Polkadot News
With approximately 36 hours left in the current parachain lease auction, Ajune Network is in the lead, and has been for the majority of the Ending Period. https://parachains.info/auctions
Referendum 639, proposing to bump parachain validation timeouts, is currently passing almost unanimously. Polkassembly - Referendum #639
Referendum 648, proposing to upgrade the Polkadot relay chain runtime to v1.2.0, is currently passing almost unanimously. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/648
Kusama News
After leading for 98% of the Ending Period, Memecoin Chain has won the most recent parachain lease auction. https://parachains.info/auctions/kusama
Referendum 375, enabling coretime on Kusama, has passed. Note that execution is set for 18 April (after the 1.2.0 runtime upgrade). Polkassembly - Referendum #375
Referendum 374, proposing to enable Asynchronous Backing on Kusama, is currently passing with 99.9% in favor. Polkassembly - Referendum #374
Async backing decreases parachain block time to ~ 6 seconds, and allows ~ 4x more throughput in each block. For more details and a comparison to the current synchronous backing protocol, see the Polkadot Wiki: Asynchronous Backing (Pipelining) - Polkadot Wiki