Dot Leap 2024 - 10: Prose mode

Let's try something different.

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The Attention Problem

Sorry about being late with this edition, I've been working on some other things and, honestly, thinking about how to increase readership and retention and turn the attention sentiment around.

Ever since we successfully grew Dot Leap to 25k+ subs, the open rate - which used to be at 30% - plummeted to ~10%, then 9%, now 8%, with clickthrough rates remaining stable at 3% (which is actually pretty good!).

There hasn't been any feedback on the X account, nor via Telegram, and I've been at a loss as to why people are losing interest in Polkadot en-masse, or how to reinvigorate this.

It's easy to assume that the modern man has no attention span for long-form content, and a greedy modern man gambling on shitcoins even less so. After all, most of us are juggling multiple ecosystems, playing the slotmachine of modern technology with the hope of striking oil through one of our random pokes in the ground before the AGI/ASI superrevolution renders everything and everyone obsolete, with barely 1% of us truly wanting a decentralized and censorship resistant experience. Most do this while working a separate non-web3 job, too, and juggling family life. But there's also a whole section of the population more than capable of watching 4 hour podcasts with great understanding, so the attention span is definitely there.

It must be the content.

So I'll try something different. Something simpler. Rather than distilling every PR in the Polkadot repos that I can understand, and rather than link to tweets of product launches that you're probably already exposed to anyway, I will turn Dot Leap into prose for the next 3-4 editions and check the reception.

What is "prose" mode? Rather than heavily linking "week in Ethereum"-style, I will instead give my opinion with inline links to things that I noticed the most since last edition, and each sub-section of prose will focus on a different persona, some of which may appear, disappear, and re-appear between editions. This means the updates will be less comprehensive (i.e. not every single link or update will be in an edition), but they should be more meaningful and relatable.

Let's see.

Btw, if you want to stay on top of ALL the links, I encourage you to follow Bill.

For Devs

For years I've been calling the Polkadot ecosystem creatively bankrupt and afraid of trying something new. It has indeed been exceptionally novelphobic on the userland side. This is why I'm ecstatic when I see experiments like Kukabi's on-chain game of life.

Ok, ok, maybe ecstatic is a bit too strong of a word - let's say cautiously optimistic. The repos are private for now so we don't know how this actually works.

So what is the Game of Life?

Conway's Game of Life is a "cellular automaton" or a zero-player game where each "tick" (game loop iteration - in this case, each block) calculates the outcome of a pure function which follows these rules:

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.

  2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.

  3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.

  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

A cell is a square in a grid, and the only input the player has in the original GoL is the initial distribution of cells. From then on, the automaton takes over.

This leads to some interesting outcomes as we observe the world "evolving" before our eyes, producing interesting deterministic patterns and growing past our expected initial bounds.

So what does kukabi mean when he says "multiplayer" Game of Life? Based on his screenshots, I'm assuming this means multiple players will be able to place the initial distribution of cells. At that point, we might see a bit of a homo sapiens vs neanderthals - whose cellular civilization will survive?

Alternatively, I could see it working in a special pay-to-play mode where you can deploy a new cell on a random location for every 10 cells your civilization consumes, leading to a need for careful planning and placement, playing god.

Something similar is available via Life Competes.

On a technical level, I assume Kukabi's GoL uses off-chain workers between blocks and then commits outcome to state, but we'll know more once the code is public. It's been a while since we've seen inspirational and edgy development thinking in the Substrate ecosystem - more accurately, since Joshy left his recipes behind - and I'm excited about the inspiration this could provide to a new generation of builders.

Other things to read:

For Gamblers

Polkadot has a TVL problem - with little to offer in the way of userland apps beyond what already exists elsewhere with better UX, the struggle is real in growing TVL enough to appeal to the average gambler looking for high yields. Sure, the staking returns on Polkadot are unreal at 15-20%, but what does this matter if the price fluctuates 50% up and down month on month?

Polkadot needs cross chain yields and liquid restaking across chains in order to attract the degens, and that's exactly what Bifrost is offering.

Their validator boost program and the liquid restaking program with 9+ million DOT locked in both show that there is indeed interest in such efforts, and that compound interest is a thing not just financially, but also socially.

So if you're looking to supercharge your staking returns and really degen-down into Polkadot, there's few better options than this type of overleveraging, and with Kusama<>Polkadot bridge live, and Ethereum<>Polkadot bridge on the way in a decentralized way too, soon you will be able to put your restaked vDOT to work outside of Polkadot too. That's when we should see these yields achieve orbital escape velocity šŸ”„

Other things to read:

  • Jonas' Dynamic unbonding will make it easier to cash out when not a lot of people are cashing out, and extend queues in times when there's a bank run.

For Everyone

Polkadot Decoded teases an awesome new Polkadot mobile app.

Allegedly, it's self-custodial, but without passphrases and private keys, and it supports payment in "1M+ stores across the USA" via Raise. So what's it all about?

It looks like Novasama - the people behind Nova Wallet - built their own competition under the watchful eye and leadership of Parity. At the same time, the Nova team seems to be teasing their upcoming debit card.

(As if that's not enough, they also launched a telegram-based wallet which lets you send USDT to anyone... in theory)

Spending staking interest has long been the crypto pipe dream, but there's a reason why the average "crypto debit card" project has a 2 year life span - when it gets popular enough, regulators notice, put pressure on Visa/MC, and Visa/MC promptly terminates their supply. This cycle repeats every 2-3 quarters, and I don't see why this time would be different. In fact, I'm more hopeful of products like Paycek which live-liquidate the crypto you pay with and deposit to IBAN/Bank account via heavily regulared intermediaries than disrupting incumbents through those same incumbents.

From that perspective, the Polkadot App looks more promising if there are indeed partnerships with some stores in USA (I will not entertain the lie that there are 1M+), but we'll know more when it's closer to release.

I find it interesting that the BD part focused on USA here - an environment not only openly hostile to innovation and crypto, but also an environment in which Polkadot is a complete unknown. Would it work better in a society which is already familiar with Polkadot like Asia, or is this the way to go? I guess we'll see.

Other things to read:

Please let me know how you like this format.

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