With the potential cost for purchase and subsequent renewal starting at 920 DOT in the next Coretime Sales round, the Baron has cut their first deal for a Polkadot core. ParaID 3415 has purchased a core for 2000 DOT, securing a renewal price of 95 DOT, rising by 3% each period.
Between May 2nd and 7th, Polkadot parachain block times experienced a period of degradation. Andrei Sandu (Parity) has published a post-mortem. The cause of the issue related to disputes originating from a single validator suffering from disk failures. In each new session the faulty validator was added to the list of disabled validators after losing a dispute. Due to a bug, the list of disabled validators clears when a validator restarts. Thus, any restarted validator would join disputes raised by the faulty validator, triggering a dispute storm. The issues have been patched in the stable2503-4 release.
Tommi Enenkel has published the 2025 Q1 Polkadot Treasury Report, recording the first ever quarterly net profit. The top spending category was outreach (7.5m USD), followed by software development (1.5m DOT), and operations relating to network infrastructure (2.1m USD). With the treasury inflows, under the new inflation model, current spending is sustainable for at least 10 years.
In Polkadot Referendum 1563, N3mus is seeking 25K DOT to integrate with the Polkadot Hub and expand its gaming to parachains beyond Moonbeam. It plans to onboard at least 15 more games from across the ecosystem, with 75% of funding going towards prize pools for more than 150 gaming tournaments.