Polkadot Digest 27 January 2026

Ecosystem Digest
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Polkadot News

Polkadot Upgrade 2.0.5 referendum has been enacted. The new runtimes are queued to go live around 11 UTC today https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/1828

The hard-cap and stepped supply schedule for DOT, which was approved by Polkadot OpenGov in September 2025, is set to go live with this runtime upgrade https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/1710?tab=timeline

The Elastic Scaling feature, which enables 2-second blocks on Polkadot Hub, will also go live with this runtime upgrade https://x.com/filippoweb3/status/2008491910445641888

Smart Contracts can be deployed natively on Polkadot after this runtime upgrade Smart Contracts Overview | Polkadot Developer Docs

Kusama News

There are five referenda up for voting on Kusama OpenGov https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda

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The Polkadot Digest noted that “there are five referenda up for voting on Kusama OpenGov.” Here’s what those five actually are.

Deciding

Referendum 627 proposes Ethereum-style burn mechanisms for KSM — 5% base inflation, 50% fee burn, 1% periodic treasury balance burn, 25% coretime burn — as an alternative to a hard supply cap. Currently ~48.7% Aye. Decision period ends ~Jan 29 21:16 UTC. https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/627

Referendum 630 requests ~17,457 KSM to fund system collators for AssetHub, BridgeHub, CoreTime, People, and Encointer over six months. Unanimous Aye so far. https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/630

Referendum 631 requests funding for Kusama Shield v2, a zero-knowledge shielded pool on AssetHub with support for 40+ L1 asset swaps. https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/631

Referendum 629 requests ~$90K for Bloque to expand stablecoin card infrastructure targeting Latin American markets. Currently majority Nay. https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/629

Referendum 632 asks for a Nay vote to retire bounties #35 #36 #37 pending migration to a new multi-asset bounties pallet. https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/632

Recently Executed

Referendum 628 increased the parachain scheduler lookahead parameter from 3 to 5 to improve block production reliability. Executed Jan 26. https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/628

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