🐂 top news
Gavin Wood spoke at length about DOT & Fiscal Responsibility.
The Polkadot x Kaito Yapping campaign concluded its sixth and final month.
Decentralized Nodes Program Cohort 3 launches September 10th with 99 Polkadot validators and 194 Kusama validators selected for diversity across OS, location, and hosting.
Coins.ph launched educational content about Polkadot Asset Hub with earning incentives.
Grayscale filed an S-1 with the SEC for a Polkadot ETF.
Polkadot blog published DeFi Builders Program: Scaling the future of DeFi on Polkadot.
Asphere launched a No-Code Deployer for Polkadot rollups, eliminating infrastructure coding requirements and weeks of setup time.
Bastian (Polkadot Technical Fellow) published From 12s to 500ms - The long road to faster blocks.
Polkadot posted a trailer for sub0 Symbiosis conference in Buenos Aires, November 14-16.
Polkadot sponsored the Origins Hackathon at TOKEN2049 Singapore with an $85,000 prize pool.
Polkadot launched a Rewards App with Inter Miami CF offering match day experiences and gear through on-chain activity.
OpenGovWatch published the first bounty compliance audit of all Polkadot bounties.
Kusama stalled on August 24. A post-mortem has been published.
There is an open call to parachain teams and ecosystem projects to share ideas on what they would like to see built.
⭕️ ecosystem
Bifrost surpassed 20 million DOT liquid staked.
Crust announced partnerships with Euler AI, Cryplex AI, HeLa, and ZK Zyra for decentralized storage services.
Hydration hosted an AMA with its founder around the upcoming release of HOLLAR.
Hyperbridge published The End of Fragile Bridges.
Integritee published Crypto Heist Stats: 2025’s Half Was Worse Than All of 2024, and It Will Get Worse.
InvArch and Energy Web vsBond tokens expire in 168 days for Bifrost SALP crowdloan partcipants.
OriginTrail partnered with Bitstamp for a Learn and Earn campaign offering rewards for article reading and quiz completion.
OriginTrail partnered with Oxford PharmaGenesis to introduce a collaborative, AI-ready medical knowledge ecosystem for agentic science.
peaq published a recap for August.
Phala published The future of AI + Post-Cookie Era Marketing - Enabling Secure Data Collaboration Through Confidential Computing.
Pudgy Party launched worldwide on Android and iOS, reaching 200K installs by day three with Web3 IP integration secured by Polkadot via Mythos Chain.
Solana-based Beamable launched Pudgy Party missions on Mythos with Premium Airdrop Tickets.
RegionX updated its coretime sales interface.
StellaSwap's veSTELLA surpassed $100K in shared revenue.
StellaSwap announced that single-sided liquidity provisioning is now live.
⚙️ technical
Pop CLI added built-in hashers including Blake2, Keccak, SHA2, and Twox in its latest release.
🏛️ governance
For more information on Polkadot governance statistics, check out the Polkadot Dune governance dashboard.
🆕 new
Ref 1735: Updating ERC-20 asset metadata on AssetHub and registering Frequency token on Ethereum
Ref 1740: Reducing the number of pending messages allowed in an HRMP channel
Ref 1741: Funding the continuous development and maintenance of Polkawatch (9,998 DOT)
Ref 1743: Funding the DeFi Infra & Tooling Bounty (1M DOT)
🕓 confirming
Ref 1708: Retroactively funding JUST Ventures GmbH for work across governance, technical support, and ecosystem coordination ($149.91K)
👍🏾 passing
Ref 1701: Making adjustments to OpenGov
Ref 1710: Adjusting DOT inflation to the Hard Pressure & Stepped Supply model
Ref 1722: Funding milestone 3 of Subsquare’s development of a Collectives/Fellowship-focused portal ($160.8K)
Ref 1727: Funding Subscan for Q4 2024 - Q2 2025 ($184.67K)
Ref 1729: Acquiring USDC & USDT for the Polkadot Treasury (2.64M DOT)
Ref 1732: Updating the curators of the Bridge Bounty
Ref 1734: Topping up the Events Bounty (500K DOT)
👎🏾 failing
Ref 1703: Funding the development of the Staking Dashboard for Sept 2025 - Mar 2026 ($103K)
Ref 1705: Funding the go-to-market strategy of Pudgy Party on Polkadot ($2M)
Ref 1706: Retroactively funding the development and branding of the Polkadot Cloud website (~$42K)
Ref 1712: Funding 4-months development of DotCodeSchool ($22K)
Ref 1715: Funding the hardening of Polkadot to increase its hacking resilience ($495.8K)
Ref 1717: Funding the development of Clarys.AI ($130K)
Ref 1718: Adjusting DOT inflation to the Medium Pressure & Stepped Supply model
Ref 1721: Enabling RFC103 (elastic scaling) on the relay chain runtime
Ref 1724: Retroactively funding the development of a JAM Knowledge Base Search Engine ($25K)
✅ approved
Ref 1693: Funding the operations of Polkadot Africa for 6 months ($160.8K)
Ref 1695: Funding the continued development and maintenance of Snowbridge for one year (~$2.44M + 116.5K DOT)
Ref 1699: Funding Gossamer’s contribution to Polkadot-SDK for Q3-Q4 2025 (~$815K) v2
Ref 1702: Retroactively funding Nova Wallet ($980.37K)
Ref 1725: Retaining Bastian Köcher at Technical Fellowship Rank VI
❌ rejected
Ref 1697: Funding Encode Club to cover the costs of the recently finished Scalability Hackathon and fund the final stage–an accelerator (~128K)
Ref 1698: Topping up the Moderation Bounty (~46K DOT)
📺 what to watch and listen to
Attempts At Governance #264 (a community-driven show that reviews governance on Polkadot).
Interview with Cameron Thacker (Pudgy Party Slides onto Polkadot with Mythical Games Co-founder Cameron Thacker - Space Monkeys 207).
Friday DOT News Pump (Gaming Levels Up Polkadot 🎮 Mythical Steps On the Gas - The Weekly Friday DOT News Pump!) by The Kus.
PBA Campus Special - Daria Mikhailova: Click, Deploy, Scale: Rollups on Polkadot by Polkadot Blockchain Academy.
PBA Campus Special - Daan van der Plas: Building with Rust on Polkadot by Polkadot Blockchain Academy.
Thank you for taking the DOT leap!
