Polkadot 2022 Annual Summary and 2023 Outlook

Against the backdrop of the cryptocurrency industry falling into winter, the Polkadot community was busy in 2022 building and launching the world's largest and most diverse Layer 1 blockchain ecosystem, and introduced several core technologies in preparation for 2023.

Looking back over the past year, the Polkadot ecosystem has witnessed many noteworthy events. Let's review some important trends and milestones of Polkadot in 2022.

The Birth of the Web3 Pioneer Ecosystem

In just over a year since the launch of the parallel chain at the end of 2021, Polkadot has become the largest and most diverse dedicated Layer 1 blockchain and application ecosystem, being the only ecosystem fully protected by a shared set of validators, benefiting from secure, trustless cross-chain interoperability.

A total of 74 parachains have won auctions on Polkadot or Kusama, supporting over 300 applications. Approximately 550 projects have been launched or are being developed for Polkadot, marking an impressive start for the first year of parachain launches.

More than 200 teams have launched or are building dedicated blockchains on Polkadot's technology stack, recognizing that this model is more suitable for their needs than smart contract solutions, and that Polkadot offers shorter time to market, lower building costs, and the scalability and interoperability necessary for continuous innovation.

The Polkadot community contributed over 130 million DOT and nearly 300,000 KSM through crowdloans to support the bidding for parachains, demonstrating great confidence in the future of the Polkadot ecosystem.

The Polkadot ecosystem encompasses all possibilities of blockchain technology, from social media to supply chain, identity, gaming, tokenization of real-world assets, carbon credits, privacy, robotics, IoT, and more.

This year's breakthrough events in the ecosystem include:

• Smart contract parallel chains collaborate with a mobile phone operator to invest 4 billion dollars to promote Web3 adoption.
• NFT parachain collaborates with a gaming giant to develop Polkadot-powered NFTs for a well-known game series.
• A parallel chain leading real-world assets into on-chain DeFi has secured $220 million in investment.
• The privacy hub parallel chain has completed the largest trusted setup in history for zero-knowledge technology.

A decentralized social network protocol has announced its initial deployment on Polkadot, ushering in a new era for social media. The music industry has also seen some significant innovations on Polkadot, creating a music NFT marketplace.

Polkadot's decentralized identity parachain has gained some influential adoption through partnerships with multiple projects.

The DeFi community of Polkadot has also been greatly boosted this year due to the integration of stablecoins and the launch of decentralized exchanges.

With an unmatched tech stack in flexibility, scalability, upgradability, and security, Polkadot is proving to be the ideal place for all-encompassing rapid growth Web3 opportunities.

Leading the True Path to Decentralization

In 2022, Polkadot made significant strides towards becoming the most decentralized, trustless, and unstoppable Web3 ecosystem.

Polkadot has been gradually increasing its level of decentralization and eliminating centralized areas that could become bottlenecks, making it one of the largest true DAOs in existence.

The year 2022 witnessed the launch of Polkadot's next-generation governance system OpenGov for the first time on Kusama. OpenGov is the most advanced and complex blockchain governance system designed to date, eliminating the centralized council role and decentralizing the entire governance process of the network to a community-driven referendum system.

The Polkadot Fellowship was also launched this year, which is an important component of OpenGov. The Fellowship is a decentralized, on-chain, ranked group of technical experts that replaces the technical committee and provides a knowledge base for the Polkadot community.

Due to these efforts to achieve true decentralization, a certain foundation announced in November 2022 that DOT has transitioned from a security to software after a 3-year collaboration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, marking a milestone achievement in realizing Web3.

Polkadot is driving the industry's most advanced light client technology, allowing users to no longer rely on third-party node services to check data and interact with features hosted on Polkadot or any Substrate-based chain.

The staking system of the Polkadot network also underwent some key upgrades in 2022, including a nomination pool that increases the opportunity for local staking on Polkadot by reducing the minimum staking amount to 1 DOT, further achieving decentralization and trustlessness.

Unstoppable Innovation

In 2022, Polkadot completed 15 seamless, non-fork upgrades, demonstrating an unparalleled pace of innovation in the blockchain field, totaling nearly 50 to date. In contrast, a certain blockchain completed 3 upgrades via hard forks in 2022 and 4 in 2021. Considering that in the non-blockchain world, a tech giant conducted 16 upgrades to its operating system in 2022, Polkadot's ease of upgrading is on par with more traditional software updates, ensuring that technology can continue to evolve at an innovative speed. So far, nearly 1000 non-fork upgrades have been completed on blockchains based on Polkadot technology.

The parallel chain underwent a significant upgrade on May 4, when Polkadot governance upgraded the relay chain to v0.9.19, unlocking secure cross-chain data transfer with XCM. The launch of XCM on Polkadot showcased the magic of secure cross-consensus bridges to the world. Coupled with the upcoming XCMv3, this will address the "weakest link" issue that plagued the previous generation of bridge technology, which resulted in losses of $2.5 billion just last year.

The parallel chain team did not waste time using XCM, opening more than 100 channels and sending 10,000 messages within the first month. So far, more than 160,000 XCM messages have been sent on Polkadot alone, and over 200,000 messages have been sent on Kusama, ushering in a new era of secure cross-chain interoperability.

v0.9.19 also signifies the true launch of Statemint. Users can now mint assets including NFTs and transfer DOT to the relay chain or transfer it out from the relay chain, thereby providing essential functionality for the ecosystem.

This year, the second system parachain of Polkadot, Collectives, was launched, enabling people to organize and act as a group without trusting a third party, which is an important feature of Web3. The first such collective initiated is the Polkadot Alliance, a community initiative aimed at recognizing positive contributions to the ecosystem and establishing a code of ethics around misconduct.

One of the most active and ever-evolving developer communities in Web3

Polkadot development reached a historic high in 2022. Polkadot peaked at nearly 2,500 monthly active developers in 2022, remaining one of the most active developer communities outside of any blockchain throughout the year.

Substrate Builders Program (SBP) guides builders to initiate projects and received 32 new teams from 127 application pools in 2022. So far, 60% of Polkadot's parachains have become part of the SBP.

In order to support the developer community of Polkadot, a foundation's funding program has exceeded its 400th project milestone this year, distributing 150 new grants in 2022, receiving 267 applications, and ultimately delivering 230 funded projects.

Polkadot's decentralized on-chain treasury has also disbursed a record amount of DOT this year to support projects that benefit the network's development. To date, over 4 million DOT has been paid to teams and individuals supporting the ecosystem, up from around 200,000 at the end of 2021.

2022 was also the founding year of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA). The first session was held at a certain university this summer, with a total of 55 students selected from 560 applicants. This program has achieved great success, with many promising developers starting their Web3 journey and being employed to work in the Polkadot ecosystem after graduation.

The second phase of PBA in 2023 is about to kick off, to be held in January in collaboration with 12 universities in the Latin American region at a certain university. The number of applicants for the second phase reached nearly 800 in less than a month, reflecting the particularly high interest in Polkadot in the region.

Looking Ahead

With the accomplishments of 2022 and everything coming in 2023, the future of Polkadot looks bright! This year, the founder of Polkadot has set a new vision for technology development, which will be launched in 2023 if approved by Polkadot governance.

Important upgrades in 2023 include:

• Launch OpenGov on Polkadot
• Asynchronous support could enable Polkadot to process over 1 million transactions per second.
• XCMv3 will unlock trustless cross-ecosystem bridging with XCM, as well as NFT transfers and remote locking.
• The introduction of parallel threads and other scheduling methods allows the blockchain to launch on Polkadot while bypassing the auction process.
• The continuous maturation of Polkadot's Wasm smart contract ecosystem

The outlook for the broader Polkadot ecosystem in 2023 is also very strong, with a large number of projects set to launch their custom parachains in a wide range of use cases over the coming months. Given that parachains on Polkadot have only been running for an average of about 6 months, we will also see these existing projects mature in 2023. The Polkadot ecosystem is just getting started, and 2023 is sure to be an exciting year for the community!