The Week in Polkadot: $60 Million JAM Prize Fund Open for Applications

Welcome to Decrypt’s Week in Polkadot, our regular round-up of the latest developments in the Polkadot ecosystem.

$60 million JAM Prize pool open for applications

The JAM Prize is now officially open for applications. Developers working on implementations of JAM, the next stage in Polkadot’s evolution, will be able to win prizes from a pool of 10 million DOT tokens and 100,000 KSM tokens, roughly $60 million and $1.8 million at the time of writing.

Developers can now find out exactly how many tokens they can expect to win if they can deliver projects which successfully exceed milestones such as importing and producing blocks, achieving Kusama and Polkadot-level performance, and passing security audits.

The JAM Implementers’ Prize, courtesy of the Web3 Foundation, seeks to encourage multiple client implementations to boost the network’s resilience. The foundation seeks proposals for JAM implementations in diverse programming languages such as OCaml, Go, and Zig.

Projects written in languages like this are a departure from the current state of affairs, where the majority of Polkadot projects are written in Solidity.

You can apply via the online portal here.

What is JAM? Polkadot's Biggest Ever Upgrade Explained

Announced in April 2024, the Join Accumulate Machine (JAM) represents the biggest-ever update to Polkadot since the blockchain first became fully operational in 2021. It will bring deep changes to the Relay Chain, the center of the project’s ecosystem, which underpins all its independent parachains. The JAM upgrade’s proposed technical principles and aims were outlined in the JAM Gray Paper, penned by Polkadot creator Gavin Wood. Polkadot relies on decentralized leadership to decide the future o...

Polkadot hits Consensus 2024

Some of the leading lights in the Polkadot ecosystem, including Web3 Foundation CEO Fabian Gompf and Chief Legal Officer at Parity Technologies Chrissy Hill, took to the stage at Consensus 2024.

The pair discussed recent governance changes in the Polkadot ecosystem and delved into Polkadot’s commitment to decentralization.

Back in October 2023, Parity Technologies made the bold decision to give up Polkadot’s go-to-market function to its decentralized contributors, with the intention of empowering the community to take more control of the project.

Polkadot heads to Southeast Asia

Polkadot will be heading to Bali, Indonesia for Coinfest Asia, Southeast Asia's largest Web3 event. The event will run between the 22nd and the 23rd of August and is expected to attract roughly 6,000 people from 60 countries.

Polkadot will be supporting Mandala Chain, an Indonesia-founded project specifically built to cater to the challenges and opportunities of developing economies, using a parachain hosted on Polkadot.

Mandala Chain believes that Indonesia’s huge population—275.5 million and growing— which is relatively young and digitally connected, is the perfect environment for Web3 adoption.

The project looks to link public and private sector use cases, can enable use cases like digital identity, and has already signed partnerships with over 90 banks.