Polkadot Decoded makes impressive gains in reach after successful hybrid event

Polkadot Decoded, the annual two-day conference for the Polkadot community, has demonstrated impressive growth and adoption metrics amid significant sustained interest in its decentralized sharded protocol despite the threat of a looming ‘Crypto Winter.’

Taking place for the first time with in-person audiences across Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York, and Hangzhou, this year’s Polkadot Decoded provided much enhanced engagement and networking opportunities when compared to the two previous editions, which had been held as online-only events due to pandemic restrictions.

With hundreds of people eagerly absorbing key ecosystem news in the four main locations, huge numbers also picked up online streams. Twitter proved a particularly popular platform through which to view the talks, with 265,000 unique viewers accessing Decoded content this way.

In addition, around 37,000 viewers watched via other social media platforms or through the registered streaming service, which delivered free proof-of attendance NFTs to attendees.

By comparison, the previous year’s single-day conference, one of the best-attended blockchain conferences of 2021, had just 12,300 online attendees in all.

Inevitably, the focal interest was around the two keynote speeches provided by Polkadot co-founder Dr Gavin Wood. He arrived on stage in Buenos Aires to a chorus of excitable cheering, and gave an energetic talk on the ecosystem’s upcoming governance changes, which will allow for a more democratic and decentralized decision-making process.

Dr Wood then flew to New York in time for a closing speech detailing the roadmap for XCM, Polkadot’s cross-consensus messaging service which has been adopted with great enthusiasm by Polkadot’s parachains.

Adoption milestones

The Decoded conference announced several major technical and adoption milestones for Polkadot. The network recently surpassed 550 total teams building in the ecosystem, with the Web3 Foundation grants program, which supports Polkadot projects, surpassing 400 approved grants. Polkadot currently has 1,400 monthly active developers, a +75% increase year-over-year and more than any other Web3 protocol outside of Ethereum. The Polkadot codebase also surpassed 500+ core contributors across Polkadot and Substrate repositories.

XCM: Latest statistics

Polkadot’s cross-chain interoperability technology has also seen significant adoption. Just weeks after the launch of XCM, Polkadot’s cross-chain and cross-consensus communication standard, parachain teams have already opened 84 messaging channels between themselves and are already sending approximately 10,000 messages per month.

Key announcements at Polkadot Decoded

Substrate Marketplace was launched. This is a hub for the “pallets” or modular building blocks that allow builders in the Polkadot or Kusama ecosystems to easily design their bespoke blockchains.

In addition to the open-source pallets natively included with Polkadot’s Substrate blockchain framework, developers can now browse those developed by the community and offered back to the community under various open-source licenses, with nearly 100 available at launch.

Among the other announcements to come out of Polkadot Decoded were:

• An advanced active learning algorithm that provides individual recommendations to nominators in Polkadot’s staking system, based on the first scientific studies ever funded by the Polkadot Treasury, announced by Web3 Foundation researcher Jonas Gehrlein.
• The team behind Project Liberty’s Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), a project from Frank McCourt, announced the launch of an upcoming Polkadot parachain, Frequency, which will be dedicated to decentralized social media.
• Discussing how Polkadot can foster decentralized sustainability innovation, Adam Carver of Bitgreen announced the launch of a $100 million dollar renewables project fund in central Africa, and announced a partnership with the Sequester project to convert a percentage of Polkadot transaction fees into carbon credits
• Ingo Rübe of KILT Protocol announced AssetDIDs (a new type of identifier that can be used with multiple asset classes) with a deep dive on the implications for NFTs and XCM use cases.
• Derek Yoo of Moonbeam revealed details of an upcoming collaboration with Uniswap
• Astar announced the launch of Wasm (WebAssembly) smart contract functionality

Governance milestones

Polkadot’s governance system has also hit several important milestones, with over 100 forkless, automatic upgrades having been made across Polkadot and Kusama, and more than 1,400 engaged governance participants voting on recent referenda, demonstrating the strength of future proof innovation on the networks. In total, there have been 621 forkless upgrades across all Substrate-based blockchains, including Polkadot and Kusama parachains. The Polkadot Treasury has funded spending proposals to the tune of over 1.4 million DOT, while the Kusama treasury has paid out nearly 130k KSM.

Media inquiries: press@parity.io