Polkadot News
Daniel Cukier has written a great, in-depth thread on PolkaVM and how it differs from EVM. https://x.com/danicuki/status/1892240092871250159
Referendum 1427, proposing to upgrade the Polkadot relay chain runtime to v1.4.0, has been approved. It will execute at block 24_899_075 (approx 08.00 UTC on 26 Feb). https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/1427
Jonas Gehrlein, researcher at W3F, has released a paper showing that parachain slot auctions (using the candle auction mechanism) for Polkadot parachains achieved high levels of efficiency and relative revenue for 97.4% efficiency and 89.9% for Kusama.
You can find the forum post describing it in more detail here: Research Digest: A Recap on Candle Auctions and the paper itself here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5109856
Kusama News
Kusama has successfully upgrades to runtime 1.4.0, following the passage and execution of Referendum 494. Subscan | Kusama Extrinsic Details
Kusama nomination pool members may now vote with their pooled KSM in OpenGov. This requires user intervention first; see this article for instructions. Polkadot Support