Gavin Wood’s handwriting: Polkadot 2024 Year in Review

Author: Gavin Wood

Compiler: Lin Ge

It's that time again... I temporarily put down the text editor I've been writing for a whole year and opened Medium. As the nights grow colder, the days grow shorter, and the fires are lit, it’s a good time to take stock of our ecosystem. How are we doing so far? What have we achieved in the past 12 months? What happens next? Buckle up, it's going to be a long one this year because we're always busy and eager to make more progress.

hello! The Christmas atmosphere is getting stronger... 🎄

Before we begin to summarize, let us review the broader context of the year. Polkadot’s journey began with a white paper (2016) and a crowd sale (2017). To a large extent, this determines subsequent development directions and product concepts. Over the past few years, we have focused on delivering on the product vision outlined in the white paper. For many reasons and in many ways, 2023/2024 represents a watershed year that marks a clear shift in this core purpose.

Therefore, this year is an important year of transformation for Polkadot - shifting from focusing on achieving the limited range of product goals in the white paper to optimizing, improving stability, and refining products to better meet market needs . At the same time, this transformation process also benefits from the data collection and analysis support provided by Parity's DOT Lake and Token Terminal . Eventually, we started building a service platform framework that was broader and more aligned with Web3 needs.

I build the stage and you perform

Polkadot 's core value proposition is to provide a large amount of high-quality, tightly connected block space, which is called coretime in Polkadot . Currently, its main use is to support the operation of high-performance blockchains, which used to be called parachains. In the past year or so, we’ve finally seen these projects take early advantage of Polkadot’s extreme performance by bringing in and serving large non-crypto user bases. A more striking example is ****The Mythos chain launched by Mythical Games provides on-chain tradable NFT game assets and other services for mainstream large-scale games.

The Mythos chain supports asset management for multiple games, including NFL Rivals, and has nearly 1 million active wallets and a user base of 5 million gamers on its platform. For this project alone, its NFT transaction volume ranks second in the entire industry, demonstrating the ability of Polkadot technology to easily cope with the needs of large-scale events. As Mythical launches the highly anticipated FIFA Rivals next year and opens its chain to the entire gaming industry with a permissionless philosophy, more similar applications are expected to join.

Mythical is not the only team that believes Polkadot is a high-performance, high-resilience Web3 gaming platform. DOTplay was launched this year to provide resource support for teams building game-related projects on Polkadot. One of the first projects to benefit is Ajuna , which integrates Polkadot into Unity, the most popular game development framework.

In fact, transaction volume on the parachain increased by approximately 300% during the year , from just over 10 million transactions per month to nearly 40 million transactions in November. On-chain event volume (another measure of on-chain activity) has shown a similar growth trend. recent ****Origin Trail ’s Neuroweb performed particularly well, generating 200 million events and 14 million transactions last month, demonstrating Polkadot’s ability to handle the high transaction volumes required for global supply chain tracking.

Likewise, Frequency (a key component of Frank McCourt's Project Liberty) went live this year and has supported 100 million users and currently processes about 10 million transactions per month. Phala, Litentry, and Mythos also contributed a significant share to the growth of Polkadot's total transaction volume, bringing it to 40 million transactions per month .

As noted in a recent Electric Capital report, Polkadot's SDK remains among the top three most active open source developers in the blockchain technology stack. Of course, this does not include EVM-based development in the Polkadot ecosystem such as Moonbeam and Phala, nor does it include some closed-source JAM implementations. If these are included, these additional 100-plus developers will further improve Polkadot's ranking.

You can't completely trust humans

In its mission to realize the true Web3 vision, decentralization has always been an important core concept for Polkadot to improve its resilience . Since its launch, Polkadot's Nakamoto coefficient performance has been impressive, and in 2024, this value has improved from 93 at the beginning of the year to 132 now , making Polkadot the first major blockchain network to achieve a score of over 100, with its The level of decentralization is four times that of the second-ranked one. For comparison, the Nakamoto coefficient of most PoS blockchains has not exceeded 20 (Solana's coefficient even dropped from 32 to 18), Polygon and Bitcoin can be controlled by four cooperative entities, while Ethereum is at the bottom with only Two entities can be controlled.

Perhaps, this is not surprising. Some crypto projects, especially those that rely on venture capital funding, are more focused on “ scaling up” (i.e. improving performance and profitability) , chasing market heat and selling tokens, and therefore often treat long-term resilience, governance and decentralization as irrelevant Essential accessory.

In late 2023, Parity has undergone some important changes . The Web3 Foundation strategically adjusted its functional model and decided to reduce functionality and staffing. Instead, a leaner and more focused model will be adopted, focusing on core technology development, important tools and indicator delivery, and leaving functions such as content, business development and applications to the community. In order to support this strategy and minimize the impact on the project, the "decentralization" plan came into being, aiming to maximize opportunities for those community members who can take responsibility. The Web3 Foundation's $60 million " Decentralized Future " plan will be officially launched in the first half of 2024.

With many individuals actively participating in the ecosystem, more and more independent and successful teams are gradually emerging within the Polkadot ecosystem, delivering valuable products and services. One notable example is WebZero, an event organizing team. They successfully took over the Sub0 Developer Conference brand and launched a new, attractive Reset conference in Bangkok in November.

Sub0 Reset is by no means the only impressive event this year. Earlier this year, we hosted another popular Sub0 conference in Bangkok. Flagship event Decoded returned to Brussels this summer with great success. 2024 is also the year when the Web3 Summit returns after five years. It still retains the slightly "rebellious" atmosphere of the past and its highly respected venue-Berlin's Funkhaus.

This year also held the Gray Paper Lecture Tour for the first time , which is a university lecture series on the JAM protocol and its formal specification Gray Paper, led by me. The series covers eight locations across four continents and includes a marathon seven-hour lecture in partnership with the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Polkadot Blockchain Academy.

Additionally, another Parity spin-off project that was successfully completed this year was the Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA) . This is an academic, face-to-face course program taught by the best members of the Polkadot project. Over the past year, the focus of PBA's courses has shifted from the specific implementation details of Polkadot to the areas of smart contracts and governance, with increasingly in-depth collaboration with the BlockchainGov collective. Today, PBA has become a completely independent project and has launched PBA-X , which aims to move the high-quality teaching content of PBA's original courses online and open it to a wider audience.

Polkadot, as popular as Coldplay

Parity isn’t the only example of decentralization: Polkadot’s governance system continues to be the largest and most complex DAO in history . Unlike murky decision-making systems or worse, centralized decision-making and development, Polkadot is proud to be the only major network where all protocol decisions are made in a transparent, accessible, and resilient manner. (And major updates continue to be delivered.)

In fact, in addition to daily and monthly upgrade plans through governance, 2024 marks the year DOT holders guide core developers in a more direct and proactive manner through the newly created " Wish For Change " governance channel. One notable proposal was Referendum #682 , formally identifying JAM as a future technical alternative to relay chains, which passed with 99.998% support (with only four accounts voting against).

Under the management of the home-grown OpenGov, about $120 million in assets are controlled by DOT holders, and roughly the same amount has been spent this year . OpenGov has launched a staggering 1,350 referendums. As voting delegation capabilities increase, we see an increase in the number of DOTs involved in decisions on each proposal and the average voting strength. More and more people are willing to lock more DOTs to have a voice in network decisions. For more information, please refer to the year-end report prepared by Parity's DotLake team. https://data.parity.io/opengov_report.pdf

A major democratic event in Polkadot this year is the DOT issuance rate vote . When the network launches, the annual issuance rate of DOT is 10%. This issuance fund is used to reward stakers (the backbone of network security), while a portion of the variable funds is allocated to the treasury to fund ecological activities that DOT holders deem valuable. This year's vote fixed the issuance at 120 million DOT per year, which means that the DOT issuance in 2025 will be reduced from more than 150 million to about 120 million. Approximately 100 million DOT will be used for staking rewards, and the remainder will fund the annual treasury budget. As the issuance rate is fixed, the base inflation rate will gradually decrease relative to the overall network issuance: DOT has now entered deflationary mode .

The Polkadot Core Alliance (Fellowship), as the main expert organization of the Polkadot protocol, has nearly 100 members, which has doubled since its establishment in the middle of last year. These organizations, like Fellowship, can now use their own treasury to pay for projects and expenses. One of my personally most anticipated features this year has finally come to fruition: multi-asset treasury , the ability for a network treasury (or any sub-treasury) to hold foreign currency reserves. Currently, the Polkadot network not only holds DOT, but also holds a large amount of USDC and USDT (not to mention "DED" 😂), and regularly uses Hydration to automatically trade currencies, usually in the form of stable coins to pay for treasury expenditure proposals. We are now ready to have a fully autonomous Polkadot sovereign wealth fund. In addition, Fellowship can now independently manage monthly salary payments and pay them in USDT.

This year we have witnessed the formation of the first “alliance” targeting Polkadot ambassadors . Its manifesto, collaboratively edited by members and publicly discussed, may provide a template for similar governance bodies in the future. At present, some people have proposed the idea of ​​establishing a new user-interface fellowship and secretaries fellowship. Combined with their respective treasury, budget and payroll systems, we are gradually seeing the seeds of a complex, transparent and autonomous "public service system" sprouting .

everything is possible

Like a phenomenon that exists on an illusory plane, autonomous operation in a decentralized world can sometimes seem inconvenient: there are many difficulties when interacting with the traditional physical, centralized world. For example, something as simple as paying rent or subscribing to a service can become a huge hassle if you don't take shortcuts and rely on the founding company to handle it for you. Because of this, a new type of entity was born in 2024 : Polkadot Community Foundation PCF (Polkadot Community Foundation).

The PCF was established in the Cayman Islands and all its activities are directed directly by DOT holders through the OpenGov system. PCF is an adapter for the centralized world, used to perform tasks such as entering into commercial contracts, making fiat payments, protecting intellectual property, and engaging third-party service providers such as consultants. Unlike institutions such as the Web3 Foundation, PCF does not have any assets, shareholders, members, trustees or beneficiaries, and its interests or opinions do not necessarily represent those of token holders.

Therefore, PCF need not be the only such entity. Parity's efforts in researching and designing the PCF structure form a template that other truly decentralized projects can learn from, helping them connect to the centralized world.

Runs efficiently like an "electric spinning machine"

When some networks try to improve the (somewhat ridiculous) TPS (transactions per second) metric by increasing node hardware requirements or adding complex optimization means, this often leads to the decentralization and resilience of the network being called into question. And Polkadot (specifically Kusama) demonstrates the true performance of a network by scaling it. By distributing workloads across consumer-grade node hardware, we are freed from limitations of the computing power of a single machine or the speed at which results can be shared among validators.

A test event called "Spammening" organized by Amforc and funded by the National Treasury was conducted live on the Kusama network in December. This test demonstrates the extreme performance of the Kusama network in a real environment (kudos to Jay!). As the first truly decentralized network of value, Kusama achieved a sustained rate of more than 100,000 transactions per second (actually reaching 143,343 TPS) while using only a quarter of Kusama's core computing resources. Although there is still room for network and computing optimization, our goal is clear: even if you are "only" looking for performance, Polkadot is the best choice. (Plus, you get best-in-class resilience, multi-chain connectivity, and the flexibility of a modular blockchain as an added bonus!)

Cross-chain interoperability is like building Lego

Polkadot’s cross-chain interoperability has been significantly improved over the past 12 months . Polkadot-managed chains can now interact trustlessly with Kusama and other Substrate independent chains via Substrate Bridge, Ethereum via Snowbridge, and multiple industry networks via Hyperbridge. By supporting the transport of XCM across these networks, Polkadot is on track to achieve the goals set out in its vision white paper.

Unlike other bridging mechanisms, Polkadot's bridging mechanism is completely trustless and programmable. It does not hand over the assets transferred across the chain to the control of a few (usually unaccountable) stakeholders, nor is it limited to specific hard-coding Function.

What this means in practice is that connections between blockchains on Polkadot and other networks such as Kusama and Ethereum can inherit the rich programmability of XCM. Token transfer is just the tip of the iceberg: transaction execution, data publishing, attribute query, fee payment, message forwarding and smart contract invocation without temporary accounts are also possible.

XCM has undergone a major revision this year, no longer purely pursuing function delivery, but focusing on solving the core pain points of Polkadot users . Through the priority optimization of system chain message relay and fee transparency, the cross-chain interaction experience becomes more coherent and powerful. As the Polkadot wallet ecosystem continues to improve, users' experience has also been significantly improved, and they gradually no longer perceive the complexity of cross-chain transactions.

On the eve of this writing, Harbor Capital partnered with Polkadot’s Velocity Labs to launch the Magic Ramp service. The service provides a top-notch experience for users who want to transfer funds between banking systems and Polkadot, supporting direct transactions of USDC and EUR from bank accounts. The service is currently only available in Europe, with further expansion expected in 2025.

This powerful system that combines trustlessness, programmability, performance and new connectivity, coupled with the effective use of service chains such as Polkadot Hub, Hydration and Polkadex, gives Polkadot the opportunity to become the center of cross-chain interaction in 2025 hub to seize this unique market opportunity.

This app is really addictive

In 2024, the overall user experience of Polkadot has been significantly improved. It is becoming increasingly easier to transfer funds and NFTs between chains, manage multi-signature and proxy accounts, and participate in governance through delegation. We have noticed that wallet applications gradually avoid allowing users to directly perceive the complexity of the multi-chain Polkadot ecosystem. Instead, they integrate the token balances and NFTs in the ecosystem to provide a more consistent user experience. This ecosystem is just a "happen" "It's just distributed on different chains. Subwallet, Talisman and Nova teams continue to improve their products, with Nova going one step further and implementing a universal trading system that routes funds to the best chain to get the best deal for users. This high-quality UI, XCM and parachain The combination of logic is brilliant.

Another project benefiting from the Decentralized Future initiative, and one that has been widely discussed within the community for weeks, is ****Polkadot App . As Björn mentioned at the Decoded event, the app is designed to simplify users' entry into Polkadot, avoiding all complications, focusing on core functionality for the mass market, and discarding everything else.

This app is an easy-to-use non-custodial wallet that supports DOT, KSM and USDT/C. By utilizing the native functions of iOS/Android to protect and back up keys, users are prevented from falling into "mnemonic hell". It also integrates a username registrar, ensuring each user gets a memorable name to receive funds, and supports one-click staking through Polkadot’s staking pool. The transfer fee is almost negligible and can be paid with stablecoins. Combined with legal currency entry and exit channels such as Magic Ramp, this application becomes a highly flexible decentralized payment system .

Most amazingly, it integrates Polkadot Pay as a payment channel , allowing users’ wallet funds to be used directly to pay for goods and services at millions of stores and merchants in the United States. And, unlike other crypto payment options, this app not only eliminates credit card transaction fees but also earns you rewards every time you spend!

As easy as Sunday morning

In 2024, Polkadot is accelerating the transition from its legacy technology to more advanced technologies . The use of Polkadot 's light client Smoldot is becoming more and more common, and the PolkadotAPI and Substrate Connect projects are gradually gaining recognition in the ecosystem. Therefore, new projects like Kheopswap are increasingly inclined to use these new, more resilient technology stacks instead of relying on Polkadot.js, which has poor light client support. Thumbs up to the independent developers who have made these projects successful!

Parity is also promoting two important plans this year, aiming to make the deployment of the Polkadot SDK blockchain closer to the convenience of smart contracts . Among them, the Omninode project, released as part of the Polkadot SDK December update, introduces a single-node binary that can synchronize and aggregate almost all networks built on the Polkadot SDK. This significantly reduces what teams need to focus on when developing, deploying and maintaining chains, and paves the way for chain hosting services such as Zeeve's Perfuse system to make chain deployment and maintenance as easy as smart contracts !

While Omninode reduces the complexity of node-level programming, maintaining on-chain business logic (the so-called runtime) can still be a challenge. Although Polkadot SDK has led the trend of modular blockchain SDKs with its amazing development speed (even teams like Polygon's Avail and Cardano's Midnight have adopted it to build projects), the API instability caused by its rapid iteration is detrimental to Downstream developers have brought a lot of workload, and the need for stability has long been urgent. In 2024, the Polkadot Stabilization Plan successfully addressed this issue, setting a strict schedule for the release of the runtime elements of the SDK. Breaking changes, such as the new Transaction Extension API that allows the use of ZK proofs in place of transaction signatures, can only be made in major releases once per quarter. As a result, teams building cutting-edge Polkadot SDK chains can enjoy three months of development stability and only need to perform code upgrades once per quarter. And for teams willing to give up the latest features, long-term support releases are now available to ensure security and compatibility for nine months .

Polkadot 2: Changes that started with a small contract

The original Polkadot platform has undergone a major evolution over the past year, and this evolution is almost complete. While parachains (Polkadot's secure high-speed rollup technology) were a key element of the original Polkadot product proposition (while giving the DOT token utility through slot auctions), the engineering behind it extends far beyond this product. The engineering work of the past three years laid the foundation for a high-performance "world computer" and took the first steps towards our broader goal - a goal still explicitly mentioned in the 2016 Polkadot white paper: to provide A platform that can introduce Web2 applications into the Web3 world, achieve resilience and trustlessness, and thereby bring authentic and trustworthy experiences. To differentiate this evolving vision from the original Polkadot product, we as a community decided to name this new vision, and Polkadot 2.0 was born.

This new understanding was not proposed by one person or even one company alone, but is the result of the joint efforts of countless voices within our community, further demonstrating Polkadot's strong resilience and decentralization capabilities. Polkadot 2.0 is a combination of in-depth upgrades of the core technology, key new features, and a new conceptual framework. Through these upgrades and frameworks, we can better understand the value of Polkadot. Under this vision, Polkadot 's success is divided into two main goals: on the one hand, improving its community, and on the other hand, maximizing the utility of Polkadot's original product, coretime . All upgrades, features, and conceptualizations are geared towards achieving these two goals.

Two-pronged approach

One of the "big three" upgrades launching in 2024 is Asynchronous Backing , an optimization across the Polkadot technology stack that introduces pipeline technology into the process of providing security for new parachain blocks. Through this optimization, two independent functions of the Polkadot security system - correctness guarantee and data availability - can be performed simultaneously, thereby reducing the standard block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds .

Along with this change, we also increased the time of the correctness assurance phase by approximately 400% , increasing the overall throughput of Polkadot 2.0-hosted blockchains by approximately 10x compared to Polkadot 1.0. This significantly improves the transaction capabilities of the Polkadot managed blockchain and significantly reduces the cost of each transaction in the ecosystem, making Polkadot a more attractive platform for building and deploying blockchain projects.

The secret recipe is time

The second upgrade is called Agile Coretime , which replaces the mortgage, leasing, and crowdlending systems in Polkadot 1.0. The new system introduces a simple monthly auction mechanism, and each of Polkadot's 45 cores is available for anyone to bid for purchase in a permissionless manner every month. Coretime can be divided, interleaved, and transferred, and can even be shared by multiple chains to achieve custody in a trustless manner. There are already dedicated exchanges and integrated services on Polkadot, such as RegionX, Lastic and Perfuse, for trading and obtaining core time.

The changes to Agile Coretime change the purpose of the DOT token ; crowdlending and mortgage auctions are abolished and replaced by a highly flexible market where consumers can respond quickly as needed while keeping costs predictable. The adjustment of this economic model fully proves that even though Polkadot is highly decentralized, it still has the willingness and ability to adapt to the changing environment.

A new era of multi-core scaling

As the chains of the Polkadot ecosystem are no longer limited to the old "one parachain corresponds to one slot, one core" model, this year has opened up more possibilities for the use of Polkadot core time. Short-cycle chains become possible; chains that run on demand become possible; chains that share core time become possible. Perhaps the most interesting direction of development, however, is multi-core scaling, which will be pioneered by the new Polkadot Hub: a high-frequency, high-performance chain that leverages multiple cores running simultaneously to increase transaction volume and reduce latency .

By using three cores, Polkadot Hub will run three times as fast as the Polkadot Relay Chain, confirming a full block every 2 seconds instead of the regular 6 seconds. This triples data and compute bandwidth, providing an unprecedented upgrade path for teams focused on future scalability. There are even higher frequency attempts. For example, Basti (Fellow at Level 6) tested the first 500 millisecond Substrate chain, which generated 12 times the number of blocks per second than the current chain.

Even more exciting is that elastic scaling (Elastic Scaling) will be developed in 2024 and planned to be deployed in 2025. This technology further advances the paradigm of multi-core scaling, allowing the chain to run at low cost during periods of low usage and dynamically scale during peak usage periods, responding flexibly to changes in demand by acquiring more core time and confirming blocks more frequently. .

More than superficial definition

The technical changes in Polkadot 2.0 have clearly helped Polkadot maximize its utility, but perhaps just as important is the conceptual work that allows us, and everyone who comes into contact with Polkadot, to better understand its capabilities and value.

The new conceptual framework proposed and discussed this year was proposed by Shawn Tabrizi (Fellow, Level 6) . Polkadot has traditionally avoided defining itself as a cryptocurrency or blockchain, preferring to present itself as a multi-chain ecosystem narrative . This definition makes sense given the original parachain-centric product proposal. However, defining Polkadot solely in these terms limits the view and ignores the potential value both above and below the parachain level. This narrow definition obscures strategic direction and makes it difficult to identify or explain certain paths to value creation.

The Hub/Cloud dualism is an alternative narrative to the “parachain community” narrative that helps us focus on Polkadot’s true core value proposition from an intellectual and market perspective . This metaphor serves as a conceptual framework that helps us better understand how all past, present, and future work, features, ideas, and developments of Polkadot fit into it and ultimately make Polkadot more relevant in the market and the world.

This metaphor divides Polkadot into two symbiotic product parts : one centered on Polkadot validators and the unstoppable computing resources generated by its protocol. This is called the Polkadot Cloud and powers the initial Polkadot parachain offering. The other is Polkadot Hub , which features services based on various system chains (which are built on top of the original product). Although the two have a symbiotic relationship, both products have independent utility, and their usage fees are paid through DOT.

Specifically, the current core of the Polkadot Cloud is coretime and all its potential uses . Hosting Polkadot SDK-based chains (i.e. parachains) is the first significant use case for Core Time, with Parity planning to launch additional use cases in 2025. When the Polkadot Bulletin chain and Small-Statements Hub are launched, its cloud services will be expanded to the field of data distribution. In addition, the JAM protocol fits well into this framework because its core time is inherently more useful than the core time of the relay chain, immediately enhancing our cloud service capabilities and integrating all services on the JAM supercomputer.

The Polkadot hub, on the other hand, is actually a convergence point for community and direct interaction . It provides a highly consistent and often synchronized collaboration and composition platform for people, teams, and their logic. The core of the Hub is the Plaza project (proposed this year by Level 6 Fellow Rob Habermeier), an advanced, Polkadot-native permissionless, low-cost and fast smart contract system. All functions on the official Polkadot chain will be conveniently available in the hub, including the staking system, governance and collectives, identity and personality, all tokens and NFTs, and all cross-chain bridges. Most of these features can be combined synchronously with smart contracts.

The Polkadot hub unifies and optimizes the overall Polkadot experience and eliminates the fragmentation problem caused by directly exposing different system chains to users, which has always been a pain point for Polkadot. Hub is powered by 3 cloud cores, with a block time of 2 seconds, which is 3 times the performance of a single-core chain and approximately 30 times the performance of last year 's parachain . To further improve performance, smart contracts on the hub are based on PVM, powered by the high-speed PolkaVM developed by Fellow Jan Bujak. Its execution speed reaches about 45% of the native execution speed, which is orders of magnitude faster than the EVM interpreter.

Although the Hub's smart contracts are expressed in PVM code (a derivative based on the proven RISC-V ISA), they do not need to be written in a specific language. In fact, the hub is fully compatible with the regular Ethereum development tool chain, including the Solidity language, deployment system and Metamask. Additionally, Hub contracts can be written in Rust, ink!, C, C++, or almost any language that supports a compiler. Through PolkaVM, Hub's cross-chain bridging and cloud security, users can get amazing Ethereum performance improvements from Polkadot without leaving the Ethereum ecosystem.

Hub is designed to compete with the fastest pseudo-decentralized sync chains in the industry, so performance is critical . Improvements to the network stack have been made this year and will be live next year. The high-performance Merkle Trie system NOMT introduced by Fellows Sergei (V Dan) and Rob this year provides a further optimization path for the hub, and its performance can be improved by more than an order of magnitude. At the same time, experiments for faster block times are also underway, further improving performance multipliers.

This month, the Westend test network has launched a preliminary test version of the Hub chain , equipped with smart contract functions compatible with Ethereum. It is expected to be officially launched in 2025 .

Hidden crisis

As our patterns of social interaction become increasingly rooted in the digital realm, often dominated by text, generative AI poses a truly unique threat to the fabric of the free world. Proof-of-Personhood in the Web2 era, such as verification codes, email/SMS verification, and even government-issued ID cards, are gradually falling victim to generative AI and malicious forces. In a recent election, at least 66,000 unique accounts were found to be controlled by a single stakeholder who also had 10 million followers. Although the old saying goes, “Truth is not determined by majority vote,” modern (social) media relies almost entirely on popularity to distinguish truth from fiction. False information that appears to have strong support can be enough to convince many people that it is true, significantly distorting the democratic process.

In the civilization we think we have, the ability to withstand AI will become increasingly important to avoid another wave of dedemocratization and the concentration of power in the hands of a few entities. A worrying alliance is forming between ignorant helpers, greedy corporations and arrogant lunatics. The only antidote can come from all of us working together.

To give people a real and honest voice, Web3 technology is absolutely essential . However, blockchain alone (even one as resilient and performant as Polkadot) is not enough: we need to algorithmize the concept of “personhood.” Furthermore, we must achieve this goal without fundamentally undermining the core values ​​of Web3, particularly the protection of personal privacy.

Therefore, we proposed the vision of “ Proof -of-(Polite-)Personhood” earlier this year. This compute-intensive logic is hosted by Polkadot, but takes advantage of Polkadot's extreme trustless connectivity (provided through Snowbridge and Hyperbridge), making this service available throughout Web3 and even extended to Web2.

The mechanism will be rolled out in at least three phases, known as DIM1, DIM2 and DIM3 (DIM stands for Digital Individuality Mechanism). Polkadot's Po(P)P is a foundational and uncompromising Web3 individual system designed to avoid any form of centralization or privilege, protect privacy using the latest ZK technology, and be open and transparent to anyone for auditability. It is expected to be launched gradually in 2025.

Polkadot 3.0: Can you stop jamming?

While our Hub and Cloud paradigm is the foundation of Polkadot 2.0, it also provides a conceptual framework for understanding the next chapter in Polkadot's journey, the transition from the Relay Chain to the JAM protocol. JAM is the foundation of the next generation of Polkadot cloud services.

In 2024, the first version of the JAM protocol was released in the form of Gray Paper, exactly ten years after the release of the Ethereum Yellow Paper. Similar to Ethereum's Yellow Paper, JAM is also a permissionless "world computer" protocol, but unlike Ethereum, JAM is not only resilient but also high-performance. It is expected to have hundreds of computing cores and data I/O of close to 1 GB per second, with the goal of becoming the first true Web3 supercomputer .

Gray Paper has been revised many times and is now close to a stable version. The current version is 0.5.3. It is expected to complete the 0.5 series at the beginning of the new year and reach the target version of 1.0 in the first half of next year . Unlike the Polkadot relay chain, which has only one main implementation (and two partially functional secondary implementations), there are currently 35 teams building implementations of JAM using 15 programming languages. Their code is not yet publicly available, but it is expected to be available next year. They are motivated by the JAM Implementation Award , the largest programming award in history, totaling tens of millions of dollars.

Similar to the current Polkadot, JAM is not only decentralized but also has a distributed architecture. We achieve performance by scaling the network, an emergent effect that occurs when multiple nodes work together. Unlike the direct effects of centralized and highly synchronized systems, engineering optimization of emergent effects is more difficult. As such systems grow, emergence effects become deeper and more complex; unexpected emergent behavior such as performance degradation becomes extremely difficult to predict, diagnose, and fix, and therefore becomes particularly difficult to optimize.

So this year we launched an industry first: We 're building a small supercomputer with 16,000 AMD Threadripper cores totaling 16 GB of L2 cache, 32 TB of RAM, and 20 PB of storage. With this hardware, we are able to deploy a full-scale JAM network, combined with debugging and analysis software, to conduct in-depth testing and optimization of the protocol and its implementation to ensure that theoretical predictions of a globally scaled network match actual performance.

The project is called the Testing, Optimisation, Analysis and Scale-Trial Experimentation Rig, or JAM TOASTER🥲 . Currently, the first phase of the project is halfway completed and is expected to be completed early in the new year; the second phase is scheduled to start in the second half of 2025 . As a small highlight, the device will be housed in the basement of Polkadot Palace , using the palace's Jacuzzi as a cooling device. Well, it's so warm!

Construction starts now

What about building applications on JAM? Our first target demo is DOOM-on-JAM, which, as the name suggests, is designed to run the classic game DOOM on JAM. This will execute the game through a consensus mechanism and output the video frames as images into our massive data lake. To achieve this, we need a service that can host an unlimited virtual machine, that is, a virtual machine that can execute any code you are willing to compile without being restricted by block gas limits or using special primitives or languages. Or annoying limitations such as programming skills. This is a first for blockchain, making it truly Turing-complete. This JAM service is code-named Alpha and is currently in an intense development stage.

Another important project that will be advanced in 2025 is to migrate the logic currently embedded in the Polkadot relay chain runtime into an independently upgradeable JAM service . This paves the way for the Polkadot JAM chain to replace the current Polkadot relay chain as the custody structure of the blockchain ecosystem. Over time, the Polkadot Blockchain Escrow Service (codenamed Beta) will expand functionality to include new JAM-specific features for the blockchain, such as Accords (allowing trustless interaction between two sovereign blockchains) and dynamic metering. metering) (avoid benchmarking in most cases).

In order to demonstrate JAM's unique transaction capabilities and provide a solid use case for optimizing the JAM protocol, we plan to create a simple payment system on JAM. The project, codenamed Mu, will prototype a low-latency, high-throughput multi-currency payment system, with the goal of achieving a sustained rate of one million transactions per second across JAM's multiple cores.

Finally, the Lambda project combines elements of Alpha and Mu to build a highly scalable Actor model-based system, using a dynamic state partitioning method to highlight and verify JAM's highly scalable and basically consistent computing model. In 2025, Parity and other teams will begin the process of designing and delivering these services.

a strong sense of fear

In recent news, advances in quantum computing have been in the collective spotlight. Google recently announced that its Project Willow has achieved important milestones, especially breakthroughs in error correction capabilities. While still far from truly useful applications, this does resolve an important obstacle on the road to realizing useful quantum computing devices.

In the strict sense of "code is law", one of the first "useful" functions that a quantum computing device may achieve is to recover a private key from a public key (and it is not necessarily the owner of this key who controls the device ). This would obviously disrupt many of Bitcoin’s fundamental services, not to mention Ethereum, Polkadot, and nearly every other cryptocurrency.

Fortunately, the JAM protocol does not rely on transactions , but mainly relies on PVM-based authorizers and game theory mechanisms, making it easy to transition into a protocol that is fully resistant to quantum attacks. By 2025, our researchers are expected to publish a report detailing the specific protocol changes needed to achieve a fully quantum-resistant protocol.

This is a blast

We can think of JAM as a "cryptoeconomic silicon" that converts raw materials of economic value and real-world computing resources into a supercomputer that no one controls in the real world, but is also uncontrollable in the Internet world. .

As long as there is a JAM network secured by DOT tokens, there will be only one such supercomputer, which we call the Polkadot supercomputer. This forms the basis of Polkadot 3.0. If you understand any part of JAM, this is probably the core of its vision.

The expected performance of the Polkadot supercomputer is amazing by current industry standards and will even be impressive in the future. But it's still not enough compared to the valuable transactions taking place between institutions and around the world within the current global Web2 system. If Web3 is to become a viable direction for the world, it will need far more performance support than is currently available, and this additional performance cannot destroy the prospects for state consistency, nor does it come at the expense of resilience or generality . ( Obviously, this logic shows that fully synchronous, high-consistency system designs like Solana are a dead end for Web3, because they can only "scale up" and cannot "scale out", and their logical end point is a centralized super computer. )

In short, we need a feasible long-term (5-year) plan so that the Polkadot service can run not only on one JAM-powered supercomputer, but also on multiple - or even many - supercomputers.

To borrow what Delenn said about the White Star battleship in "Babylon 5", the Polkadot supercomputer was never intended to be the only one, it would just be the first . The goal of Polkadot Cloud is to have multiple such JAM supercomputers to form a JAM Grid. While the grid's security is all guaranteed by the same DOT staking security mechanism, each JAM hosts its own service. Just as a single JAM creates a supercomputer that no one controls, a JAM grid transforms similar resources into a cohesive cluster of supercomputers... also controlled by no one in the Internet world. This is an important part of the future Polkadot cloud.

The JAM service design is divided into two parts: the asynchronous, almost stateless Refinement part and the highly synchronous, fully consistent Accumulate part . This design ensures that services can be expressed in a way that can be extended to the computing core of the JAM supercomputer. Even better, this design not only scales to cores within a single JAM supercomputer, but can be further extended using cores from other supercomputers in the JAM grid.

There are still some unanswered questions: How to transparently extend services beyond a single JAM? How important is a JAM's position in the grid? Are data availability guarantees consistent across the grid? These questions will be further explored over the next year as JAM 1.0 takes shape.

What is the potential of the Polkadot cloud? According to preliminary estimates, a grid composed of 10 JAMs can achieve more than 1 Exabyte of data availability (DA), 600 GB/s of data bandwidth, and about 1 quadrillion EVM equivalent Gas/second of computing power.

In terms of raw computing power, this is enough to provide everyone on the planet with several times the block space of the current Ethereum L1 chain , enough to handle not only everyone's signed transactions, but also everyone's robots, actors, and devices. This is a necessary condition if we are to live in a digital world that is not controlled by agential interests.

Okay, let’s do this first! I have to run to Londis supermarket.

Polkadot’s 2025 begins here . As with all wrap-ups like this, there's too much to mention here: for that, my deepest apologies to all the projects and people working tirelessly around us to help us realize a true Web3 future.

The future of Polkadot is promising. Whether it is App, Hub, citizenship system, DAO extensions, JAM or deep, trustless and seamless Ethereum integration, it is all very exciting and provides everyone with unlimited possibilities to build.

So, enjoy your well-earned rest, watch some nostalgic movies (Die Hard and Home Alone are my top picks), think about the above, and come back next year, buidl buidl buidl, And look forward firmly and never look back.

happy holidays! 🎄