A little bit of chitchat
Another big unlock of KSM will take place on August 8th. Nearly 1.2 million KSM will return to its owners after the crowdloan period for the parachain auctions of Kilt, Basilisk, Kintsugi, Parallel Heiko, Altair and Kalamari has expired. If you participated in any of the mentioned crowdloans, you should receive your tokens starting on August 8th. Please consider staking to us here.
Reactions to the Nomad exploit 🌉
Over $200 million were stolen during the exploit of a smart contract in the Nomad Bridge, impacting ecosystems across industry, including Dotsama, since Nomad provides services to Moonbeam.
Once the development team spotted the irregular transactions, the Moonbeam Technical Committee enabled the Maintenance Mode, which effectively suspends all transaction processing and EVM execution while regular block production continues. The network returned to its regular operations after the issue was identified on the Nomad side and not on the Moonbeam codebase.
Besides enabling the Maintenance Mode, the Moonbeam Foundation decided to pause its Harvest Moon campaign until further notice. Other projects were also affected: Zenlink, Polkadot’s native cross-chain DEX, announced that only their 4pool was affected, and they were actively in contact with the Nomad team to protect the interests of affected users. StellaSwap halted bridging through Nomad and disabled the deposits of .mad farms and farms with any.mad assets as a result of the Nomad exploit.
Nomad announced their bug bounty for white hat hackers; those who return 90% or more of the assets drained will be allowed to keep the remaining amount (up to 10% of the funds they took). The official Ethereum address can be found on their official twitter @nomadxyz_. So far, $35 million have been returned.
XCM-to-EVM on the works 🌕
Moonbeam deployed an upgrade to its Moonbase Alpha Testnet, which includes the XCM to EVM Call feature designed to improve interoperability beyond regular XCM.
The XCM to EVM feature allows developers on other chains to trigger function calls on Moonbeam’s EVM and access all of its features from their home chains. Dotsama developers can also use EVM over XCM to access general message passing protocols like Axelar, which allows them to communicate with blockchains outside of the Dotsama ecosystem like Ethereum, Cosmos, and Avalanche. Currently, the existing XCM Transactor functionality only allows connected contracts on Moonbeam to send XCM messages to remote chains.
The upgrade also allows stakers to use their staked GLMR to vote, an essential step toward improving the democratisation of the network.
dApps made easy 👌
Astar has become the port of entry to the Polkadot universe for blockchain developer platform Alchemy, an infrastructure provider whose primary value proposition is to make the development of dApps as easy as possible, providing developers with scalability, consistency, and reliability.
This collaboration will allow Astar DApp developers to access Alchemy’s Supernode technology — crypto APIs for Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Solana.
Alchemy has a good track record of helping networks increase their building capabilities, including a 95x increase in on-chain apps on Polygon since Alchemy began supporting developers. To join the waitlist, you can sign up here.
This week’s crowdloans
It’s very quiet out here.
Weekly Spot: A recently spotted Polkadot /Kusama native NFT
The Foundry are the once great rulers of the realm. Orbiting a red dwarf, these ET are aspirational ideologues.
Wrap Up
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