Polkadot OpenGov Whitelisted Caller Referendum 1400 is open for voting. If passed it will lower the cost of Snowbridge transfers from Polkadot to Ethereum from ~6.12 DOT to ~1.49 DOT. In addition, it will register native ETH on Asset Hub and make it a sufficient asset with a minimum balance of 15k Gwei.
Khala Referendum 128 proposes to sunset the Khala Chain on Kusama, when its lease ends on January 10th 2025, and migrate its assets to a new Ethereum L2. In addition, the team has decided to cease development of their metaverse project Phala World (PW), and will be reclaiming PW NFTs and issuing refunds of the mint price.
KILT announces Polar Path, a Polkadot pallet that allows the bi-directional conversion of native parachain tokens to Ethereum compatible ERC-20 tokens. This solves the token compatibility challenge of bridging parachain native tokens over Snowbridge to Ethereum. For their own token, KILT has built a unique token locking mechanism that ensures that the total supply of KILT tokens remains constant. An equal number of locked KILT ERC-20 tokens has been minted on Ethereum. When bridged, the Polkadot assets become locked, while the ERC-20 tokens becomes unlocked, and vice-versa.
SubWallet introduces Unified account, a solution for managing token and NFT assets in more than 200 networks across the Polkadot, Ethereum, and TON ecosystems. Unified account displays all staking options across supported ecosystems, allows cross-chain transactions between Ethereum and Polkadot, and offers seamless interactions with Substrate and EVM dApps, all without the need to switch between accounts or networks.
The Moonbeam Foundation is inviting the community for input into its future strategic direction. Building on the Improved Ethererum Integration Initiative research work streams presented in their 2024 Product Roadmap, Moonbeam have drafted an early stage vision which will be developed further after community feedback. The idea is for the Moonbeam Network to launch in the Ethereum ecosystem in some form, with links back to Moonbeam on Polkadot. The most plausible option at this point appears to be launching the Moonbeam runtime as an AVS (actively validated service) via Tanssi as it allows for the porting of all of Moonbeam's core technology and capabilities.
Polkadot OpenGov Whitelisted Caller track Referendum 1127 is open for voting. It proposes to lower the pricing of Snowbridge transfer fees. The original Snowbridge pricing parameters were based on a worst case gas price of 60 Gwei and an ETH/DOT exchange rate of 1:450. This resulted in a Polkadot>Ethereum transfer cost of ~11 DOT and a Ethereum>Polkadot cost of 0.000399 ETH. If passed, the pricing parameters will be changed to a worst case gas price of 25 Gwei, and an ETH/DOT exchange rate of 1:566. This will result in a Polkadot>Ethereum transfer cost of ~6 DOT, and a Ethereum>Polkadot transfer cost of 0.000317 ETH.
Spazcoin is on a mission to connect the parachains through governance. With Zeitgeist Referendum 65, he proposes to open XCM channels with 16 parachains. Meanwhile, Proposal 33 aims to accept two incoming XCM requests. On Astar he has initiated a referendum to open 11 XCM channels, and on Acala he proposes to accept two incoming XCM requests.
Velocity Labs introduces Turtle a new cross-chain transfer app powered by Snowbridge. Initially supporting EthereumPolkadot bridging, future plans will include widgets for all parachains, a Turtle SDK, cross-parachain transfers, cross-chain swaps, and on-ramp capabilities.
Snowfork announces that Snowbridge, the trustless EthereumPolkadot bridge, is now live on Polkadot. In the first release the focus in on transferring ETH and ERC20 assets between Ethereum and Polkadot. An initial scale test is running for the first two weeks, with admin features enabled for upgrades and bug fixes. The bridge will go fully trustless using cross-chain governance after this period. Snowbridge assets are not supported on Talisman, SubWallet, and Nova Wallet yet, but balances can be viewed and transferred on the Snowbridge website. Bridging Polkadot-native assets is expected to be enabled in the next few months at the same time that the arbitrary messaging feature is released. Stay tuned for news about a new governance proposal for long-term funding of Snowbridge and a liquidity program.