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

Hello! The atmosphere of Christmas is getting stronger...

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

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

I build the stage, you perform

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

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

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

In fact, the transaction volume on the parachain increased by about 300% during the year, from just over 10 million transactions per month to November of nearly 40 million transactions. On-chain event volume (another measure of on-chain activity) has shown a similar growth trend. Origin Trail’s Neuroweb has been particularly impressive 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) came online this year and supports 100 million users, currently processing about 10 million per month transaction. Phala, Litentry, and Mythos also contributed a significant share to the growth of Polkadot’s total transaction volume, taking it to 40 million transactions per month.

As a recent Electric Capital report pointed out, Polkadot's SDK still ranks among the top three open source developers in the blockchain technology stack. Of course, this does not include EVM-based development in the Polkadot ecosystem such as Moonbeam and Phala, nor does it include some closed-source JAM implementations. If these are included, these additional 100+ developers could further boost Polkadot’s ranking.

You can’t completely trust humans

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

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

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

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

Sub0 Reset is far from the only impressive event this year. Earlier this year, we hosted another popular Sub0 conference. Flagship event Decoded returned to Brussels this summer with great success. 2024 also marks the return of the Web3 Summit after five years, still retaining its slightly "rebellious" atmosphere and its highly regarded venue, Berlin's Funkhaus.

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

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

Polkadot, as popular as Coldplay

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

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

About $120 million in assets are controlled by DOT holders under the management of its own OpenGov, and roughly the same amount has been spent this year. OpenGov has launched a staggering 1,350 referendums. With the enhancement of voting delegation capabilities , we are seeing an increase in the number of DOTs involved in decisions on each proposal and the average voting strength as more people are willing to lock more DOTs to have their voice in network decisions. For more information, Please refer to Parity The year-end report prepared by the DotLake team https://data.parity.io/opengov_report.pdf

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

Polkadot Core Alliance (Fellowship), as the main expert organization of the Polkadot protocol, has nearly 100 members, which has doubled since the establishment of these organizations (such as Fellowship) in the middle of last year. It is now possible to use your own treasury to pay for projects and expenses. One of my personally most anticipated features this year has finally been implemented: multi-asset treasury, the ability to hold foreign currency reserves in the network treasury (or any sub-treasury). Currently, Polkadot. The network holds not only DOT, but also large amounts of USDC and USDT (not to mention "DED"?), and regularly uses Hydration to automatically trade currencies, often in the form of stablecoins to pay for treasury spending proposals. We are now ready to have a full treasury spending proposal. An autonomous Polkadot sovereign wealth fund. In addition, Fellowship can now independently manage monthly salary payments and pay them in USDT

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

Everything is possible

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

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

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

Operate as efficiently as a "power loom"

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

Group by AmforcThe organization- and treasury-funded test event called “Spammening” took place live on the Kusama network in December. This test demonstrates the extreme performance of the Kusama network in a real-world environment (kudos to Jay!). As the first truly decentralized network of value, Kusama achieved sustained rates of over 100,000 transactions per second (actually reaching 143,343 TPS) while using only a quarter of Kusama’s core computing resources. While there is still room for network and compute optimizations, our goal is clear: even if you are "only" looking for performance, Polkadot is the best choice. (Plus, you get best-in-class resilience, multi-chain connectivity, and the flexibility of modular blockchains as added benefits!)

Cross-chain interoperability Sex is like building Lego

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

Unlike other bridging mechanisms, Polkadot's bridging mechanism is completely trustless and programmable, and does not hand over cross-chain transferred assets to a small number of (usually not Responsible) stakeholder controls are also not limited to specific hard-coded functionality.

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

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

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

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

This app is really addictive

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

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

This app is an easy-to-use non-custodial wallet that supports DOT, KSM and USDT/C. By utilizing the native features of iOS/Android to protect and back up keys, users are prevented from falling into "mnemonic land."Jail". It also integrates a username registrar, ensuring every user gets a memorable name to receive funds, and supports one-click staking through Polkadot's staking pool. Transfer fees are almost negligible and can be used Stable currency payment, combined with legal currency entry and exit channels such as Magic Ramp, makes this application a highly flexible decentralized payment system

The most amazing. Yes, it will work with Polkadot Pay Integrated as a payment channel, allowing users’ wallet funds to be used directly to pay for goods and services at millions of stores and merchants across the U.S. And, unlike other crypto payment options, the app not only eliminates credit card transaction fees, but also pays for them every time. Get rewarded when you spend!

Easy as Sunday morning

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

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

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

Polkadot 2: Changes that started with a small contract written casually

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

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

A two-pronged approach

One ​​of the "big three" upgrades launched in 2024 is asynchronous support (Asynchronous Backing), which is an ongoing project throughout Polkadot The optimization of the technology stack introduces pipeline technology into the process of providing security for new parachain blocks. Through this optimization, the two independent functions of the Polkadot security system - correctness guarantee and data availability, can be carried out simultaneously, thus Change the standard block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds

With this change, we also increased the time of the correctness assurance phase by approximately 400%, making Polkadot 2.0 managed. The overall throughput of the blockchain has increased by approximately 10 times compared to Polkadot 1.0. This has significantly improved the transaction capabilities of the Polkadot managed blockchain and significantly reduced the cost of each transaction in the ecosystem, making Polkadot more efficient. Becoming a more attractive platform for building and deploying blockchain projects

The secret recipe is time

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

The changes in Agile Coretime have changed DOT. The purpose of the token; crowdlending and mortgage auctions were abolished and replaced with a highly flexible market where consumers can respond quickly as needed while keeping costs predictable. This adjustment of the economic model is a strong example of how Polkadot can be highly flexible. Decentralization, still has the willingness and ability to adapt to changing environments

A new era of multi-core expansion

With Polkadot The chains of the ecosystem are no longer limited by the old "one parallel chain corresponds to oneThe "slot, one core" model opens up more possibilities for the use of Polkadot core time this year. Short-cycle chains are possible; chains that run on demand are possible; chains that share core time are also possible. However, perhaps the most interesting The direction of development is multi-core scaling, 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, Polkadot Hub will run three times as fast as the Polkadot Relay Chain, confirming a full block every 2 seconds instead of the regular 6 seconds. This increases data and computing bandwidth by three times. times, providing an unprecedented upgrade path for teams focusing on future scalability. There are even higher-frequency attempts, such as Basti (a fellow at level six) testing the first 500 millisecond Substrate. chain, which generates 12 times the number of blocks per second than the current chain.

What is even more exciting is that elastic expansion (Elastic) will be developed in 2024. Scaling) and planned for 2025 deployed. This technology further advances the paradigm of multi-core scaling, allowing the chain to run at low cost during low usage and scale dynamically during peak usage periods, with flexibility by acquiring more core time and confirming blocks more frequently. Responding to changing needs

More than superficial definitions

Polkadot 2.0’s technological changes clearly help. Polkadot Maximizing its utility, but perhaps equally important is the conceptual work that allows us, and everyone who comes into contact with Polkadot, to better understand its functionality and value.

The new conceptual framework proposed and discussed this year was proposed by Shawn Tabrizi (Fellow at level 6). Polkadot Traditionally avoiding defining itself as a cryptocurrency or blockchain, preferring to present itself in terms of a multi-chain ecosystem narrative, this definition is justified, however. Defining Polkadot solely in these terms results in a limited view that ignores the potential value above and below the parachain level. This narrow definition obscures strategic direction and makes it difficult to identify or explain certain paths to value creation.

Hub/Cloud Dualism is the answer to the "parallel chain community""An alternative narrative to the narrative that helps us focus on the true core value proposition of Polkadot from an intellectual and market perspective. This metaphor serves as a conceptual framework that helps us better understand all work on Polkadot in the past, present, and future , features, ideas, and developments that fit into it and ultimately make Polkadot more relevant in the market and the world

This metaphor separates Polkadot into two symbiotic products. Part: One to Polkadot Centered on unstoppable computing resources generated by validators and their protocols, this is called the Polkadot Cloud and powers the initial Polkadot parachain product. The other is the Polkadot Hub, which features services based on various system chains. The service is built on top of the original product). Although the two are symbiotic, both products have independent utility and their usage fees are paid through DOT.

Specifically, Polkadot The core of the cloud right now is coretime and all its potential uses. Hosting Polkadot SDK-based chains (i.e. parachains) is the first big use case for coretime, and Parity plans to launch other use cases in 2025 when the Polkadot Bulletin comes. After the launch of Chain and Small-Statements Hub, its cloud services will be expanded to the field of data distribution. In addition, JAM. The 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.

< p style="text-align: left;">The Polkadot hub, on the other hand, is actually a convergence point for community and direct interaction. It provides a highly consistent and often synchronized collaboration and composition for people, teams, and their logic. Platform. The core of the Hub is the Plaza project (this year, it is composed of Level 6 Fellow Rob Habermeier proposed), which is an advanced, Polkadot-native permissionless, low-cost and fast smart contract system. All functions on the official Polkadot chain will be conveniently provided in the hub, including the staking system, governance and collectives. Identity and personality, all tokens and NFTs, and all cross-chain bridges can be combined with smart contracts

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

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

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

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

Hidden dangers

As our social interaction patterns become more and more ingrained Operating 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 in the Web2 era, such as verification codes, email/SMS verification, and even issued ID cards, are gradually becoming victims of generative AI and malicious forces. existDuring a recent election, at least 66,000 unique accounts were found to be controlled by a single stakeholder who also had 10 million followers. Despite the old saying: “Truth is not determined by majority vote,” modern (social) media relies almost entirely on popularity to distinguish truth from fiction. False information that appears to have strong support can be enough to convince many people that it is true, significantly distorting the democratic process.

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

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

That’s why we launched our vision for Proof-of-(Polite-)Personhood earlier this year. This compute-intensive logic is hosted on Polkadot, but takes advantage of Polkadot’s extreme trustless connectivity (provided via Snowbridge and Hyperbridge), making the service available across Web3 and even by extension Web2.

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

Polkadot 3.0: Can you stop jamming?

Although our Hub and Cloud paradigm isThe foundation for Polkadot 2.0, but it also provides a conceptual framework for understanding the next chapter in Polkadot’s journey, the transition from the relay chain to the JAM protocol. JAM is the foundation for the next generation of Polkadot cloud services.

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

Gray Paper has been revised many times and is now close to a stable version. The current version is 0.5.3. It is expected that the 0.5 series will be completed at the beginning of the new year and will be released in 2020. The target version of 1.0 will be reached in the first half of next year. Unlike the Polkadot relay chain, which has only one primary implementation (and two partially functional secondary implementations), there are currently 35 teams building implementations of JAM using 15 programming languages. Their code is not yet publicly available, but it is expected to be available next year. They are motivated by the JAM Implementation Prize, the largest programming prize in history, totaling tens of millions of dollars.

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

So this year we launch an industry first: 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 are able to deploy a full-scale JAM network, combined with debugging and analysis software, to conduct in-depth testing and optimization of the protocol and its implementation to ensure that theoretical predictions of a globally scaled network match actual performance.

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

Starting now

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

Another important project that will be promoted in 2025 is to migrate the logic currently embedded in the Polkadot relay chain runtime into an independently upgradeable JAM service. . This paves the way for the Polkadot JAM chain to replace the current Polkadot relay chain as the hosting structure of the blockchain ecosystem. Over time, the Polkadot Blockchain Escrow Service (codenamed Beta) will expand functionality to include new JAM-specific features for the blockchain, such as Accords (allowing trustless interaction between two sovereign blockchains) and dynamic metering. metering) (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. The project, codenamed Mu, will prototype a low-latency, high-throughput multi-currency payment system, targeting sustained rates of one million transactions per second across JAM’s multiple cores.

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

A strong sense of fear

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

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

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

This is a blast

We can think of JAM as a "cryptoeconomic silicon chip" ”, which transforms raw materials of economic value and real-world computing resources into a supercomputer that is uncontrolled by no one in the real world, but 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 at the core of its vision.

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

In short, we need a feasible long-term (5-year) plan to make the Polkadot service not only operational. In a by JAM It can run on multiple—or even many—supercomputers.

To borrow what Delenn said about the White Star battleship in "Babylon 5", thePolkadot supercomputer was never intended to be the only one, it would be just the first. a. The goal of the Polkadot cloud is to have multiple such JAM supercomputers to form a JAM Grid. While the grid's security is all guaranteed by the same DOT staking security mechanism, each JAM hosts its own service. Just as a single JAM creates a supercomputer that no one controls, a JAM grid transforms similar resources into a cohesive cluster of supercomputers... also controlled by no one in the Internet world. This is an important part of the future of the 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 not only scales to cores within a single JAM supercomputer, but can be further extended using cores from other supercomputers in the JAM grid.

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

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

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

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

Polkadot’s 2025 begins. As with all wrap-up articles like this, there are too many worthy mentions to include here: for that, my deepest apologies to all the projects and people working tirelessly around us to help us realize a true Web3 future.

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

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