tl;dr of Gavin Wood's annual Polkadot Roundup baked with my spice in it

[Reading time: 6 min]

Decentralization.

• “It is not just something we should work towards, but something we truly must deliver on.”
• Despite ongoing work to forge resilient, decentralized, self-sufficient systems, Polkadot leads the industry. An independent report ranks it highest in the Nakamoto coefficient, a key structural decentralization metric:
• This year marked a decentralization milestone with Kagome for client diversity.
• Importance? Decentralization comparison on geo and infra scale? Check it out.
• Parity's push for decentralization has led to a notable decrease in executive-managed staff, mainly affecting ecosystem support roles, marketing/BD branch, consolidating focus on core tech development and engineering.
• Web3foundation (W3F) announced a $55M Decentralized Futures fund. Its purpose? To foster further ecosystem decentralization. To become more of a starfish organization than a spider one. To enhance Polkadot's Coretime utility and demand.
• Funds are available now. Dozens of applications have arrived. Quality is high. The fund remains active. Disbursements continue into 2024's first half. Apply here.

Ecosystem Growth.

• Polkadot and its canary network Kusama, host 90 parachains. 580 projects. 300 of are dApps 300. 190 are Substrate based chains.
• Polkadot runs with 50 of its parachains cores enabled now. Monthly, 17,000 XCM messages. Trustlessly and securely. A first this week: an XCM NFT transfer. First novel use case for NFTs.
• December 22nd: a single day, a hive of activity. The relay chain, just one among fifty chains on Polkadot—6.9 million transactions. Still, it maintains its main job in sharp focus.
• 2K montly active devs. 83k montly user/wallet engage, interact, live the ecosystem.
• W3F grants surge: 324 applications. Across 54 countries, 135 triumph. Last month, a milestone: the 600th grant since 2017.
• A breakthrough for Polkadot: new metadata for hardware wallets. They now navigate the Polkadot ecosystem, trustless. Enabling to have a single secure generic hardware wallet (Ledger) app for the entire ecosystem, overcoming metadata changes breaking Ledger apps or other air gapped wallets.
• The first of its kind Polkadot Academy continues to recruit. Saw 790 applications for 76 seats. Very best minds in industry lead the program. 6 weeks: intense course. %80 emerge as core devs for the industry, for Polkadot.
• A new track added to the Academy: the Founders Track. It's less code, more vision. Impact on society, on industry. A highlightt: a 17-year-old stands among graduates. Register your interest.
• The PolkadotDevs Builders Program: a launchpad for innovation. Using PolkadotSDK. 125 teams applied. From 55 reviews, 23 projects hit their first mark.
• Developer Heroes, a sibling program. Focusing mentorship for the individual devs. Saw 420 applications. The community continues to grow—200 members, 60 mentors.

Power to parachains.

• USDC and USDT deployed on Polkadot this year. USDC stakes a claim: $250M in Polkadot's Asset Hub, with USDT adding to the ecosystem's wealth.
• Kusama’s Asset Hub full integrated direct token swaps. DOT/KSM liquidity pool pairs with a fee system. Users pay with any supported token. XCM facilitates exchange—no middlemen. The result? Cross-chain transactions are seamless, drastically simpler for users, collators, devs.
• Parity Signer's evolution: meet Polkadot Vault now. Old Android or IOS phones reborn as fully stacked, ultra-secure air gapped wallets. The team behind Nova Wallet now pilots its maintanance, syncing with their Nova Spektr desktop wallet.
• Kampela Signer is crafting the Polkadot Vault's hardware form. The most secure crypto setup? Pre-orders are live.
• “One Ledger app in 2024 Q1, all PolkadotSDK chains, any transaction, no blind signing, safe forever without updates” - asynchronous rob.
• A collab between Zondax, Ledger, Alzymologist.
• Four system chains break free from the Relay Chain's limits.

Bridge Hub introduces two trustless bridges: KSM<>ETH leads the launch, audited, ready.

First of its kind. No special governance trapdoor admin body. Unlike Ethereum bridges, these ones transcend mere token swaps, allowing for totally arbitrary contract interactions leveraging XCM.

The caveat: bridge security still limited by the weaker network.

Big beats.

• Energy Web announced their official shifting from EVM chain to Polkadot, powering the world's largest energy sector network with decentralized tech.
• Open Zeppelin, a giant of blockchain security audting, now forges Polkadot runtime libraries.
• Mythical Games, #1 gaming chain and 3th largest blockchain by monthly digital asset sales, transitions from Ethereum to Polkadot.

Millions of in-game assets will migrate, reborn as NFTs on their parachain. Their NFL Rivals App store game saw over 2M players. It's a testament to OnlyOnPolkadot, to its scaling, security, interoperability, most sophisticated on-chain governance.

Polkadot 1.0 and the future.

• Polkadot 1.0 is complete. The vision splits into long and near terms.
• Long-term -> Polkadot evolves into more general platform for generating, utilizing and selling coretime: Polkadot’s blockspace.
• Near-term -> maximizing Polkadot 1.0's potential—features, tools, fixes.
• Async backing has kickstarted on Kusama; Polkadot is up next, shortly. A major leap, ~2 years in the making. Introduces pipelining, slashing parachain block time in half: from 12 sec to 6.

The result? An up to 800% performance boost for parachains.

• ChainSafeth is building Metamask snap functionality. Every Metamask wallet to be used for Polkadot apps.
• Tanssi Network streamlines: a new system to deploy appchains on Polkadot with ease.
• Parathreads morphs to, now On-Demand Parachains (ODP). Buy coretime just-in-time, no long-term leases.
• Agile coretime and ODP signal big steps. Redefining the efficient utilization of blockspace.

Rolling with it.

• Polkadot rolls on seamless upgrades. No breaks, no downtime. Credit to WebAssembly based meta protocol foundations and Kusama doing its job for handling any integration first. Testing them not on testnets. With real market-driven incentives and network effects. Probably, some others need their own Kusama-s?
• The PolkadotSDK, once Substrate, now welcomes big names: Cardano’s partner chains, MadaraStarknet, AvailProject.
• Three major codebases unite under one banner: PolkadotSDK. Decentralization takes a leap forward. These production runtimes shifts from Parity administration to the hands of the decentralized Polkadot Fellowship Collective.

Business as Unusual.

• Polkadot governance stepping up: intermediaries out, fully decentralized OpenGov in. Tallies so far? 377 proposals, 193 executed. Likely more than the total of all governance proposals in the crypto space.
• A milestone moment: Community mobilizes, shields Polkadot from its first rogue referendum. Neutralized, forcefully canceled.
• OpenGov also births the Polkadot Fellowship, a first-of-its-kind entity. Governed by on-chain code, it's a self-sovereign DAO, nurturing and coordinating top talents for Polkadot's unstoppable journey.
• Currently 60 members. Including names like Gavin Wood, Shawn Tabrizi, Bryan Chen, Seun Lanlege and Robert Habermeier.
• Monthly public calls, tracked developments, with Jay of Kusamarian directing and Tommi hosting.
• The Fellowship's salary/funds? A unique method: OpenGov-sanctioned, periodic USDT buys, funded by treasury. 469k DOT acquired, XCM from HydraDX Omnipool in play, dodging instant sell-offs and price volatility. All executed trustlessly, on-chain, no intermediaries.
• This model isn't just for DOT. It's a blueprint for any token via Polkadot's XCM.
• The big picture? A decentralized sovereign wealth fund for Polkadot. Future: rule-based collectives, multi-asset treasuries, maybe even salary programs, all serving the network's specific needs.
• OpenGov, decentralized governance, has evolved this year. Beyond mere stake-voting, it matures into a sophisticated DAO.
• The Fellowship emerges as Polkadot's first non-token decision makers.
• Then there's ChaosDAO, drawing prominent members from across Polkadot, selected for reputation, commitment, and skin/soul in the game.
• Votes in ChaosDAO handle anonymously, free from token stake. And for those short on time, delegation to these governance focused units/individuals is the best option atm. ChaosDAO, Ivy, Kusamarian, Giotto. How?
• There's more: a weekly OpenGov YouTube show. Already 93 episodes. A platform for proposers to show up. Curious? Tune in. At least once.

Core Blimey.

• Agile coretime now debuts on Rococo testnet, eyeing Kusama and Polkadot for 2024 Q1. Long-term leases and auctions for blockspace ( time on parachain cores) will be gone. Coretime is sold off: monthly sales set just before use, prices predictable.
• Another OnlyOnPolkadot: chunks of coretime are represented by XCM NFTs. Tradeable, exchangeable, just like any NFT. The first novel use case for NFTs, indeed. Slice, dice, reshape these coretime NFTs.
• The impact? No more DOT locked in slot auctions. Eases burdens for newcomers, clears uncertainties for existing teams. Perfectly aligns with On-Demand Parachains. Share pools open, blockspace market thrives—anyone can buy coretime as needed.

The Road Ahead.

• 2024 Q1: a busy quarter. Key infras come alive: Agile Coretime, On-Demand Parachains, ETH <> DOT <> KSM bridges.
• Elastic scaling is expected to be seen in 2024. Transcending the one-core-per-chain limit. Imagine chains utilizing multiple cores, scaling 10, 20, even 100 times temporarily to manage heavy loads. See why Mythical Games is moving to Polkadot.
• On the flip side, what if a chain uses less than one core? This reshapes our understanding of blockchains. They're not just perpetual block-makers. Changing the way of seeing blockspace and blockchains like apps, living momentarily on cores, completing tasks, then concluding. So this is a shift towards a CPU-like approach, redefining how we think about the way dApps should run. [*]
• Sassafras, Polkadot's novel, forkless block production consensus algorithm, hits testnets in 2024.
• Lastly, Coreplay and Corejam. Set to boost Polkadot's run efficiency, like updating a game server to make building projects faster and smoother. But still ensuring seamless integration of contributions, enhancing the entire system.

Many of these will make more sense in retrospect next year. Until then.