Welcome to week 4 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
Last week the DAO announced the final two waves of mentors for the Village Wonders program who will be helping the 12 selected Wonders projects, including our very own DOA lead, Marco Grendel.
You can see the complete list of mentors below:
DAO Bounty Contest Updates
Polygon DAO recently announced the DAO Bounty Contest, where projects get to make their pitch and have the community decide on the winner of $15K in prizes plus full Polygon Village support.
Here’s the latest list of projects who have made their pitch on the community forum.
New DAO Grants Application Cycle
Grant application cycles for the Village program close on the 10th of each month and re-open two days after, meaning that starting tomorrow, projects will be able to start applying for the September grants round.
Interested in applying? Click the button below:
Monthly Grant Roundup
Here is the list of July grantee winners who received financial support from the DAO:
Decentralized Talent Network
Kaafila Metaverse
Gagarin
Tangible
Kontour
Ogami Conquest
KUMO
Synphonic
Dyve
Pyme
Every week, we host “Village Talk” sessions on Twitter, where we speak to different web3 experts and BUIDLers. Last week, we hosted three Village Talk events:
Grantee AMA with PawnSpace
On Wednesday, we held an AMA session with one of our previous grantees, Pawnspace.
Pawnspace is a P2P NFT collateralized lending platform on Polygon, allowing users to take advantage of the value behind their NFTs rather than having them stay idle in their wallets. The platform is currently live on Alpha testnet for users to try out.
To learn all about their decentralized platform that allows for the conversion of NFTs into financial opportunities, you can listen to the whole conversation below.
AMA With Blockpit
On Thursday, we held an AMA session with Blockpit, a platform allowing users to calculate crypto taxes for their entire portfolios.
Blockpit’s crypto tax app allows users to import all their data from the different exchanges they interact with, as well as all wallet activity, and create a compliant tax report.
You can listen to the whole conversation to learn more about the Blockpit platform, the challenges they aim to solve, its value proposition, case studies, and more.
Expert Talk and Project Pitches
Last week we held a conversation with JokeDAO, a platform that enables bottom-up, on-chain governance. We discussed the topic of “Internet Native Governance.” Topics included:
An introduction to the JokeDAO platform
Problems of Governance Today
Forking and Collusion: good or bad
Governance as a Social Graph
Case Studies
Project Pitches
We followed this up by having two new projects take the stage:
Mac & Cheese (XVMC): an all-inclusive (Defi, DAO, NFT) protocol that creates a superior store of value through time deposits - governed and optimized in real-time by long-term stakers acting as integrated decentralized oracles
Kryxivia Game: a 3-D P2E MMORPG built on BNB chain and soon to be Polygon - as a player, you will explore the city of Kryxivia and the deep, mysterious mine that it was built around
Next Week’s Events Schedule
Wednesday, August 17th at 9:30 AM PST: An Expert Talks session
Thursday, August 18th at 9:00 AM PST: An AMA session with Clipto DAO
Friday, August 19th at 5:30 AM PST: An AMA session with Onto Wallet
Join the Polygon DAO Discord and stay up-to-date with the AMA event schedule.
API / Node Infrastructure: Infura
Storage & Hosting: Akash Network
Dapp Audit: Hacken
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.
DAO Monthly Recap
The monthly DAO recap for July is out! Here are some of this past month’s highlights:
WAGMI JobDrops event
The launch of Village Wonders
7 new Village partners
Grants & voucher updates
The DAO goes to Paris
Job Board Updates
15 “Village Talks” sessions on Twitter, accumulating 3.5K total listeners for the month
A website revamp + blog launch
& of course, the launch of the Village Times newsletter
Each week, Polygon DAO will spotlight a project and its journey into the Polygon Village.
Village story #2
This week, we want to highlight one of our grantees - AlturaNFT.
AlturaNFT is a platform that provides tools and infrastructure to easily integrate NFTs into video games. It enables developers to build web3 games without prior web3 knowledge or the need to write complex blockchain code.
Their vision is to become the largest network for in-game items. Becoming the default choice for developers to build their web3 games, as well as the default choice for web2 developers transitioning to web3.
Altura is known for its “smart NFTs.” Smart NFTs allow for the ability to instantly change an NFT without paying gas fees. Altura believes that in order for web3 games to take off, NFTs need to be dynamic, which is exactly what their platform enables.
What are some of the features of Altura?
Developer Tools (API/SDK): Right now, people can use the Altura SDK (Javascript), allowing users to integrate NFTs into their games in just 3 lines of code. However, they will soon also be launching a Unity SDK and an Unreal SDK.
Multi-Chain: Altura is currently live on Polygon, Ethereum, and Binance, with plans to go live on Solana.
Multi-Chain Economy: Players can have their in-game items from one game be used in another game (as long as the individual games allow for it themselves, of course)
A launchpad in development: The purpose of this launchpad will be to kickstart new web3 games and enable web3 game developers to gain traction, funding, and exposure.
NFT Marketplace: They have a live multi-chain NFT market, reaching 40K unique active wallets, with over $3M in NFT trading volume. The marketplace is currently only for Altura native NFTs; however, it will soon expand to external NFT collections (BAYC, Punks, etc).
What does their 2022 roadmap look like?
In Q3, they plan to launch their Unity SDK and NFT launchpad. Support for external NFT collections on their marketplace will also go live.
In Q4, they plan to add support for the Solana network, release their Unreal SDK, enable web2 authentication and credit card payments on the marketplace, and release their Altura app store, where web3 gamers can find Altura native games, as well as games powered by Altura.
Our gossip column includes news and updates from all across web3, with a bit of bias towards the Polygon ecosystem, of course.
ENS is now available on Polygon mainnet - get your .matic domain
BUIDL IT Hackathon
FC Barcelona soccer team NFT
Polygon and Techstars teamed up for an accelerator program offering hands-on mentorship, personalized programs, and investor networking opportunities to a cohort of founders building on Polygon. Applications open from August 29.
One of the largest education departments in Maharashtra has issued 100K verifiable digital diplomas on Polygon, enabled by LegitDoc.
Polygon researchers spent a few months researching the compatibility of Black Scholes Merton Model, one of the most popular pricing models for option contracts. Here you can find Part 1 & Part 2 of the research paper.
Threads!
Village Wonders
Journey Into Web3
Degen Wizard
Here are some of the “whispers” & “hacks” we heard from the Degen Wizard.
Whispers:
The NFTs.com domain just sold for $15M
“DAO’s are gaming L2 airdrops”
Hacks:
A good read about the mp (multiplier points) mechanism the GMX protocol uses. It rewards long-term holders without the need for a ve-token model
Some tools for all you NFT lovers out there
Here’s a good playbook for crypto founders
Struggling to handle your web3 community? Here are some tips on community design and management
Megathread for Solana hack resources
Recently, Xcopy went full CC0 with his digital artwork. This essentially means that owners of his artwork have full IP rights for that specific piece. This thread does a good job covering the story
Here’s a good thread covering veTokenomics
You can head over to our community Discord & subscribe to our “alpha alerts” to receive notifications from the Wizard.
Key highlights from the Job Board this week include:
There are now 608 jobs on the platform, from 118 projects
56 jobs got listed in the last week across job functions by Merge, Ankr, Fireblocks, UMA, Set Protocol, Quicknode, Hike, CoinDCX, and Horizon Blockchain Games. etc
We witnessed over 700 job clicks this week
Featured Job of the Week: EPNS hiring Business Development Lead
Stay up-to-date on who’s hiring by checking out the WAGMI Jobs page and following our WAGMI Jobs posts on Twitter!
I mean, who doesn’t like a good ol’ Spongebob meme?
Have a meme you’d like to share? Make sure to post them on the Polygon DAO Discord.
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