Gavin Wood: Polkadot 2024 Year in Review

It’s that time again… I’ve put down my text editor after a year of writing and opened up Medium. As the nights get colder, the days get shorter, and the fire is lit, it’s a good time to take a look back at our ecosystem. How are we doing? What have we accomplished in the past 12 months? What’s next? Buckle up, this year’s post is going to be long because we’ve been busy and eager to make more progress.

Hello! The Christmas spirit is getting stronger…

Before I start to wrap up, let’s review the context of the year. Polkadot’s journey began with a white paper (2016) and a crowd sale (2017). This largely shaped the subsequent direction and product philosophy. 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 is a watershed year, marking a clear shift in this core goal.

Therefore, this year is an important transformation year for Polkadot - from focusing on achieving the limited scope of product goals in the white paper to optimizing, improving stability, and refining the product to better meet market needs. At the same time, this transformation process is also supported by the data collection and analysis support provided by Parity's DOT Lake and Token Terminal . Ultimately, we are starting to build a broader service platform framework that is more in line with Web3 needs.

I build the stage, 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 have finally seen the initial use cases of these projects taking advantage of Polkadot’s extremely high performance, bringing in and serving large non-crypto user bases. One of the more prominent examples is the Mythos chain launched by Mythical Games, which provides services such as on-chain tradable NFT game assets for major major games.

The Mythos chain supports asset management for multiple games, including NFL Rivals, and has a user base of nearly 1 million active wallets and 5 million gamers on its platform. This project alone ranks second in the industry in terms of NFT trading volume, demonstrating the ability of Polkadot technology to easily handle the needs of large-scale events. With Mythical launching the highly anticipated FIFA Rivals next year and opening 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 that Polkadot is a high-performance, high-resilience Web3 gaming platform. This year DOTplay was launched 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 parachains has grown by about 300% over 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. Origin Trail’s Neuroweb has been a particularly strong performer recently, 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.

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

As recently noted in the Electric Capital report, Polkadot’s SDK remains in the top three for open source developer activity in the blockchain stack. Of course, this does not include EVM-based development on the Polkadot ecosystem such as Moonbeam and Phala, nor does it include some closed-source JAM implementations. If these were included, the additional 100+ developers would further improve Polkadot’s ranking.

You Can’t Trust Humans

Decentralization has always been an important core concept for Polkadot’s resilience in its mission to achieve the true Web3 vision. Polkadot’s Nakamoto coefficient has been impressive since launch, and in 2024, it has risen from 93 at the beginning of the year to 132 now, making Polkadot the first major blockchain network to reach a score above 100, and four times more decentralized than the next best blockchain. In contrast, most PoS blockchains have a Nakamoto coefficient of less than 20 (Solana’s coefficient even dropped from 32 to 18), Polygon and Bitcoin can be controlled by four cooperating entities, while Ethereum is at the bottom, with only two entities required to control it.

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

At the end of 2023, some important changes occurred at Parity. The Web3 Foundation strategically adjusted its functional model and decided to reduce functions and staffing. Instead, a leaner and more focused model was adopted, focusing on core technology development, important tools and metrics delivery, while leaving functions such as content, business development and applications to the community. 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 was officially launched in the first half of 2024.

With the active participation of many individuals in the ecosystem, more and more independent and successful teams have emerged in the Polkadot ecosystem, delivering valuable products and services. One example worth noting is WebZero, an event organizing team. They have successfully taken over the Sub0 Developer Conference brand and launched the revamped and highly engaging Reset conference in Bangkok in November.

Sub0 Reset was by no means the only impressive event this year. Earlier this year, we hosted another popular Sub0 Conference in Bangkok. The flagship event Decoded returned to Brussels this summer with great success. 2024 is also the year when Web3 Summit returns after a five-year absence, retaining its slightly “rebellious” vibe and its much-loved venue, Berlin’s Funkhaus.

This year also saw the debut of the Gray Paper Tour, a university lecture series by me on the JAM protocol and its formal specification, the Gray Paper. The series spanned eight locations across four continents, including a seven-hour marathon lecture in partnership with the Polkadot Blockchain Academy at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Another successful Parity spin-off completed this year was the Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA). This is an academic-grade, in-person course program taught by the best members of the Polkadot project. Over the past year, PBA’s course focus has shifted from the nitty-gritty of Polkadot’s implementation to the areas of smart contracts and governance, with an increasing collaboration with the BlockchainGov collective. Today, PBA has fully become an independent project and has launched PBA-X, which aims to bring the high-quality teaching content of the original PBA course online and open it to a wider audience.

Polkadot, as popular as Coldplay

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

In fact, in addition to the daily and monthly upgrade plans passed through governance, 2024 marks a more direct and proactive way for DOT holders to guide core developers through the newly created “Wish For Change” governance channel. One notable proposal was referendum #682, formalizing JAM as the future replacement relay chain technology, which passed with 99.998% approval (with only four accounts voting against it).

Under the homegrown OpenGov, ~$120M in assets are controlled by DOT holders, with roughly the same amount spent this year. A staggering 1,350 referendums were initiated by OpenGov. With the increased power of voting delegation, we’ve seen an increase in the number of DOTs involved in decisions per proposal and the average vote strength. More people are willing to lock up more DOTs to have a voice in network decisions. For more information, see the year-end report compiled by Parity’s DotLake team. https://data.parity.io/opengov_report.pdf

One of the big democratic events for Polkadot this year was the vote on the DOT issuance rate. At network launch, DOTs will be issued at an annual rate of 10%. This issuance is used to reward stakers (the backbone of network security), while a portion of the variable funds are allocated to the treasury to fund ecosystem activities that DOT holders deem valuable.This year’s vote fixed issuance at 120 million DOTs per year, meaning that DOT issuance will drop from over 150 million to about 120 million in 2025. About 100 million of these DOTs will be used for staking rewards, and the remainder will fund the annual treasury budget.With the issuance rate fixed, the base inflation rate will gradually decrease relative to the network’s overall issuance:DOT is now in deflationary mode.

The Polkadot Core Alliance (Fellowship), the main expert organization of the Polkadot protocol, has nearly 100 members, doubling since its inception mid-last year. These organizations (such as the Fellowship) can now use their own treasuries to pay for projects and expenses. One of the features I personally looked forward to the most this year has finally arrived: multi-asset treasuries, that is, the ability for the network treasury (or any sub-treasury) to hold foreign currency reserves. Currently, the Polkadot network holds not only DOT, but also a large amount of USDC and USDT (not to mention "DED"?), and routinely uses Hydration to automatically trade currencies, usually in the form of stablecoins to pay treasury spending proposals. We are now ready to have a fully autonomous Polkadot sovereign wealth fund. In addition, the Fellowship can now also manage monthly salary payments autonomously and pay them in USDT.

This year we saw the first “fellowship” of Polkadot Ambassadors take shape. Its manifesto, edited collaboratively and discussed publicly by its members, may provide a template for similar governance bodies in the future. Already, new user-interface fellowships and secretaries fellowships have been proposed. Combined with their own treasuries, budgets, and payroll systems, we are beginning to see the seeds of a complex, transparent, and autonomous “public service system” sprouting.

Anything is possible

Like a phenomenon that exists in the imaginary plane, autonomy can sometimes be inconvenient in the decentralized world: it presents many difficulties when interacting with the traditional physical, centralized world. For example, simple things like paying rent or subscribing to a service become very cumbersome 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: the Polkadot Community Foundation (PCF). Founded in the Cayman Islands, all of the PCF’s activities are directed directly by DOT holders through the OpenGov system. The PCF is an adapter to 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, the PCF has no assets, shareholders, members, trustees, or beneficiaries, and its interests or opinions do not necessarily represent those of token holders.

Therefore, the PCF does not have to 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 to help them connect to the centralized world.

Running Like a Power Loom

When some networks try to increase (somewhat ridiculous) TPS (transactions per second) metrics by increasing node hardware requirements or adding complex optimizations, this often leads to questions about the network's decentralization and resilience. Polkadot (and specifically Kusama) shows the true performance of a network by scaling the network. By distributing the workload across consumer-grade node hardware, we are no longer limited by the computing power of a single machine or the speed at which results can be shared between validators.

A test event called "Spammening" organized by Amforc and funded by the Treasury was conducted live on the Kusama network in December. This test showed the extreme performance of the Kusama network in a real environment (hat tip to Jay!). As the first truly decentralized network of value, Kusama achieves a sustained rate of over 100,000 transactions per second (143,343 TPS in fact) while using only a quarter of Kusama’s core computing resources. While there is room for network and compute optimization, the goal is clear: Polkadot is the best choice even if you’re “only” looking for performance. (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 with Lego

Polkadot’s cross-chain interoperability has improved significantly in the past 12 months. Polkadot-hosted chains can now trustlessly interact with Kusama and other Substrate-based independent chains via Substrate Bridge, Ethereum via Snowbridge, and multiple industry networks via Hyperbridge. By enabling XCM transfers across these networks, Polkadot is on track to achieve the goals outlined in its vision whitepaper.

Unlike other bridge mechanisms, Polkadot’s bridge mechanism is fully trustless and programmable, not placing the control of assets transferred across chains in the hands of a few (often irresponsible) stakeholders, nor limited to specific hard-coded functionality.

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 transfers are just the tip of the iceberg: transaction execution, data publishing, attribute querying, fee payment, message forwarding, and smart contract invocation without temporary accounts can also be achieved.

XCM has undergone a major revision this year, moving away from pure feature delivery and focusing on solving core pain points for Polkadot users. By prioritizing system chain message relay and fee transparency, the cross-chain interaction experience has become more coherent and powerful. As the Polkadot wallet ecosystem continues to improve, the user experience has also been significantly improved, and they can gradually no longer perceive the complexity of cross-chain transactions.

On the eve of writing this article, Harbour Capital, in collaboration with Polkadot's Velocity Labs, launched the Magic Ramp service. The service provides a top-level experience for users who want to transfer funds between the banking system and Polkadot, supporting direct transactions between USDC and EUR in bank accounts. Currently, the service is only available in Europe and is expected to be further promoted 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 central hub for cross-chain interactions in 2025 and seize this unique market opportunity.

This app is really addictive

In 2024, the overall user experience of Polkadot has improved significantly. It has become easier to move funds and NFTs between chains, manage multisig and proxy accounts, and participate in governance through delegation. We have noticed that wallet applications have gradually avoided exposing the complexity of the multi-chain Polkadot ecosystem to users, and instead integrated token balances and NFTs in the ecosystem to provide a more consistent user experience. This ecosystem just "happens" to be distributed on different chains. The Subwallet, Talisman, and Nova teams continue to improve their products, with Nova going a step further and implementing a universal transaction system to route funds to the best chain to get the best deal for users. This combination of high-quality UI, XCM, and parachain logic is excellent.

Another project that has benefited from the "decentralized future" plan and has been widely discussed in the community for several weeks is the Polkadot App. As Björn mentioned at the Decoded event, the app is designed to simplify onboarding users to Polkadot, removing all the complications, focusing on core functionality for the mass market, and leaving out everything else.

The app is a simple, non-custodial wallet that supports DOT, KSM, and USDT/C. It avoids the “mnemonic hell” by leveraging native iOS/Android features to protect and back up keys. It also integrates a username registrar to ensure that every user gets an easy-to-remember name to receive funds, and supports one-click staking through Polkadot’s staking pools. Transfer fees are almost negligible and can be paid in stablecoins, which combined with fiat on- and off-ramps like Magic Ramp make this 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 solutions, this app not only eliminates credit card transaction fees, but also earns rewards every time you spend!

As easy as Sunday morning

In 2024, Polkadot is accelerating its 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. As a result, new projects like Kheopswap are increasingly inclined to use these new, more resilient technology stacks instead of relying on Polkadot.js, which has poor support for light clients. Thumbs up to the independent developers who made these projects successful!

Parity is also pushing two important initiatives this year to make the deployment of Polkadot SDK blockchains closer to the convenience of smart contracts. Among them, the Omninode initiative, released as part of the Polkadot SDK December update, introduced a single-node binary that synchronizes and aggregates almost all networks built on the Polkadot SDK. This greatly reduces the content that teams need to pay attention to when developing, deploying, and maintaining chains, and paves the way for chain hosting services (such as Zeeve's Perfuse system), making chain deployment and maintenance as simple 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 the 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 has brought a lot of work to downstream developers, and the need for stability has long been urgent. In 2024, the Polkadot stabilization plan successfully solved this problem, setting a strict timetable for the release of runtime elements of the SDK. Major changes (such as the new Transaction Extension API that allows the use of ZK proofs instead of transaction signatures) can only be made in major version releases once a quarter. In this way, teams building cutting-edge Polkadot SDK chains can enjoy a three-month development stability period, with only one code upgrade per quarter. And for teams willing to give up the latest features, the long-term support version now provides security and compatibility for nine months.

Polkadot 2: A revolution that started with a random contract

The original Polkadot platform has undergone a major evolution over the past year, and that evolution is now largely complete. While parachains (Polkadot’s secure and high-speed Rollup technology) were a key element of the original Polkadot product proposition (while also giving DOT tokens utility through slot auctions), the engineering value behind it extends far beyond this product. The past three years of engineering work have laid the foundation for a high-performance “world computer” and taken the first step towards our broader goal — a goal that is still clearly stated in the 2016 Polkadot whitepaper: to provide a platform that can bring Web2 applications to the Web3 world, achieving resilience, trustlessness, and providing a real and trusted experience. To distinguish this evolutionary vision from the original Polkadot product, we as a community collectively decided to name this new vision, and Polkadot 2.0 was born.

This new understanding was not created by a single person, or even a single company, but rather was the result of the joint efforts of countless voices within our community, further demonstrating the strong resilience and decentralization of Polkadot. Polkadot 2.0 is a combination of deep upgrades to the technical core, key new features, and a brand new conceptual framework through which we can better understand the value of Polkadot. Under this vision, Polkadot’s success is divided into two main goals: improving its community on the one hand, and maximizing the utility of Polkadot’s original product, coretime, on the other. All upgrades, features, and conceptualizations are efforts to achieve these two goals.

Two-pronged Approach

One ​​of the “three major” upgrades coming in 2024 is Asynchronous Backing, an optimization across the Polkadot technology stack that introduces pipelining into the process of providing security guarantees for new parachain blocks. With this optimization, two independent functions of Polkadot’s security system - correctness guarantees and data availability - can proceed simultaneously, reducing the standard block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds.

With this change, we have also improved the time of the correctness guarantee phase by about 400%, increasing the overall throughput of blockchains hosted by Polkadot 2.0 by about 10 times compared to Polkadot 1.0. This significantly increases the transaction capacity of Polkadot's hosted blockchains and significantly reduces the cost per 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, lease, and crowd-loan system in Polkadot 1.0. The new system introduces a simple monthly auction mechanism, where each of Polkadot's 45 cores is available for anyone to bid on in a permissionless manner every month. Coretime can be split, interleaved, and transferred, and can even be shared by multiple chains to achieve trustless hosting. There are already dedicated exchanges and integrated services on Polkadot, such as RegionX, Lastic, and Perfuse, for trading and acquiring coretime.

The Agile Coretime revolution changes the purpose of the DOT token; crowdlending and collateral auctions are done away with in favor of a highly flexible market where consumers can quickly respond to demand while keeping costs predictable. This adjustment in the economic model is a great demonstration of Polkadot’s willingness and ability to adapt to a changing environment, even with its high level of decentralization.

A New Era of Multi-core Scaling

This year has opened up even more possibilities for the use of Polkadot’s coretime, as chains in the Polkadot ecosystem are no longer constrained by the old “one parachain per slot, one core” model. Short-cycle chains are possible; chains that run on demand are possible; chains that share coretime are possible. However, perhaps the most interesting direction of development is multi-core scaling, which will be pioneered by the new Polkadot Hub: a high-frequency, high-performance chain that leverages multiple cores to run simultaneously for higher transaction throughput and lower latency. By using three cores, the Polkadot Hub will run three times faster than the Polkadot Relay Chain, confirming a full block every 2 seconds instead of the regular 6 seconds. This allows for a three-fold increase in data and computational bandwidth, providing an unprecedented upgrade path for teams focused on future scalability. There are even attempts at higher frequencies, such as Basti (Fellow of Level 6) testing the first 500ms Substrate chain, which generates 12 times the number of blocks per second as the current chain. Even more exciting is the development of Elastic Scaling in 2024, with deployment planned for 2025. This technology further advances the paradigm of multi-core scaling, allowing the chain to run cheaply during low usage and dynamically scale during peak usage, flexibly responding to changes in demand by acquiring more core time and confirming blocks more frequently.

More Than Just a Skinny

Polkadot 2.0’s technical changes clearly help Polkadot maximize its utility, but perhaps just as important is the conceptual work that allows us, and everyone who touches Polkadot, to better understand its functionality and value.

The new conceptual framework proposed and discussed this year was proposed by Shawn Tabrizi (Fellow of Level 6). Polkadot has traditionally avoided defining itself as a cryptocurrency or blockchain, preferring instead to present itself in the narrative of a multi-chain ecosystem. This definition makes sense given the initial parachain-centric product proposal. However, defining Polkadot solely in these terms leads to a limited view that overlooks the potential value both above and below the parachain level. This narrow definition obscures strategic direction and makes it difficult to discover 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 of Polkadot’s past, present, and future work, features, ideas, and developments fit into it, and ultimately make Polkadot more relevant in the market and the world.

This metaphor divides Polkadot into two symbiotic product halves: One centered around Polkadot validators and the unstoppable computational resources generated by its protocol. This is called the Polkadot Cloud and powers the initial Polkadot parachain products. The other is the Polkadot Hub, which features services based on various system chains (which are built on top of the original products). Although the two are symbiotic, both products have independent utility, and the fees for their use are paid in DOT.

Specifically, Polkadot Cloud is currently centered around core time and all its potential uses. Hosting chains based on the Polkadot SDK (i.e. parachains) is the first major use case for core time, and Parity plans to launch other use cases in 2025. When the Polkadot Bulletin chain and Small-Statements Hub go live, its cloud services will expand to the field of data distribution. In addition, the JAM protocol also 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.

On the other hand, the Polkadot hub is actually a gathering point for communities and direct interactions. It provides a highly consistent and often synchronized platform for people, teams and their logic to collaborate and combine. At 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 Polkadot official 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 functions can be combined synchronously with smart contracts.

The Polkadot hub unifies and optimizes the overall Polkadot experience, eliminating the fragmentation problem caused by exposing different system chains directly to users, which has always been a pain point for Polkadot. The Hub is powered by 3 cloud cores and has a 2 second block time, 3x the performance of a single core chain and about 30x the performance of last year’s parachains. To further improve performance, smart contracts on the Hub are based on PVM, powered by the high-speed PolkaVM developed by Fellow Jan Bujak, which executes at about 45% of native execution speed and multiple orders of magnitude faster than the EVM interpreter. Although the Hub’s smart contracts are expressed in PVM code (based on a derivative of 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 toolchain, including the Solidity language, deployment system, and Metamask. In addition, Hub contracts can be written in Rust, ink!, C, C++, or nearly any language with a supported compiler. Through PolkaVM, the Hub’s cross-chain bridge, and the security of the cloud, users can get amazing Ethereum performance improvements from Polkadot without leaving the Ethereum ecosystem.

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

This month, the Westend testnet 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 Danger

As our social interaction patterns become increasingly rooted in the digital realm, and often text-based, Generative AI poses a truly unique threat to the fabric of the free world. Proof-of-personhood mechanisms in the Web2 era, such as CAPTCHAs, email/SMS verification, and even government-issued ID cards, are increasingly falling prey to generative AI and malicious forces. In a recent election, at least 66,000 unique accounts were found to be controlled by a single party with 10 million followers. Despite the old saying that "truth is not determined by majority votes," modern (social) media relies almost entirely on popularity to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Some false information, if it appears to have strong support, is enough to convince many people to believe it, significantly distorting the democratic process.

In the civilization we think we own, AI resilience will become increasingly important to avoid another wave of de-democratization and the concentration of power in the hands of a few entities. Ignorant helpers, greedy corporations, and megalomaniacs are forming a worrying alliance. The only antidote can only come from the combined efforts of all of us.

To give people a real and honest voice, Web3 technologies are absolutely indispensable. However, blockchains alone (even ones as resilient and performant as Polkadot) are not enough: we need to algorithmize the concept of “personhood”. Moreover, we must do this without fundamentally undermining the core values ​​of Web3, especially the protection of individual privacy.

For this reason, we proposed our vision of “Proof-of-(Polite-)Personhood” earlier this year. This computationally intensive logic is hosted on Polkadot, but takes advantage of Polkadot's extreme trustless connectivity (provided through Snowbridge and Hyperbridge), making this service available across Web3 and even extending to Web2.

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

Polkadot 3.0: Can You Stop Jamming?

While our Hub and Cloud paradigm is foundational to Polkadot 2.0, it also provides the 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 for the next generation of Polkadot’s cloud services.

In 2024, the first version of the JAM protocol was released as a 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 close to 1 GB of data I/O per second, aiming to be the first true Web3 supercomputer.

Gray Paper has been revised several times and is now close to a stable version, now at version 0.5.3, and is expected to complete the 0.5 series early in the new year and reach the target version 1.0 in the first half of next year. Unlike the Polkadot relay chain, which has only one main implementation (and two secondary implementations of partial functions), there are currently 35 teams building implementations of JAM in 15 programming languages. Their code is not yet public, but it is expected to be open next year. They are incentivized by the JAM Implementation Award, which is the largest programming award in history, with a total amount of 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 expanding the scale of the network, which is an emergent effect caused by the joint action of multiple nodes. Unlike the direct effect of centralized and highly synchronous systems, it is more difficult to optimize the engineering of emergent effects. As such systems grow, emergent effects become deeper and more complex; unexpected emergent behavior, such as performance degradation, becomes extremely difficult to predict, diagnose, and fix, making optimization particularly difficult.

So this year we launched an industry-first effort: we are 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 will be able to deploy a full-scale JAM network and, combined with debugging and analysis software, deeply test and optimize the protocol and its implementation to ensure that theoretical predictions match actual performance for a globally scaled network.

This project is called the Testing, Optimisation, Analysis and Scale-Trial Experimentation Rig (JAM TOASTER for short). Currently, the first phase of the project is halfway done 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 the Polkadot Palace and use the palace's jacuzzi as a heat sink. Mmmm, it's warm!

Now we start

So what about building applications on JAM? Our first target demo is DOOM-on-JAM, which, as the name suggests, aims to run the classic game DOOM on JAM. This will execute the game through a consensus mechanism and output the video frames as images to our huge data lake. To achieve this, we need a service that can host an unrestricted virtual machine, that is, a virtual machine that can execute any code you are willing to compile without being restricted by annoying restrictions such as block gas limits or the use of special primitives, languages ​​or programming techniques. This is a first for blockchains, making it truly Turing complete. This JAM service, codenamed Alpha, is currently under intense development. Another important project that will be moving forward in 2025 is migrating the logic currently embedded in the Polkadot relay chain runtime to an independently upgradeable JAM service. This paves the way for the Polkadot JAM chain to replace the current Polkadot relay chain as the custodial structure for the blockchain ecosystem. Over time, the Polkadot blockchain custodian service (codenamed Beta) will expand functionality to include new JAM-specific features for blockchains, such as Accords (allowing two sovereign blockchains to interact trustlessly) and dynamic metering (avoiding benchmarking in most situations). To showcase 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. Project Mu, 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 multiple cores of JAM.

Finally, Project Lambda will combine elements of Alpha and Mu to build a highly scalable Actor-based system that uses dynamic state partitioning to highlight and validate JAM's highly scalable, fundamentally consistent computational model. In 2025, Parity and other teams will begin the journey to design and deliver these services.

A Strong Sense of Fear

In recent news, advances in quantum computing have been the focus of our collective attention. Google recently announced that its Project Willow had achieved important milestones, especially breakthroughs in error correction capabilities. Although it is still far from truly useful applications, this does solve an important obstacle on the road to realizing useful quantum computing devices.

One ​​of the first “useful” functions that a quantum computing device might achieve, in the strict sense of “code is law”, is to recover a private key from a public key (and not necessarily the owner of that key controls the device). This would obviously undermine a lot of the underlying services of Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum, Polkadot, and nearly all other cryptocurrencies.

Fortunately, the JAM protocol does not rely on transactions, but instead relies primarily on PVM-based authorizers and game-theoretic mechanisms, making it an easy transition to a fully quantum-resistant protocol. 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 Blast

We can think of JAM as a kind of "cryptoeconomic silicon" that transforms the raw materials of economic value and real-world computing resources into a supercomputer that is controlled by no one in the real world, but is equally uncontrolled 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 existing industry standards, and even impressive in the future. But it is still insufficient compared to the current valuable transactions between institutions and around the world within the global Web2 system. If Web3 is to become a viable direction for the world, it will need to support performance far beyond what is currently available, and this extra performance cannot undermine the promise of state consistency, nor come at the expense of resilience or ubiquity. (Obviously, this logic suggests that fully synchronous, highly consistent system designs like Solana are a dead end for Web3, because they can only “scale up” and not “scale out”, and their logical endpoint is a centralized supercomputer.)

In short, we need a viable long-term (5-year) plan for Polkadot services to run not just on one JAM-powered supercomputer, but on multiple — or even many — supercomputers.

To paraphrase Delenn in Babylon 5 when talking about the White Star battleship, the Polkadot supercomputer was never intended to be the only one, it was just going to be the first. The goal of the Polkadot Cloud is to have multiple such JAM supercomputers, forming a JAM Grid. While the security of the grid is guaranteed by the same DOT staking security mechanism, each JAM hosts its own services. Just as a single JAM creates a supercomputer that no one controls, the JAM Grid transforms similar resources into a tightly coupled supercomputer cluster...again, not controlled by anyone in the Internet world. This is an important part of the future Polkadot Cloud.

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 cores of the JAM supercomputer. Even better, this design is not only suitable for core expansion within a single JAM supercomputer, but can also be further extended to use the cores of other supercomputers in the JAM grid.

There are still some unanswered questions: How to transparently scale services beyond a single JAM? How important is the position of a JAM in the mesh? Are data availability guarantees consistent across the mesh? 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 mesh of 10 JAMs could achieve over 1 Exabyte of data availability (DA), 600 GB/s of data bandwidth, and around 1 quadrillion EVM-equivalent Gas/second of computational power.

In terms of raw computational power, this is enough to provide every person on Earth with several times more block space than the current Ethereum L1 chain, and enough to handle not only everyone’s signed transactions, but also everyone’s bots, actors, and devices. This is necessary if we are to live in a digital world that is not controlled by proxy interests.

Okay, that’s it for now! I have to run to the Londis supermarket

And so begins Polkadot’s year in 2025. As with all such summaries, there is much to mention that cannot be fully included: for this, my deepest apologies to all the projects and people working tirelessly around us to help us achieve a true Web3 future.

The future of Polkadot is full of promise. Whether it’s Apps, Hubs, Citizenship Systems, DAO extensions, JAMs or deep, trustless and seamless Ethereum integration, there is so much to look forward to and so much to build.

So, enjoy your well-deserved break, watch some nostalgic movies (Die Hard and Home Alone are my top choices), ponder the above, come back next year, keep buidl buidl buidl, and look forward with determination.