TLDR Write-Up; 2021 Yearly Roundup by Gavin Wood

Highlights TLDR;

-Over two million lines of code now exists between Substrate Repository, Cumulus, Smoldot, and ecosystem tools.

-10k developers are on Element. Roughly 350 individual teams are in the ecosystem. More than 150 Chain are under development, many of which already have test-nets.

-Substrate EVM compatibility platform FRONTIER is being heavily worked on.

-20k wallets have voted across 297 validators on DOT. 3 million user accounts created and are run by 6,000 validators across all parachains. Support for DOT nominator accounts tripled.

-DOT treasury has funded 200,000 DOT, and the KSM treasury around 70,000 KSM, over one thousand funding proposals. https://www.dotreasury.com/dot for audit.

-31 Substrate-based mainnets are now live.

-540 forkless upgrades have occurred. "Substrate’s governance and live upgrade system made the near-impossible seem so mundane, that it was barely distinguishable from magic, at least in the blockchain realm."

-DOT completed its first five auctions. Over one hundred million DOT (9% of total supply) has already been locked up for two years. Kusama has sixteen parachains launched with over 3 million KSM, 31% of total supply, locked for 12 months.

-Deutsche Telekom announced its participation in Polkadot’s security and maintenance.

-There was a major improvement to the metadata format which reduces the chance of bugs.

-version 2 of XCM was released, which makes it easy for different consensus systems to interact, and, acts as a safety net. ie, catches assets unexpectedly left unspent at the end of a message.

-FRAME, the API and framework for on-chain business logic, was upgraded, and, "unlocked Polkadot’s capabilities in tokens and NFTs respectively."

-ParityDB, the blockchain database specifically for Substrate, has been honed and is ready for launch.

-DOT became the world’s first globally decentralised system that determined its own brand through voting, using a quadratic voting system that balances DOT ownership with individuality.

-DOT website visits surpassed 2 million visits, with a quarter of them unique. DOT Twitter has 1m followers, and KSM 200k. Polkadot Wiki had 160 unique contributors and 1.6m visitors, with 3.2m views.

-Polkadot's Decoded event had 40 curated speakers and 27k viewers, and the Parachain Launch Party had 220k unique viewers. Numbering China's events alone, more than 50 events occurred.

-In 2021, over 1k devs took Substrate educational courses, with 70% graduating, several of these graduating members are responsible for the parachains already launched, today.

-Substrate builder's program had 163 teams apply, with only 36 accepted.

-Chainlink announced that their Oracles would support Substrate.

-Web3 Foundation has added several hires, very notably Bertrand Perez as its Chief Operating Officer.

-A Substrate-based Anti-Scam team was funded and launched. Over a thousand sites and scams were taken down, reported by community members, with bounties given to reporters amounting to 550 DOT. Sites and addresses involved in phishing and scams includes more than 2,300 entries listed.

-More decentralized bridges are coming soon, Parity’s bridge for Polkadot to Kusama, and Snowfork for Polkadot to Ethereum.

-Polkadot team will be focusing on parathreads moving forward which allows teams who did not win an auction to still have security guaranteed by Polkadot and have the benefits of XCMP.

Finally, a number of substrate-based projects were highlighted that were not covered here. I recommend reading the full article for these highlights:

https://medium.com/polkadot-network/polkadot-2021-roundup-6cbd3b50c50e

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