development teams to prove the value of their ideas, resolve bugs, and add features. A strong performance on Kusama will help teams make a strong case for a parachain deposit from Polkadot community members and token holders.

Read more on the topic here

Polkadot and Chainlink Integration Using Substrate

Polkadot adds market-leading network of decentralized oracles in critical step towards parachain development.

Chainlink has completed an initial integration with a Substrate-based blockchain, marking a major milestone in the mission to bring Chainlink’s market-leading network of decentralized oracles to the Substrate chain ecosystem and Polkadot. This is the first blockchain ecosystem outside of Ethereum that Chainlink will support. By being the first Substrate-based oracle solution, Chainlink is set to become the first and primary oracle provider for all Substrate-based chains and eventually the entire Polkadot network. Polkadot developers can use Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks to quickly connect their smart contracts to all the inputs and outputs they need to run securely and reliably end-to-end, while avoiding the major pitfalls associated with trying to deploy your own oracles, such as long time delays, additional expenses, and even fatal security flaws.

This initial integration with Substrate will open a pathway towards integrating Chainlink with a dedicated parachain or even building one, following Polkadot’s launch. Prior to launching its parachain on Polkadot, Chainlink will deploy a parachain on Kusama. A Chainlink parachain would let Polkadot’s parachains and dApps access virtually any external, real-world resource. Parity Technologies, the lead development team for Polkadot and Substrate, has contributed significant code to the Chainlink’s open-source repository in Github to accelerate the integration and bring it to our developers.

Substrate, used for the Chainlink integration, is the groundbreaking blockchain development framework from Parity Technologies. Created for maximum flexibility and ease of development, Substrate’s modular and composable architecture abstracts away as much blockchain development as possible, freeing teams to focus on their project’s unique business logic. Using Substrate, projects gain access to pluggable consensus and forkless upgrades. Projects can start building on Substrate today and significantly decrease development time and expense both now and in the future.

Read the whole article about Polkadot and Chainlink Integration here

Watch Sergey Nazarov’s interview here: Polkadot to Use Chainlink Oracles for Interoperability Network

Web3 Builders: Polymesh

Polymath’s mission is to unlock global access to wealth creation through a digital economy. Polymesh is an enterprise-grade blockchain built with Substrate for security tokens and capital markets. The foundations of Polymesh are focused on the most crucial regulatory elements and design principles meant to meet the demands of regulators and institutions, while unlocking the true potential of security tokens. These include blockchain primitives for identity, compliance, governance and confidentiality as well as a flexible and extensible framework for asset features and functionality using Smart Extensions.

Polymesh will use the Nominated Proof-of-Stake staking mechanism with the finality gadget GRANDPA, and be supported by POLYX, the native protocol token. With Polymesh, Validators stake POLYX on the network and run authoring nodes, Nominators stake POLYX on Validators, and both are rewarded or fined by the network based on blocks being added to the chain and fulfillment of their roles. All POLY tokens currently existing on Ethereum will be able to be upgraded to POLYX at a 1:1 ratio.

Polymesh will fill the gap between security token technology and the needs of issuers, investors, institutions, and regulators.

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Polymath’s Adam Dossa Discusses Polymesh Blockchain Built with Substrate

The future of Polkadot in Golang: Gossamer

Gossamer is an implementation of the Polkadot Host, formerly known as the Polkadot Runtime Environment. To learn more about what exactly that is, watch our introductory talk from DotCon during Berlin Blockchain Week.

The Web3 Foundation highlights the importance of having multiple implementations:

“Multiple implementations of Polkadot improves network resilience and adds to the decentralization of the network. The governance of the network is more democratized when multiple teams build clients which run the nodes in the network. By building the next implementation of the Polkadot protocol, ChainSafe is helping develop a robust network — meaning that if there’s an issue with one client, it won’t impact network availability — thus ensuring a healthy, resilient Polkadot ecosystem.”

As such, once Gossamer is complete, they will use it to build node implementations of Polkadot & Kusama. In addition, for any blockchain that is built using Substrate, building an additional node implementation using Gossamer is trivial; just take your existing runtime (a Wasm blob) and plug it into Gossamer.

By using Gossamer, you can focus on building the state transition function (i.e the logic) of the blockchain, since the networking and consensus components are already built for you. These components will be modular and configurable. If significant customization is desired, any of the modules, including networking and consensus, can be modified or reimplemented directly in Go.

Learn more about Gossamer here

OAX Foundation to Build on Polkadot Network Opening Opportunities for Future with DeFi

OAX Foundation announced a strategic initiative to build a parachain within the Polkadot network, opening doors to DeFi opportunities and expanding the potential that decentralized exchanges hold in digital asset trading.

Having released OAX Layer 2 Protocol (L2X) during the course of last year, which addressed fundamental issues within decentralized exchanges, namely speed, scalability and trust, the OAX Foundation team continued to explore opportunities resulting from the ever-changing environment with its partners.

“The OAX community has long been passionate about supporting the future of the digital asset economy, and the parachain that we are working on will open up doors to so many opportunities in the future,” said Amanda Liu, General Manager of OAX Foundation.

The decision to build a parachain within the Polkadot network also underscores a crucial objective by the OAX team — increasing utility for the OAX token. The parachain will serve as one of the first key milestone by the OAX team, and will bring a broad range of opportunities that exist within the DeFi market, with its rise fueled by an explosive growth in lending with more than USD1bn worth of ETH locked in lending smart contracts according to DeFi Pulse.

Learn more about OAX Foundation by visiting their website

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Related news, recent updates on the collaboration

Second State awarded a grant to bring next-gen Ethereum infrastructure to Polkadot ecosystem

The Web3 Foundation has awarded Second State, a leading cloud and blockchain infrastructure company, a grant to bring the Ethereum flavored WebAssembly (Ewasm) virtual machine to the Polkadot ecosystem.

The virtual machine is a key infrastructure component for public blockchains. It allows any user from the public to submit untrusted code to the blockchain platform, in the form of smart contracts, and pay for its execution based on resource consumption. The Ethereum flavored WebAssembly (Ewasm) virtual machine is posed to be the dominant virtual machine in the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 blockchain platform.

Through the Web3 Foundation grant, Second State will create extensions to its high-performance WebAssembly virtual machine, the Second State VM (SSVM). Those extensions would allow the SSVM to function as a blockchain virtual machine in accordance with the Ewasm specification. It will develop the necessary software to bootstrap and load SSVM as a Substrate module. The SSVM-Ewasm Substrate module will allow developers to create blockchains that can deploy and execute Ethereum smart contracts in the Polkadot ecosystem.

This project will add value to both the Ethereum and Polkadot ecosystems. Ethereum developers will have more choices in deploying their applications, and the Polkadot ecosystem will be able to directly leverage efforts from the large Ethereum developer and tooling communities.

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Figment Networks Receives Grant from Web3 Foundation

Figment Networks has been awarded a grant from Web3 Foundation to build Dot Hub, a staking explorer tool for the Polkadot network. Dot Hub will include validator analytics, nominator events and alerts, and rewards reporting.

Figment has demonstrated expertise in building tools for networks such as the Cosmos Hub, Tezos, Terra, and Kava, each of which use the Hubble Platform. Our software is important for validators, token holders, and developers to access information and to interact directly with these networks.

Figment Networks is operating validators on the Kusama network in preparation for validating on the Polkadot network. If you own DOTs, you also own KSM. Learn how to stake your KSM here. They are also running validators on Edgeware, a parachain connected to Polkadot. Learn how to stake your EDG here.

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Flex Dapps, an Australian Blockchain Startup Joins the Polkadot & Substrate Ecosystem

The team has been interested in getting into the Polkadot and Substrate ecosystem since 2018 when we saw Gav’s presentation at the Web3 summit. Flex Dapps have primarily built solutions using Ethereum, and with their new product, they’ve selected the Polkadot & Substrate ecosystem to build on.

Flex Dapps is building Gantree, a product that speeds up blockchain development for companies creating Substrate chains. Companies can focus on developing their custom blockchain logic and leave the node infrastructure management to Gantree. Flex Dapps have a working demo. You select your desired cloud platform such as GCP or AWS, enter in some configuration options and it deploys!

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Polkadot ambassadors in China：the most powerful thing is Substrate framework！

PolkaWorld interviewed the first group of official ambassadors of Polkadot in China recently to share why they chose Polkadot, how they became ambassadors, and what they have done in the community for Polkadot! This is the first part.

Read the interview here

Join the Polkadot Ambassador Program

And if you become a Polkadot Ambassador, from day one, you’ll have the chance, very practically, to write the next chapter of Web3. Contributing for the sake of being a contribution is its own great reward, but you’ll also enjoy these benefits:

FUNDING — You’ll get first-call, early access to bounties, and be eligible to receive funding to host local meetups and workshops

SPECIAL ACCESS — You’ll be invited to exclusive events, an Ambassadors-only Riot channel, and behind-the-scenes phone calls with core-team members

FREE STUFF — You’ll stand out with cool Polkadot swag, marking you as an extra-special member of the crew

TRUE COMMUNITY — You’ll be working closely alongside some of the most notable figures in the Web3 space, while forging ties with others who are equally as passionate about architecting a better future for everyone

What are the expectations of an Ambassador?

Anyone is more than welcome to join the Polkadot community, but to become an actual Ambassador requires a bit more commitment, and a few extra steps. An Ambassador is a self-starter who is keen to demonstrate their dedication to the project. Ambassadors should contribute significantly each month to tasks and actions designed to help Polkadot grow.

Find out all the details and the process of becoming an Ambassador here.