Polkadot News
Jonas Gehrlein and Alistair Stewart, researchers at W3F, have issued an RFC proposing to significantly reduce unbonding time on Polkadot (variable, but down to a potential minimum of 2 days) Unbonding queue by jonasW3F · Pull Request #97 · polkadot-fellows/RFCs · GitHub
Preliminary work to scale the active set on Polkadot to 500 validators is ongoing. For details, see Update: Polkadot validator set size increase
The Rococo test network will be deprecated in October 2024. You can use Westend or Paseo testnets. FOor details, see Rococo to be deprecated in October
Alex ‘Birdo’ Bird wrote up a blog post about his trip to Consensus 2024 representing Polkadot. https://www.parity.io/blog/birdo-at-consensus
Kusama News
Referendum 409, proposing to upgrade Kusama Relay Chain, Asset Hub, and People Chain to Kusama runtime 1.2.6, is currently passing unanimously. Upgrade Kusama: v1.2.6 | Polkassembly
Note that this is a relatively minor update for Kusama, mostly cleaning up some errors from the initial People Chain launch and preparing Asset Hub for an upcoming change to Asset indices.