Gavin Wood's Handwritten: Polkadot Annual Review 2024

Author: Gavin Wood

Compiled by: Lin Ge

It's that time again… I've temporarily set aside the text editor I've been writing in all year and opened Medium. The nights are getting colder, the days are getting shorter, the fire is lit, and it's a great time to reflect on our ecosystem. How are we doing right now? What achievements have we made in the past 12 months? What will happen next? Buckle up, because this year's content will be long, as we've been busy and eager to make more progress.

Hello! The Christmas spirit is getting stronger…🎄

Before we start summarizing, let's take a look at the broader context of the year. Polkadot's journey began with a white paper (2016) and a crowd sale (2017). This largely determined the subsequent development direction and product vision. Over the past few years, we have focused on realizing the product vision outlined in the white paper. For various reasons and in various ways, 2023/2024 has become a watershed year, marking a significant shift in this core objective.

Thus, this year has been an important transformative year for Polkadot ------ shifting from a focus on achieving the limited scope of product goals outlined in the white paper to optimizing, enhancing stability, and refining products to better meet market demands. This transformation has also benefited from data collection and analysis support provided by Parity's DOT Lake and Token Terminal. Ultimately, we have begun to build a broader service platform framework that aligns more closely with Web3 needs.

I set the stage, you perform

Polkadot's core value proposition is to provide a large amount of high-quality, tightly connected block space, referred to as coretime in Polkadot. Currently, its main use is to support the operation of high-performance blockchains, previously known as parachains. Over the past year or so, we have finally seen preliminary cases of these projects utilizing Polkadot's high performance, bringing in and serving large-scale non-crypto user bases. A notable example is Mythical Games 's Mythos chain, which provides on-chain tradable NFT game assets and other services for mainstream large games.

The Mythos chain supports asset management for multiple games, including NFL Rivals, which has nearly 1 million active wallets and a user base of 5 million gamers on its platform. Just from this project, its NFT trading volume ranks second in the entire industry, showcasing Polkadot's ability to easily handle the demands of large-scale activities. With Mythical set to launch the highly anticipated FIFA Rivals next year and open its chain to the entire gaming industry under a permissionless philosophy, we expect more similar applications to join.

Mythical is not the only team that sees Polkadot as a high-performance, resilient Web3 gaming platform. This year, DOTplay launched, aiming 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 the most popular game development framework, Unity.

In fact, the transaction volume on parachains has grown by about 300% this year, increasing from just over 10 million transactions per month to nearly 40 million transactions in November. The volume of on-chain events (another metric for measuring on-chain activity) has also shown a similar growth trend. Recently, Origin Trail 's Neuroweb has performed particularly well, generating 200 million events and 14 million transactions last month, demonstrating Polkadot's capability to handle the high transaction volumes required for global supply chain tracking.

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

As noted in a recent Electric Capital report, Polkadot's SDK remains among the top three in terms of open-source developer activity in the blockchain tech stack. Of course, this does not include EVM-based development on platforms like Moonbeam and Phala within the Polkadot ecosystem, nor does it account for some closed-source JAM implementations. If these are included, the additional 100+ developers could further enhance Polkadot's ranking.

You can't fully trust humans

In the mission to realize the true vision of Web3, decentralization has always been a key core principle for Polkadot to enhance resilience. Since its launch, Polkadot's Nakamoto coefficient has consistently performed impressively, and in 2024, this value has risen from 93 at the beginning of the year to 132 now, making Polkadot the first major blockchain network to achieve a score above 100, with a level of decentralization four times that of the second-ranked network. In comparison, most PoS blockchains have Nakamoto coefficients that do not exceed 20 (Solana's coefficient even dropped from 32 to 18), while Polygon and Bitcoin can be controlled by four collaborating entities, and Ethereum ranks at the bottom, requiring only two entities for control.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Some crypto projects, especially those reliant on venture capital, focus more on "scaling up" (i.e., improving performance and profitability), chasing market trends and selling tokens, often viewing long-term resilience, governance, and decentralization as irrelevant accessories.

At the end of 2023, Parity underwent some significant changes. The Web3 Foundation strategically adjusted its functional model, deciding to reduce functions and personnel. Instead, it adopted a more streamlined and focused model, prioritizing core technology development, important tools, and metric delivery, while delegating content, business development, and applications to the community. To support this strategy and minimize impact on projects, the "decentralization" plan was born, aimed at providing maximum opportunities for community members who can take responsibility. The Web3 Foundation's $60 million Decentralized Future ** program will officially launch in the first half of 2024.

Many individuals in the ecosystem are actively participating, and an increasing number of independent and successful teams are emerging within the Polkadot ecosystem, delivering valuable products and services. One noteworthy example is WebZero, an event organizing team. They successfully took over the brand of the Sub0 developer conference and launched the refreshed and highly attractive Reset conference in November in Bangkok.

Sub0 Reset is certainly not the only impressive event this year. Earlier this year, we held another highly popular Sub0 conference in Bangkok. The flagship event Decoded returned to Brussels this summer and achieved great success. 2024 will also see the return of the Web3 Summit after five years, retaining its slightly "rebellious" atmosphere and its highly regarded venue ------ Funkhaus in Berlin.

This year also saw the inaugural Gray Paper lecture tour, a university lecture series on the JAM protocol and its official specification, the Gray Paper, which covered eight locations across four continents, including a seven-hour marathon lecture in collaboration with the National University of Singapore (NUS) at the Polkadot Blockchain Academy.

Additionally, another successfully completed Parity spin-off project this year is the Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA). This is an academic-level, in-person course project taught by some of the best members of the Polkadot project. Over the past year, PBA's curriculum has shifted focus from the specific implementation details of Polkadot to the fields of smart contracts and governance, deepening collaboration with the BlockchainGov collective. Today, PBA has fully become an independent project and launched PBA-X , aimed at moving the high-quality teaching content of the original PBA curriculum online to reach a broader audience.

Polkadot, as popular as Coldplay

Parity is not the only example of showcasing decentralization: Polkadot's governance system continues to rank as the largest and most complex DAO in history. Unlike vague decision-making systems or, worse, centralized decision-making and development, one point of pride for Polkadot is that it is the only major network where all protocol decisions are made in a transparent, accessible, and resilient manner. (And it continues to deliver significant updates.)

In fact, in addition to the daily and monthly governance upgrade plans, 2024 marks the year when DOT holders can guide core developers in a more direct and proactive manner through the newly established "Wish For Change" governance channel. A notable proposal is #682 referendum , which formally identifies JAM as the technological solution to replace the relay chain in the future, passing with a support rate of 99.998% (with only four accounts voting against).

Under the governance of its self-developed OpenGov, approximately $120 million in assets are controlled by DOT holders, with spending this year being roughly the same. OpenGov has initiated an astonishing 1,350 referendums. With the enhancement of voting delegation functionality, we have seen an increase in the amount of DOT involved in each proposal's decision-making and the average voting strength. More and more people are willing to lock up more DOT to make their voices heard in network decisions. For more information, refer to the year-end report compiled by Parity's DotLake team. https://data.parity.io/opengov_report.pdf

A major democratic event for Polkadot this year was the DOT issuance rate vote . At the network's launch, the annual issuance rate of DOT was set at 10%. This issuance fund was used to reward stakers (the pillars of network security), while a portion of the variable funds was allocated to the treasury to fund ecosystem activities deemed valuable by DOT holders. This year's vote fixed the issuance at 120 million DOT per year, meaning that the DOT issuance in 2025 will decrease from the original over 150 million to about 120 million. Of this, about 100 million DOT will be used for staking rewards, while the remaining portion will fund the annual treasury budget. With the issuance rate fixed, the base inflation rate relative to the total issuance of the network will gradually decline: DOT has now entered a deflationary mode.

The Polkadot Fellowship, as the main expert organization of the Polkadot protocol, has nearly 100 members, doubling since its establishment in mid-last year. These organizations (like the Fellowship) can now use their own treasury to pay for projects and expenses. One feature I personally looked forward to this year has finally been realized: the multi-asset treasury, which allows the network treasury (or any sub-treasury) to hold foreign currency reserves. Currently, the Polkadot network holds not only DOT but also a significant amount of USDC and USDT (not to mention "DED" 😂), and regularly uses Hydration to automatically trade currencies, typically paying treasury expenditure proposals in stablecoins. We are now ready to have a fully autonomous Polkadot sovereign wealth fund. Additionally, the Fellowship can now autonomously manage monthly salary payments and pay in USDT.

This year we witnessed the gradual formation of the first "Alliance" targeting Polkadot ambassadors . Its declaration was collaboratively edited and publicly discussed by members, which may provide a template for similar governance bodies in the future. Proposals have already been made to establish a user interface fellowship and a secretaries fellowship. Combining their respective treasuries, budgets, and salary systems, we are gradually seeing the seeds of a complex, transparent, and autonomous "public service system" sprouting.

Anything is possible

Like a phenomenon existing in a virtual plane, operating autonomously in a decentralized world can sometimes be inconvenient: interacting with the traditional, materialized, centralized world can present many difficulties. For example, simple tasks like paying rent or subscribing to a service can become very cumbersome if shortcuts are not taken and rely on the founding company to handle them. Because of this, 2024 saw the birth of a new type of entity: Polkadot Community Foundation (PCF).

PCF was established in the Cayman Islands, with all its activities directly guided by DOT holders through the OpenGov system. PCF serves as an adapter to the centralized world, executing tasks such as signing commercial contracts, making fiat payments, protecting intellectual property, and hiring third-party service providers (like consultants). Unlike organizations such as the Web3 Foundation, PCF has no assets, shareholders, members, trustees, or beneficiaries, and its interests or opinions do not necessarily represent those of token holders.

Thus, PCF does not have to be the only entity of its kind. Parity's efforts in researching and designing the PCF structure have created a template that other truly decentralized projects can reference to help them connect to the centralized world.

Operating as efficiently as a "power loom"

When some networks attempt to improve (some absurd) TPS (transactions per second) metrics by raising node hardware requirements or adding complex optimization techniques, it often leads to questions about the network's decentralization and resilience. Polkadot (specifically Kusama) demonstrates the true performance of a network by scaling its network. By distributing workloads on consumer-grade node hardware, we free ourselves from the limitations of single-machine computing power or the speed of result sharing between validators.

A test event called "Spammening," organized by Amforc and funded by the treasury, took place live on the Kusama network in December. This test showcased the extreme performance of the Kusama network in a real-world environment (shoutout to Jay!). As the first truly decentralized network with value, Kusama achieved a sustained rate of over 100,000 transactions per second (actually reaching 143,343 TPS), using only a quarter of Kusama's core computing resources. While there is still room for network and computational optimization, our goal is clear: even if you are "only" pursuing performance, Polkadot is the best choice. (Moreover, you can enjoy top-notch resilience, multi-chain connectivity, and the flexibility of modular blockchains as added benefits!)

Cross-chain interoperability is like building with Legos

In the past 12 months, Polkadot's cross-chain interoperability has significantly improved. Chains hosted by Polkadot can now interact trustlessly with Kusama and other independent Substrate chains via the Substrate Bridge, connect to Ethereum through Snowbridge, and link with multiple industry networks via Hyperbridge. By supporting the transfer of XCM across these networks, Polkadot is gradually realizing the goals outlined in its vision white paper.

Unlike other bridging mechanisms, Polkadot's bridging mechanism is completely trustless and programmable, not placing the assets transferred across chains under the control of a few (often irresponsible) stakeholders, nor limited to specific hard-coded functionalities.

In practice, this means that blockchains on Polkadot can connect with other networks like Kusama and Ethereum, inheriting the rich programmability of XCM. Token transfers are just the tip of the iceberg: it also enables transaction execution without temporary accounts, data publishing, attribute querying, fee payments, message forwarding, and smart contract calls.

XCM underwent significant revisions this year, no longer purely pursuing functional delivery but focusing on addressing the core pain points of Polkadot users. By prioritizing the optimization of system chain message relaying and fee transparency, the cross-chain interaction experience has become more coherent and powerful. As the Polkadot wallet ecosystem continues to improve, user experience has also significantly enhanced, allowing users to gradually become unaware of the complexities of cross-chain transactions.

On the eve of this article's writing, Harbour Capital collaborated with Polkadot's Velocity Labs to launch the Magic Ramp service. This service provides a top-notch experience for users wishing to transfer funds between the banking system and Polkadot, supporting direct transactions of USDC and euros from bank accounts. Currently, this service is only available in Europe, with further expansion expected in 2025.

This powerful system, combining trustlessness, programmability, performance, and new connectivity, along with effective utilization of service chains like Polkadot Hub, Hydration, and Polkadex, positions Polkadot to potentially become the central hub for cross-chain interactions in 2025, seizing this unique market opportunity.

This application is truly addictive

In 2024, Polkadot's overall user experience has significantly improved. Transferring funds and NFTs between chains, managing multi-signature and proxy accounts, and participating in governance through delegation have become increasingly simple. We notice that wallet applications are gradually avoiding making users directly aware of the complexities of the multi-chain Polkadot ecosystem, instead integrating token balances and NFTs within the ecosystem to provide a more consistent user experience, as if this ecosystem just "happens" to be distributed across different chains. The Subwallet, Talisman, and Nova teams continue to improve their products, with Nova going a step further by implementing a universal transaction system that routes funds to the best chain, securing the best deals for users; this combination of high-quality UI, XCM, and parachain logic is outstanding.

Another project benefiting from the "Decentralized Future" program, which has been widely discussed within the community for weeks, is Polkadot App . As Björn mentioned at the Decoded event, this application is designed to simplify user entry into Polkadot, avoiding all complexities and focusing on providing core functionalities for the mass market while discarding all irrelevant content.

This application is a simple, user-friendly non-custodial wallet that supports DOT, KSM, and USDT/C. By leveraging native iOS/Android features to protect and back up keys, it avoids users falling into "mnemonic hell." It also integrates a username registrar, ensuring every user can obtain an easy-to-remember name to receive funds, and supports one-click staking through Polkadot's staking pool. Transfer fees are almost negligible and can be paid in stablecoins, combined with fiat on-ramps like Magic Ramp, making this application a highly flexible decentralized payment system.

Most impressively, it integrates Polkadot Pay as a payment channel, allowing users' wallet funds to be directly used to pay for goods and services at millions of stores and merchants in the U.S. Moreover, unlike other crypto payment solutions, this application not only eliminates credit card transaction fees but also rewards users with incentives for each purchase!

As easy as a Sunday morning

In 2024, Polkadot is accelerating its transition from traditional technology to more advanced technology. The use of Polkadot's light client Smoldot is becoming increasingly 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 tech stacks rather than relying on Polkadot.js, which has poor support for light clients. Kudos to the independent developers who successfully build these projects!

Parity is also promoting two important initiatives this year aimed at making 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's December update, introduces a single-node binary file that can synchronize and aggregate almost all networks built on the Polkadot SDK. This greatly reduces the aspects that teams need to focus on when developing, deploying, and maintaining chains, paving the way for chain hosting services (like Zeeve's Perfuse system), making chain deployment and maintenance as simple as smart contracts!

While Omninode reduces the complexity of node-level programming, maintaining business logic on-chain (the so-called runtime) can still be a challenge. Although the Polkadot SDK has led the trend of modular blockchain SDKs with its astonishing development speed (even teams like Polygon's Avail and Cardano's Midnight have adopted it for building projects), the API instability caused by rapid iterations has imposed a significant workload on downstream developers, and the demand for stability has long been urgent. In 2024, the Polkadot stabilization plan successfully addresses this issue, setting a strict timeline for the release of runtime elements of the SDK. Major changes (such as allowing the use of ZK proofs instead of transaction signatures in the new Transaction Extension API) can only occur in quarterly major releases. This way, teams building cutting-edge Polkadot SDK chains can enjoy a three-month development stability period, requiring only one code upgrade per quarter. For teams willing to forgo the latest features, the long-term support version now offered ensures security and compatibility within nine months.

Polkadot 2: A revolution starting from a casually written small contract

Over the past year, the original Polkadot platform has undergone a significant evolution, and this evolution is nearly complete. While parachains (Polkadot's secure high-speed Rollup technology) were a key element of the initial Polkadot product proposition (also giving utility to the DOT token through slot auctions), the engineering value behind it far exceeds this product. The engineering work of the past three years has laid the foundation for a high-performance "world computer" and taken the first step towards our broader goal ------ a goal that was clearly mentioned in the 2016 Polkadot white paper: to provide a platform capable of bringing Web2 applications into the Web3 world, achieving resilience, trustlessness, and thereby delivering a real and credible experience. To distinguish this evolved vision from the original Polkadot product, we as a community collectively decided to name this new vision, thus Polkadot 2.0 was born.

This new understanding was not proposed by any one person or even a single company, but is the result of countless voices within our community working together, further demonstrating Polkadot's strong resilience and decentralization capabilities. Polkadot 2.0 is a combination of deep upgrades to the technical core, key new features, and a new conceptual framework, through which we can better understand the value of Polkadot. Under this vision, Polkadot's success is divided into two main objectives: on 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 aimed at achieving these two goals.

A dual approach

One of the "three major" upgrades launching in 2024 is Asynchronous Backing, an optimization that runs throughout the Polkadot tech stack, introducing pipelining techniques into the process of providing security for new parachain blocks. With this optimization, the two independent functions of Polkadot's security system ------ correctness assurance and data availability ------ can occur simultaneously, reducing the standard block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds.

With this change, we also increased the time for the correctness assurance phase by about 400%, allowing the blockchains hosted by Polkadot 2.0 to achieve an overall throughput approximately 10 times greater than that of Polkadot 1.0. This significantly enhances the transaction capacity of Polkadot-hosted blockchains, greatly reducing the cost of each transaction in the ecosystem, making Polkadot a more attractive platform for building and deploying blockchain projects.

The secret ingredient is time

The second upgrade is called Agile Coretime , which replaces the staking, leasing, and crowdloan systems in Polkadot 1.0. The new system introduces a simple monthly auction mechanism, where each of Polkadot's 45 cores can be bid on by anyone in a permissionless manner each month. Coretime can be divided, interleaved, and transferred, and can even be shared among multiple chains in a trustless manner.

There are already dedicated exchanges and integration services on Polkadot for trading and acquiring coretime, such as RegionX, Lastic, and Perfuse.

The transformation of Agile Coretime changes the utility of the DOT token; crowdloans and staking auctions have been abolished, replaced by a highly flexible market where consumers can respond quickly as needed while maintaining cost predictability. This adjustment in the economic model fully demonstrates that Polkadot, even when highly decentralized, still possesses the willingness and ability to adapt to changing environments.

The new era of multi-core expansion

As the chains in 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 coretime. Short-cycle chains have become possible; on-demand running chains have become possible; chains sharing coretime have also become possible. However, perhaps the most interesting direction of development is multi-core expansion, which will be pioneered by the new Polkadot Hub: a high-frequency, high-performance chain that utilizes multiple cores to run simultaneously to increase transaction volume and reduce latency.

By using three cores, the Polkadot Hub will achieve a speed three times that of the Polkadot relay chain, confirming a complete block every 2 seconds, instead of the usual 6 seconds. This triples the data and computational bandwidth, providing an unprecedented upgrade path for teams focused on future scalability. There are even higher frequency attempts underway, such as Basti (a sixth-level Fellow) testing the first 500-millisecond Substrate chain, which generates blocks at a rate 12 times that of current chains.

Even more exciting, in 2024, Elastic Scaling (Elastic Scaling) ** was developed and is planned for deployment in 2025. This technology further enhances the paradigm of multi-core expansion, allowing chains to operate at low costs during low usage and dynamically scale during peak usage periods by acquiring more coretime and confirming blocks more frequently, flexibly responding to changing demands.**

More than just surface definitions

The technical transformations of Polkadot 2.0 clearly help maximize its utility, but perhaps equally important is the conceptual work that enables us and everyone interacting with Polkadot to better understand its functions and value.

This year, a new conceptual framework proposed and discussed was introduced by Shawn Tabrizi (a sixth-level Fellow) . Polkadot traditionally avoids defining itself as a cryptocurrency or blockchain, preferring to present itself through the narrative of a multi-chain ecosystem. Under the initial parachain-centric product proposal, this definition was reasonable. However, defining Polkadot solely in these terms can lead to a limited perspective, overlooking the potential value above and below the parachain layer. 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, helping us focus on Polkadot's true core value proposition from both intellectual and market perspectives. This metaphor serves as a conceptual framework, aiding us in better understanding how all the work, functions, ideas, and developments of Polkadot in the past, present, and future fit into this framework, ultimately making Polkadot more relevant in the market and the world.

This metaphor divides Polkadot into two symbiotic product parts: one centered around the unstoppable computational resources generated by Polkadot validators and their protocols. This is called the Polkadot Cloud, supporting the original Polkadot parachain products. The other is the Polkadot Hub, characterized by services based on various system chains (these services are built on top of the original product). Although the two are symbiotic, both products possess independent utility, and their usage fees are paid through DOT.

Specifically, the core of the Polkadot Cloud is currently coretime and all its potential uses. Hosting chains based on the Polkadot SDK (i.e., parachains) is the first important use case for coretime, and Parity plans to introduce other use cases in 2025. Once the Polkadot Bulletin chain and Small-Statements Hub are launched, its cloud services will expand into the realm of data distribution. Additionally, the JAM protocol fits very well into this framework, as its coretime is essentially more useful than the coretime 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 essentially a convergence point for community and direct interaction. It provides a highly consistent and often synchronous platform for collaboration and combination for people, teams, and their logic. The core of the Hub is the Plaza project (proposed this year by sixth-level Fellow Rob Habermeier), which is an advanced, Polkadot-native, permissionless, low-cost, and fast smart contract system. All functionalities on the official Polkadot chain will be conveniently provided within the hub, including staking systems, governance and collectives, identity and personhood, all tokens and NFTs, as well as all cross-chain bridges. Most of these functionalities can be synchronously combined with smart contracts.

The Polkadot Hub achieves the unification and optimization of the overall Polkadot experience, eliminating the fragmentation issues caused by directly exposing different system chains to users, which has always been a pain point for Polkadot. The Hub is supported by three cloud cores, with a block time of 2 seconds, three times the performance of single-core chains, and approximately 30 times the performance of last year's parachains. To further enhance performance, smart contracts on the hub are based on PVM, supported by the high-speed PolkaVM developed by Fellow Jan Bujak, executing at about 45% of native execution speed, significantly faster than EVM interpreters.

Although smart contracts on the Hub are represented in PVM code (a derivative of the well-established RISC-V ISA), they do not need to be written in a specific language. In fact, the hub is fully compatible with the conventional Ethereum development toolchain, including the Solidity language, deployment systems, and Metamask. Additionally, Hub contracts can be written in Rust, ink!, C, C++, or almost any language supported by a compiler. Through PolkaVM, the Hub's cross-chain bridging, and the cloud's security, users can achieve impressive Ethereum performance boosts from Polkadot without leaving the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Hub aims to compete with the fastest pseudo-decentralized synchronous chains in the industry, making performance crucial. Improvements to the network stack have already been made this year, with plans for implementation next year. The high-performance Merkle Trie system NOMT, introduced this year by Fellows Sergei (V Dan) and Rob, provides a further optimization path for the hub, with performance improvements of over an order of magnitude. Meanwhile, experiments for faster block times are also underway, further enhancing performance multiples.

This month, the Westend testnet has launched a preliminary test version of the Hub chain, equipped with Ethereum-compatible smart contract functionality. A formal launch is expected in 2025.

An underlying crisis

As our social interaction patterns increasingly root themselves in the digital realm and often revolve around text, generative AI poses a truly unique threat to the structure of the free world. The proof-of-personhood mechanisms from the Web2 era, such as CAPTCHAs, email/SMS verification, and even government-issued IDs, are gradually becoming victims of generative AI and malicious forces. In a recent election, at least 66,000 independent accounts were found to be controlled by a single stakeholder, which also had 10 million followers. While the old saying goes, "truth is not determined by majority vote," modern (social) media almost entirely relies on popularity to distinguish truth from falsehood. Some false information, if it appears to have strong support, is enough to convince many people, significantly distorting the democratic process.

In the civilization we believe we possess, the ability to resist AI 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 arrogant madmen are forming a concerning alliance. The only antidote can come from our collective efforts.

To empower people with real and honest voices, Web3 technology is absolutely indispensable. However, relying solely on blockchain (even one as resilient and high-performing as Polkadot) is not enough: we need to algorithmize the concept of "personhood." Moreover, we must achieve this without fundamentally undermining the core values of Web3, especially protecting individual privacy.

Thus, earlier this year, we proposed the vision of "Polite Personhood" (Proof-of-(Polite-)Personhood). This computationally intensive logic is hosted by Polkadot but leverages Polkadot's ultimate trustless connectivity (provided through Snowbridge and Hyperbridge), allowing this service to be used throughout Web3 and even extend into Web2.

This mechanism will be rolled out in at least three phases, referred to 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, using the latest ZK technology to protect privacy and being open and transparent to anyone for auditing. It is expected to launch in 2025.

Polkadot 3.0: Can you stop Jamming?

While our Hub and Cloud paradigms form the foundation of Polkadot 2.0, they also provide a conceptual framework for understanding the next chapter of the Polkadot journey, which is the transition from the relay chain to the JAM protocol. JAM is the foundation for the next generation of Polkadot cloud services.

In 2024, the initial version of the JAM protocol will be released in the form of a Gray Paper, coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of the Ethereum Yellow Paper's release. Similar to Ethereum's Yellow Paper, JAM is also a permissionless "world computer" protocol, but unlike Ethereum, JAM not only has resilience but also high performance. It is expected to have hundreds of computing cores and nearly 1 GB of data I/O per second, aiming to become the first true Web3 supercomputer.

The Gray Paper has undergone multiple revisions and is now nearing a stable version, with the current version being 0.5.3, 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 with partial functionality), there are currently 35 teams building JAM implementations using 15 programming languages. Their code is not yet public but is expected to be opened next year. They are incentivized by the JAM Implementation Award , the largest programming bounty in history, totaling tens of millions of dollars.

Like the current Polkadot, JAM is not only decentralized but also has a distributed architecture. We achieve performance by scaling the network, which is an emergent effect produced by the collective action of multiple nodes. Unlike the direct effects of centralized and highly synchronous systems, engineering optimizations for emergent effects are more challenging. As such systems grow, emergent effects become deeper and more complex; unexpected emergent behaviors, such as performance degradation, become extremely difficult to predict, diagnose, and fix, making optimization particularly challenging.

Therefore, this year we initiated the industry's first attempt: 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 can deploy a full-scale JAM network and, combined with debugging and analysis software, conduct in-depth testing and optimization of the protocol and its implementations to ensure that the theoretical predictions of globally scalable networks align with actual performance.

This project is called Testing, Optimisation, Analysis and Scale-Trial Experimentation Rig (JAM TOASTER 🥲). Currently, the first phase of this project is halfway complete, expected to finish early in the new year; the second phase is planned to start in the second half of 2025. As a small highlight, this device will be placed in the basement of the Polkadot Palace, using the palace's hot tub as a cooling system. Well, that's warm!

Now let's get to work

So what about building applications on JAM? Our first target demonstration is DOOM-on-JAM, aptly named, aiming to run the classic game DOOM on JAM. This will execute the game through a consensus mechanism and output video frames as images into our vast data lake. To achieve this, we need a service capable of hosting an unrestricted virtual machine, meaning this virtual machine can execute any code you wish to compile without being limited by annoying constraints such as block gas limits or the need to use special primitives, languages, or programming techniques. This is a first in the blockchain space, truly achieving Turing completeness. This JAM service is codenamed Alpha, and it is currently under intense development.

Another important project to be advanced in 2025 is migrating the logic currently embedded in the Polkadot relay chain runtime to a JAM service that can be independently upgraded. This paves the way for the Polkadot JAM chain to replace the current Polkadot relay chain as the hosting structure of the blockchain ecosystem. Over time, the Polkadot blockchain hosting service (codenamed Beta) will expand its functionality to include new JAM-exclusive features for blockchains, such as Accords (allowing two sovereign blockchains to interact trustlessly) and dynamic metering (avoiding benchmarking in most cases).

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. Codenamed Mu, this project will prototype a low-latency, high-throughput multi-currency payment system, aiming for a sustained rate of one million transactions per second across multiple cores on JAM.

Finally, the Lambda project will combine elements of Alpha and Mu to build a highly scalable system based on the Actor model, using a dynamic state partitioning approach to highlight and validate JAM's highly scalable, fundamentally consistent computing model. In 2025, Parity and other teams will embark on the design and delivery of these services.

A strong sense of fear

Recent news has brought advancements in quantum computing into collective focus. Google recently announced significant milestones in its Willow project, particularly breakthroughs in error correction capabilities. Although we are still far from truly useful applications, this indeed addresses an important barrier on the road to achieving useful quantum computing devices.

In the strict sense of "code is law," one of the first "useful" functions that quantum computing devices might achieve is recovering private keys from public keys (and not necessarily with the key's owner controlling the device). This would obviously undermine many foundational services of Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum, Polkadot, and almost all other cryptocurrencies.

Fortunately, the JAM protocol does not rely on transactions, but primarily depends on PVM-based authorizers and game-theoretic mechanisms, allowing it to easily transition into a fully quantum-resistant protocol. By 2025, our researchers are expected to release a report detailing the specific protocol changes needed to achieve full quantum resistance.

This is simply explosive

We can think of JAM as a "crypto-economic silicon chip," transforming the raw materials of economic value and real-world computational resources into a supercomputer that is uncontrolled in the real world but equally ungoverned in the internet realm.

As long as there exists a JAM network backed by DOT tokens, there will only be one such supercomputer, which we call the Polkadot supercomputer. This forms the foundation 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 astonishing by current industry standards, and even impressive for the future. However, compared to the valuable transactions occurring among institutions within the current global Web2 system, it still falls short. If Web3 is to become a viable direction for the world, it requires performance support far beyond the current levels, and this additional performance cannot compromise the prospects of state consistency, nor can it come at the expense of resilience or universality. (Clearly, this logic indicates that designs like Solana's, which are fully synchronous and highly consistent systems, are a dead end for Web3, as they can only "scale up" and cannot "scale out," with their logical endpoint being a centralized supercomputer.)

In short, we need a viable long-term (5-year) plan that allows Polkadot services to run not only on a JAM-driven supercomputer but also on multiple ------ even many ------ supercomputers.

Borrowing from Delenn's words about the White Star ships in Babylon 5, the Polkadot supercomputer was never intended to be the only one; it will merely be the first. The goal of the Polkadot Cloud is to have multiple such JAM supercomputers, forming a JAM grid (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 an uncontrolled supercomputer, the JAM grid transforms similar resources into a tightly coupled supercomputer cluster… also uncontrolled by anyone in the internet realm. This is a crucial component of the future Polkadot Cloud.

The design of JAM services 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 scale to the computing cores of JAM supercomputers. Even better, this design is applicable not only for core scaling within a single JAM supercomputer but can also be further extended to utilize cores from other supercomputers in the JAM grid.

There are still some unresolved questions: how to transparently extend services beyond a single JAM? How important is a JAM's position within the grid? Is the guarantee of data availability consistent across the entire grid? These questions will be further explored in the coming year as JAM 1.0 takes shape.

How great is the potential of the Polkadot Cloud? According to preliminary estimates, a grid composed of 10 JAMs could achieve over 1 Exabyte of data availability (DA), 600 GB/s of data bandwidth, and approximately 1 trillion EVM equivalent Gas/second of computational power.

From the perspective of raw computational power, this is enough to provide several times the current Ethereum L1 chain's block space for every person on Earth, sufficient to handle not only everyone's signature transactions but also everyone's bots, Actors, and devices. If we are to live in a digital world free from the control of proxy interests, this is a necessary condition.

Alright, that's it for now! I need to make a trip to the Londis supermarket

The year 2025 for Polkadot is now underway. As with all such summary articles, there are many worthy mentions that cannot all be included: for this, I extend my deepest apologies to all the projects and individuals tirelessly working around us to help us realize a truly Web3 future.

The future of Polkadot is bright. Whether it's apps, hubs, citizen identity systems, DAO expansions, JAM, or deep, trustless, and seamless Ethereum integration, there is much to look forward to, providing everyone with endless possibilities to build.

So, enjoy the well-deserved break, watch some nostalgic movies (Die Hard and Home Alone are my top picks), reflect on the points mentioned above, and come back next year to continue buidl buidl buidl, looking firmly ahead without looking back.

Happy holidays! 🎄