The Village Times
For the week ending October 13th
Welcome to week 13 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.
Projects building within the Polygon Village gain free access to our Village program benefits, including:
Grants
Jobs & Bounty Board
Welcome Vouchers
Visibility & Recognition
Curious about the Polygon Village and its participants? Head over to the Village to learn more.
Monthly Grant Roundup: September Edition
Polygon DAO is proud to announce the Village grant recipients for the month of September:
Congrats to all projects! We look forward to supporting your growth.
For any teams interested in applying for a Village grant, the October submissions round is live from now until November 10th.
Village Voucher Numbers For September
September was a record month for Polygon DAO when it came to #VillageVouchers:
Village Wonders Mentorship
Last week, MetaGameHub, a platform that enables users to navigate through the open metaverse, was able to benefit from a personal branding call with Polygon Studios Brand of Director, amandatyler.eth:
Hot Off The Press
Make sure to read the DAO’s most recent blog post, “Where Polygon zkEVM fits in the market”. This is a great read for anyone that wants to take a close look at the tech stack, security, trust assumptions, and more, about Polygon’s zkEVM.
Our Village Talk sessions are a great marketing opportunity for projects, whereas, for the community, it’s a great time to get some sweet alpha.
Last week we held three Village Talk sessions:
Mondays Are For DeSci
Last Monday, we held a DeSci AMA session with GenomesDAO, a biotech DAO focused on safe, private, and auditable monetization of genomic data using Defi.
Expert Talk & Project Pitches
Our Expert Talk session featured One Planet, an NFT marketplace that recently migrated to Polygon. The topic of conversation was “How to build a strong community for an NFT project”.
We then had two blockchain & fitness related projects take the stage for ten minutes each, as part of our ‘project pitches” session:
Selfbar Belgium: a project that operates smart, self-service & cashless drink machines
Fitment: “the ultimate fitness app that tracks your workouts and rewards you with FITT tokens for each calorie you burn”
AMA with JokeDAO
We ended our week with an AMA session featuring JokeDAO, a platform that enables bottom-up, on-chain governance.
Next Week’s Events Schedule
Oct. 17th: DeSci AMA w/ Frontier Nation @ 6:30 PM CET | 4:30 PM UTC
Oct. 19th: Expert Talk @ 6:30 PM CET | 4:30 PM UTC
Oct. 20th: Wonder Project AMA w/ Deefy & Threely @ 5:30 PM CET | 3:30 PM UTC
Oct. 21st: Grantee AMA w/ Datamorpho @ 6:30 PM CET | 4:30 PM UTC
Join the Polygon DAO Discord and stay up-to-date with the AMA event schedule.
Polygon zkEVM Public Testnet Launch
ICYMI, Polygon just announced the launch of their zkEVM public testnet, allowing the community to finally test out the zkEVM for themselves.
What is zkEVM?
As you may know, there are several developers and L2 projects working relentlessly to help scale Ethereum through zero-knowledge technology - more specifically, zk-rollups. These zk-rollups are execution environments that allow users to take advantage of increased scalability, while still being able to benefit from Ethereum’s security.
Polygon’s zkEVM is a zk-rollup.
“We’re proud to say we’re the first zkEVM to reach public testnet with an open-source ZK proving system.” - so what’s a proving system? To understand this, we must first understand how a zk-rollup works.
Rather than having our transactions processed individually, as is usually done, a rollup, well, rolls up, a batch of transactions to be processed altogether. Ultimately, ending up with a zk-proof that verifies that each transaction that was processed within that batch, was done so correctly. That proof then gets sent to Ethereum to be finalized (benefiting from its security).
Get Involved
Although developers can start interacting with the zkEVM today, it’s important to know that this is not the final version. According to Vitalik’s framework, this current version of the zkEVM falls under type3 (up to type4, with 1 being the most EVM compatible).
Here’s a link for any Village project or developer that wants to start building today with zkEVM.
To learn more about Polygon’s zkEVM, make sure to check out the DAO’s most recent blog post.
API Services
Whether you’re aware of it or not, an API is something we all use on a daily basis. Given this technological age we’re living in now, it’s essential for project systems to be able to communicate with one another, and that is exactly what an API enables.
What is an API
An API stands for Application Programming Interface, and in general, it’s an interface that allows software applications to communicate with one another. It would allow one app to request an action from another app, with the API being the messenger that takes and returns the given requests.
Technically speaking, an API is a piece of code that a developer integrates into their protocol, in order to access the features of that API, removing the hassle of having to write the code yourself.
Developers can configure how often they want their API to be called, as well as other parameters of course.
Examples include a DEX aggregator that uses an API to unite several exchanges under one hub, or a crypto exchange’s API, which would enable users to receive live market data, as well as swap execution. These were just two examples of how crypto APIs are used, however, there are plenty of others, like an NFT API for example.
Voucher Partners
Polygon DAO has partnered with three API service providers:
Tatum: they offer their Tatum Rest API, “which is a unified framework to communicate with over 40+ blockchain protocols”
Moralis: “get access to NFT, token, and transaction data across all major blockchains”
Blast API powered by Bware Labs: “a multichain, subscription-based, API platform, featuring the fastest and most reliable blockchain access to the most relevant networks in the space”
Any project looking for API service support for their application or protocol can apply for our Village vouchers here.
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.
Each week, Polygon DAO spotlights a project and its journey into the Polygon Village.
Village story #11 ~ JokeDAO
Following up on their recent Village Talk appearance, today, we’re going to be doing a deep dive on JokeDAO, a previous Polygon DAO grantee that is enabling a new form of on-chain governance for web3 projects.
What Is JokeDAO
There are a few problems with on-chain governance today, including having to pay fees to vote, centralization due to “1 token = 1 vote”, and the biggest of all, that it’s hard to get different forms of input from a project’s community at large.
It’s for these reasons that JokeDAO decided to build an on-chain governance platform that truly captures the voices of each respective community, rather than just from a handful of contributors that end up making all the decisions.
JokeDAO allows any user or DAO to create contests. These contests can range from anything like what features the project should build out, protocol integrations and partners, grant proposals, content creation (“who should we bring on as a guest for our podcast”), or anything else. Ultimately, the goal is for projects to hear the voices of a wide set of their community.
JokeRace
Every week, JokeDAO hosts joke contests on their platform, called joke races.
Anyone can submit a joke, and vote for their favorite jokes, all while earning JOKE tokens in return for their participation.
These winning jokes get minted as an NFT, where 20% goes to the submitter, 20% goes to charity, and 60% to the joke race council. Owning one of these NFTs grants you rights over the joke race council treasury.
Overall, it’s a very fun, unique experience to get their community involved each and every week.
Jokenomics
$JOKE is the official token of the platform, which is used to participate and vote in the joke races each week. Every week, tokens are distributed to JOKE holders, which they can then use to vote for more races, and earn more tokens. Over time, those who don’t participate get diluted, with those who participate owning more and more as time goes on.
There’s a lot more going on with JokeDAO, so if anyone is interested, feel free to check out their website or head to their Twitter to ask them any questions you may have.
Polygon:
Shopping.io integrates with Polygon network, allowing MATIC holders to shop at places like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Home Depot, and more, using crypto
Here’s why Polygon is bringing identity & compliance to the network with Quadrata Network’s universal identity platform
For anyone interested, Polygon Avail’s Product Manager had a 30 minute interview to talk all about data availability & Avail security
Here’s a great short thread about polygon’s recent partnership with OCEEF
Polygon sponsors Moralis x Google 2022 Defi Hackathon: from Oct. 3rd to Nov. 11th. Developers will build defi protocols to compete for a chance to win from a pool of $155K
How to use Polygon ID wallet app to claim an ERC-20 token airdrop
Raises:
Web3 banking platform Juno raises $18M in a round led by ParaFi Capital, “as it expands its offerings to include a tokenized loyalty program”
Exponential raises $14M in a seed round led by Paradigm, and is now available to the public, “to build the investment platform that unlocks Defi for all.”
Horizon Games raises $40M in a series A in order “to scale our products, grow our ecosystem, and hire more incredible teammates onto our team”
Gaming & NFTs
Looks like eDAO’s all-access culture passport is dropping soon
Immersed partnered with Polygon, Republic Crypto, EveryRealm, and ReadyPlayerMe, to build the real-world economy in VR (& mixed reality soon).
New Crypto Unicorns Jousting Gameplay Trailer is out
Key highlights from the Job Board this week include:
Episode 5 of “Celebrating Web3 Careers”, featuring Santiago, writer, and “Empire” podcast co-host
There are 622 jobs on the platform from across 136 projects
66 jobs got listed in the last week across job functions by Fireblocks, Coto World, GuardianLink, Velvet Capital, Chainstack, SettleMint, CoinDCX, and more
We also witnessed around 800 job applications this past week
Featured Job of the Week: SettleMint hiring VP of Engineering
Stay up-to-date on who’s hiring by checking out the WAGMI Jobs page and following our WAGMI Jobs posts on Twitter.
This must be how people look at other L1 platforms compared to Polygon now, following their recent zkEVM launch:
Shoutout @NarbTrading for the meme.
Have a meme you’d like to share? Make sure to post them on the Polygon DAO Discord.
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