Bold move from Acala: EVM support coming!

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Source: Acala blog.

The Acala team recently announced support for EVM-based smart contracts in their parachain. In short, this means that smart contracts that run on Ethereum can be run on their parachain. As they are targetting DeFi use case, I think that’s a great way to garner adoption. It’s also a bold strategy as I will outline below.

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Step-by-step instructions: staking with Ledger devices

Wondering how to stake your dots with a Ledger device? Fortunately u/cryptovestor gave a nice set of instructions in a reply on r/dot. Check them out:

Assuming you have installed the Polkadot app on your Ledger, you can do it all at polkadot.js by enabling Ledger support in settings tab. Then you connect your Ledger, unlock it and hit the “Query Ledger” button on the accounts page. Now your Polkadot account on your Ledger should show up in the list of accounts.

I plan to use the hw wallet to protect just the stash account, like so: (this is my plan, yours may differ)

  1. Unbond all stake in existing accounts and wait for unbonding period
  2. Move funds to Ledger’s Polkadot address
  3. Create a new controller account using the polkadot{.js} web extension
  4. Assign controller account to ledger polkadot account using “change controller account” function here
  5. Bond the funds at the new Ledger address
  6. Manage nominations via the new controller account.

This results in the stash being protected by the ledger but I can still manage nominations with the controller account, which doesn’t have the rights to transfer my funds.

Stakin4All blog

In addition to the above guide from cryptovestor, there is a great guide written by Stakin4All on Medium. It goes into some depth about using the Ledger device, including how to stake.

There is a great use of pictures too, so I recommend checking it out:

Using Ledger on Polkadot Network

Staking / Nominating in Polkadot

Two excellent videos to share with you here. They show you how to stake / nominate your dots (or KSM) via the Polkadot.js UI.

One from Bill Laboon at W3F and one from Sam Eugene a community member. The first one from bill is essentially an official video althogh the UI has updated since he did the video back in June.

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Relaunch of Polkadot Market

After taking a break for the past ~2 years while I worked at the foundation, I am now back into community building mode.

Polkadot Market was the first fan website created for the Polkadot community. The Reddit was launched 29th July 2019 and this website shortly followed afterwards!

I had to take a break while working full-time, but now that I’m out, I can spend more time fostering the community. The plan is to have more blog post and more Reddit discussions. Plus I’d love to do some interviews with the Polkadot community and get those posted to (e.g.) YouTube.

Useful Links

Reddit

Discord

Twitter

Twitter news feed