Welcome to week 17 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: October Edition
Polygon DAO is proud to announce the Village grant recipients for the month of October:
PEN Digital
Congrats to all projects! We look forward to supporting your growth.
For any teams interested in applying for a Village grant, the November submissions round is live from now until December 10th.
WAGMI JobDrops II
WAGMI JobDrops is back for its second edition!
WAGMI JobDrops is a job fair that Polygon first hosted in the metaverse back in July, allowing teams and builders to connect with one another.
This time, WAGMI JobDrops is coming IRL, at Polygon Connect Bengaluru on December 1st. This is the perfect event for any builder to connect and interview with leading web3 projects, all in hopes of landing a web3 job.
So far, Quickswap, Instadapp, Push Protocol, and Biconomy have been announced as hiring partners for the event, with more to be announced throughout the coming days.
Applications for the event are open until November 25th, so make sure to apply soon if you’re interested.
DeSci Writing Competition
A reminder for any science enthusiast out there, that you have until the end of the month to submit your piece to the DeSci writing contest, for a chance to win some $USDC.
You can find the link for submissions in the tweet below:
Hot Off the Press
For our latest blog article, we dove into Data Availability. More specifically, the article touched on:
What Data Availability Is
DA Layers
DA Blockchains vs DA Committees
DA Layers vs Data Storage Layers
DA Layer Use Cases
& DA Layer Endgames
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:
DeSci AMA
We started the week with a DeSci AMA session featuring AthenaDAO, a decentralized collective to fund women’s reproductive health research and drug discovery.
Village Wonders AMA
For Tuesday’s Village Wonders AMA session, we had Art Labs and Matter Protocol join us to talk about “AI & Blockchains”
Art Labs: 3D & AI at scale for commerce and the metaverse
Matter Protocol: blockchain oracle that helps apps harness web2 social data
Expert Talks & Project Pitches
For last week’s Expert Talk event, we had BountyBlok, a platform that offers marketing tools for games, artists, and brands, join us to talk all about “web3 marketing”.
For the “project pitches” segment of the event, we had zkPass take the stage to make their pitch to the community. zkPass is a decentralized KYC solution based on Multi-Party Computation and zk-proofs.
Next Week’s Events Schedule
Nov. 21st: DeSci AMA @ 3:30 PM UTC | 4:30 PM CET | 10:30 AM EST
Nov. 22nd: Wonders AMA Creators & Web3 w/ RightsfuAlly & Synphonic @ 3:30 PM UTC | 4:30 PM CET | 10:30 AM EST
Join the Polygon DAO Discord and stay up-to-date with the AMA event schedule.
ICYMI, there have been several major announcements from the Polygon team throughout the past couple of days:
Polygon x Instagram
On November 2nd, Meta introduced NFT minting and buying on Instagram.
Instagram’s Polygon integration means that creators will be able to make their own “digital collectibles” directly within the Instagram app. They’ll be able to benefit from end-to-end tools (minting, showcasing, and selling).
Not only will this integration improve the NFT creator experience, but from a collector’s perspective, you’ll be able to purchase any of your favorite pieces directly from the app - all with zero fees.
As of now, this new digital collectibles feature is only available to a select group of creators in the US, but will soon be rolled out to everyone.
You can check out the original announcement here if you’re interested.
Polygon x Disney
As you may remember, back in July, Polygon was one of six companies selected to participate in Disney’s 2022 Accelerator Program. The goal of this accelerator program was to develop new technologies with AI, AR, and NFTs.
On November 10th, we finally got to hear what this collaboration with Polygon entails.
Polygon will be developing “a proof of concept for exclusive digital collectibles to recognize Disney employees during special occasions”. There isn’t much more information about this yet, but we will be sure to mention any new announcements about this here in The Village Times.
For anyone interested, here’s the link to the full video of the announcement.
Polygon x Nike
As you may know, Nike has been fully embracing the power of web3 this year with their RTFKT and CloneX NFT projects.
Now, they stepped it up even further.
On November 14th, Nike introduced Swoosh, their web3 experience powered by Polygon.
Swoosh will be ”the home for all of Nike’s virtual creations”. These creations can include a wide range of Nike wearables, such as jerseys and shoes, all of which could be worn in video games (could be web3 games, or potentially even games like FIFA, NBA2K, etc) and other immersive experiences that the team develops over the future.
Aside from this, Nike also plans to roll out their own marketplace within the Swoosh ecosystem, allowing users to buy, sell, and trade their Nike virtual creations with other Swoosh members. For any creators out there, you’ll also get the chance to earn royalties from any virtual products you help design.
To learn more about Swoosh, Nike’s new web3 experience, you can check out the official announcement here.
Each week, Polygon DAO spotlights a project and its journey into the Polygon Village.
Village Story #13 ~ Edge Wallet
Continuing on our Village Stories series, today we’re going to be looking at Edge Wallet, one of our previous Village grantees who is helping to hide the complexities involved with using crypto, through one seamless, easy-to-use app.
Edge Wallet allows users to buy, trade, and store all of their digital assets in one place, across a variety of chains.
Founder
The project was founded by Paul Puey, a UC Berkeley alumni who spent the majority of his time before crypto working at Nvidia. Paul first joined the crypto industry in 2013, only to be working on his own crypto endeavor the following year.
Features
The Edge Wallet team kept three things in mind when developing the app - privacy, security, and user-friendliness.
Privacy: Edge Wallet uses zero-knowledge technology to keep our data private, not only from one another but also from the app itself.
Security: Offer 2-Factor Authentication, as well as Password Recovery.
User Experience: anyone that holds different chain tokens knows how hard it is to keep track of all the different wallets and passwords. With Edge, all your tokens are stored in one place, and all you need to access the app is a username and password - not a seed phrase.
Support System
Unlike most other protocols today, Edge Wallet offers a top-tier support system. Not only do they offer phone, email, and chat support with a 24-hour response time, but they’re also one of the only teams to offer in-person support sessions.
Make sure to head over to the Edge Wallet website and download the app to get started using the platform today.
The Polygon team just published two new blog articles during the past week:
this deep dive article about Plonky2, the proving system that will be used for the Polygon Zero zk-rollup.
& this deep dive into the critical role validators play in securing the network
Polygon introduces “Creators Month". For the rest of the month, join creators, panelists, and projects to learn about the future of creators in web3
gTrade, a decentralized leveraged trading protocol, is now the biggest DAI holder on Polygon
Quickswap enters into a collaboration with Axelar, a cross-chain communications protocol. Now, users “will have another option to bridge in select tokens for use in Quickswap”.
BLR Airport launches an airport metaverse, where users can shop, socialize and attend experiences with one another
You can now sign-up for limited access to the SynFutures V2 closed alpha
Polygon introduces “Quest”, a P2E gamified feature added to the Wallet Suite to help you earn rewards
Biconomy launches its SDK, allowing developers to plug, stack, and customize modules to build their own customized user journey. “A game changer for web3 UX”
Here are some stats from Stakeall’s new shuttle campaign, including +958K $MATIC staked
Polygon Studios:
Here’s the latest episode of the Weekly Briefing
Uquid, a smart shopping market in the metaverse will be integrating the Polygon network within its platform. Uquid already has millions of products and verified merchants.
OnePlanet announces the launch of its launchpad. This new service will provide customized solutions to suit each project’s needs.
See what your NFT could do in the Bud metaverse
Claim a free Reddit world cup avatar
Tunl brings a new token-enabled commerce experience to Polygon. Tunl aims to be the standard for token-enabled commerce experiences by building a suite of products that embed into a website with no code
Key highlights from the Job Board this week include:
There are 573 jobs on the platform from across 147 projects
76 jobs got listed in the last week across job functions by Zamp, 0vix, Airstack, Venly, Community Gaming, Guardian Link, Honeybricks, Hike, Chainstack etc.
We also witnessed around 900 job applications last week.
Featured Job of the Week: 0vix hiring DeFi Head of Business Development
Stay up-to-date on who’s hiring by checking out the WAGMI Jobs page and following our WAGMI Jobs posts on Twitter.
Today’s meme of the week goes out to all you DeSci enthusiasts - enjoy :)
Have a meme you’d like to share? Make sure to post them on the Polygon DAO Discord.
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