Welcome to week three of The Village Times, a weekly newsletter run by the Polygon DAO for the community. The Village Times includes Village updates, announcements, partner and grantee spotlights, and more.
New tools and initiatives ship at lightning speed over here, and we don’t want our community to miss out. Subscribe to get The Village Times sent directly to your inbox and stay up to date with all things Polygon.
Welcome to the Village
Projects building within the Polygon Village gain free access to our Village program benefits, including:
Grants: The opportunity for financial support to build your project for the ever-increasing 20k+ Polygon community.
Jobs & Bounty Board: Whether you’re a project looking for some helping hands, or a user looking for some extra funds, the Polygon community has you covered.
Welcome Vouchers: Get access to the best web3 service providers for free/at a discount under a single forum.
Visibility & Recognition: Polygon Village provides marketing services through weekly educational talks and AMA sessions. Selected projects can pitch their offerings to the Polygon community.
Curious about the Polygon Village and its participants? Head over to the Village to learn more.
Village Wonders Program Updates
For those unaware, Polygon DAO launched the Village Wonders program, a 3-month pre-acceleration cohort where 12 selected projects receive access to funding, voucher services, marketing, mentorship, and much more. If you would like to learn more, you can check out the full announcement.
Throughout the past week, the DAO announced waves of mentors who will be helping these 12 selected projects - there are some pretty huge names in here:
DAO Bounty Contest Updates
Check out the latest list of projects who have made their pitch on the community forum.
Village Grantee and Partner Updates
StationX, a platform that allows users to instantly manage their digital assets, receives a grant from polygon DAO.
Hacken became a village partner, offering its high-quality audit services to Village projects.
Every week, we host “Village Talk” sessions on Twitter, where we speak to different web3 experts and BUIDLers. It’s a great way for Village partners and projects to get more exposure to the Polygon community, as well as for individuals to get some great knowledge and potentially some great alpha.
Last week, we hosted three Village Talk events:
AMA With XDAO
On Monday, we held an AMA session with XDAO, learning about DAOs and how their platform is helping its users instantly launch DAOs.
Village Wonders AMA
On Wednesday, Polygon DAO held an AMA session about the Village Wonders program.
Expert Talk and Project Pitches
Every week we host an Expert Talk session, where we talk to different web3 experts relating to a certain topic, plus we get to hear from two new projects every week that get to pitch their platform to the community. This all concludes with a Q&A session, where listeners get to ask questions.
Last week we held a conversation with the Cope Studio team discussing How good design will drive web3 adoption.
We also heard from Neptune Mutual and Altura, as they each took the stage for 10 minutes to present their platform to the community.
Defi Tooling: Dapp Factory
Accounting: Coinbooks
Marketing: CRE8R DAO
Interested in offering your services to a growing ecosystem of builders and gaining visibility from DAOs coming to Polygon Village? Apply to become a Voucher partner today.
Last week, Ethereum scaling made a giant leap forward with the launch of the Polygon zkEVM.
The long-awaited has finally come. Polygon zkEVM gives us the scalability power of zk-proofs while also giving us compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Allowing apps to benefit from Ethereum’s decentralization, security, and familiarity. This EVM compatibility makes it so that developers can build on Polygon zkEVM the same way they would build on Ethereum.
The benefits for end users? Dramatically reduced costs and improved speed.
In the spirit of web3, they have open sourced the code for Polygon zkEVM and will soon be releasing a public testnet.
To learn more about Polygon zkEVM, you can check out the official blog post.
DeSci is the application of blockchain technology to various aspects of scientific research to make it efficient, accessible, transparent, and censorship-resistant.
Problems DeSci is trying to solve:
Costs: Both the high costs required to publish a paper in a reputable journal and the subscription fee required to read these papers.
Bandwidth: The time to get a paper peer-reviewed
Funding: Acquiring the necessary research funding is almost impossible without the right network connections.
Transparency: Although results are made public, “reproducibility and replicability of the research results often meet with failure.”
With DeSci, anyone can contribute to the research process, which itself will be far cheaper in the decentralized world. Plus, smart contracts and blockchain technology will allow for greater efficiency and transparency.
Polygon DAO is exploring the DeSci space, looking for feedback from the community, and is ready to support DeSci projects. If you’re a DeSci project, drop us a note, we’d love to chat.
Each week, Polygon DAO will spotlight a project and its journey into the Polygon Village.
Village story #1 - JokeDAO
JokeDAO enables bottom-up, on-chain governance, letting token-holders both submit proposals and vote on their favorites—enabling community-set governance for user-generated roadmaps, grants, endorsements, bounties, curation, and contests.
To date, governance in DAOs has largely imitated web2 corporate governance: core teams make decisions that are approved by a community of token-holders, who are not incentivized to participate in voting—and to the extent, are incentivized to vote yes.
JokeDAO built an MVP of a fully operational web3-native governance platform that flips the way governance has been done: Now, the community itself can respond to prompts by submitting ideas and voting on them. For the first time, the community is incentivized to raise their voice, and governance becomes truly decentralized.
How polygonDAO helps
JokeDAO was the first project accepted in the Village, receiving a grant to build an official website.
Using the DAO grant, JokeDAO built its website in 6 weeks, allowing users to set up voting contests on any L2. Making JokeDAO the only web3 platform for bottom-up, on-chain governance.
Anyone can submit proposals for token holders to vote on. Instead of central parties making the proposals for the community to vote on, the community itself votes on its own idea. These proposals can be towards roadmap initiatives, content curation, grants, etc.
JokeDAO’s platform is gaining traction in web3
The users who set the proposals get to customize the parameters, such as voting power and voting period duration. We’d like to note, because JokeDAO is deployed on Polygon, votes only cost a fraction of a cent!
Over time, JokeDAO will expand its site by allowing for the airdropping of tokens. Curious about other upgrades? Check out this great thread detailing JokeDAO’s roadmap.
Our gossip column includes news and updates from all across the web3 space, with a bit of bias towards the Polygon ecosystem, of course.
Polygon launches zkEVM
WAGMI JobDrops makes a huge web3 splash
Polygon DAO has 10k Twitter frens
A look back on Polygon
Other Updates
Mercedes partners with Polygon to develop a platform for data exchange that will be called Acentrik.
Polygon’s BUIDL It event has been extended till August 21st - $500K in prizes to winners & over 3K participants so far 👀
Degen Wizard
Degen Wizard has two dedicated channels within the Polygon DAO Discord, where we get to hear about some of the latest scoops across web3 Defi. Here’s what the wizard shared with us last week:
4 Metrics to help you find bluechip projects
Rainbow now supports NFT’s on Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, & Optimism
Each week we have new employment opportunities shared on our job board from some of the biggest names in the space.
Key highlights from the Job Board this week include:
There are 597 jobs on the platform from 116 projects
51 jobs got listed in the week across job functions by Merge, Ankr, Fireblocks, UMA, Set Protocol, Quicknode, Hike, CoinDCX, and Horizon Blockchain Games
We witnessed around 800 job clicks
Featured Job of the Week: Horizon Blockchain Games hiring Product Marketing Director, Sequence
Stay up-to-date on who’s hiring by checking out the WAGMI Jobs page and following our WAGMI Jobs posts on Twitter!
zkEVM’s are pretty hot on CT right now, so it only made sense to include a zkEVM meme this week - Enjoy!
Have a meme you’d like to share? Make sure to post them on the Polygon DAO Discord.
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