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We reached a significant step towards implementing parachain functionality on Polkadot – we launched a new testnet specifically designed for parachains and their related technologies, dubbed Rococo. The Rococo testnet integrates Polkadot with Cumulus and HRMP.

With a turnout just shy of one third of the tokens, the recent Polkadot redenomination poll was a major result for stakeholder decision-making. This number is all the more impressive considering that both the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies abstained from the voting.

A vote has been started that will alter the course of Polkadot and define the final denomination of its native DOT token. It affects all Polkadot stakeholders. If you have claimed your DOT on the mainnet, or you plan to, then you can — and should! — vote.

The use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) in combination with the Substrate blockchain modular framework is providing new solutions to enable real-use applications on the next generation of the web.

Polkadot is designed to take back our digital sovereignty and agency from powerful third-parties, while also providing the foundation for new business models, services, organizations—and even entire societies and economies—to take shape and thrive into the future.

The very first hackathon within the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem is now live and running until August 14th. Join now!

The Kusama Treasury plays a fundamental role when incentivizing organic development and growth of our community. At the time of writing this post, more than 190,000 KSM (Kusama tokens) sit on the Treasury. Now they are being put to good use.

Polkadot and Kusama are onboarding to the Gitcoin platform, strengthening the foundations of the Web 3.0 ecosystem and expanding the opportunities for developers to earn from open source projects.

Several articles have recently been added to the Web3 Foundation research portal covering individual subprotocols of the Polkadot decentralized blockchain platform: nominated proof of stake (NPoS), time consensus and GRANDPA (the finality gadget implemented for the relay chain).

On-chain governance and autonomous enactment give the token holders agency, the vehicle to express their opinions and the guarantees about the impact that their expression has.

The new paper Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations expands on the white paper, presenting a comprehensive and updated description of Polkadot’s design components and subprotocols. Some of these are outlined here.

The genesis block of the Polkadot network was launched on May 26th. To celebrate, we have created the first builder’s bounty with over $6000 DAI to be won, split over three challenges.