Polkadot News
The Ending Period of a new parachain lease auction has begun Aventus is currently in the lead. Auctions and crowdloans on Polkadot & Kusama networks | Parachains.info
Referendum 682, proposing to ratify moving Polkadot towards JAM, is passing almost unanimously (46 million DOT Aye to 16 DOT Nay) Proposal for JAM Ratification, Conformance, Performance by Polkadot Fellows | Polkassembly
The staking rate on Polkadot continues to increase and is now at 54.5%. Polkadot Staking Dashboard | Polkadot Staking (DOT)
The W3F Technical Education Team has announced EduChain, to be used for creating tutorials on Polkadot SDK features. GitHub - w3f/educhain: Parachain developed and maintained by Tech Ed team
Kusama News
Referendum 388, enabling the Identity pallet again (on the People chain instead of the Relay chain), is now up for vote on the Whitelisted Caller track. Enable Identity Again on People Chain | Polkassembly
Note that this is part of the move towards a “hermit relay chain”, where the Relay Chain focuses on parachain validation and all other capabilities (e.g. staking, governance, etc.) move to parachains.
Referendum 384, proposing to register the People Chain and upgrade the Coretime chain runtime to v1.2.3, is now up for vote. Register People Chain and upgrade Coretime Chain to v1.2.3 | Polkassembly