Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood released the Polkadot Annual Summary on Sunday (24th), mentioning the technical and ecosystem developments in 2023, community and developer activities, and the technical advancements to be promoted in 2024.
Regarding ecosystem development, Wood pointed out that there are already 90 parachains and over 580 ecosystem projects in the Polkadot and Kusama networks, with 300 being decentralized applications and 190 being Substrate-based blockchains. Polkadot currently operates 50 active parachain cores, with 17,000 XCM messages securely transmitted between them each month without trust.
Wood also stated that the final release of Polkadot 1.0 in July represents the completion of the relay chain functionality in Polkadot, aligning with the original vision document. He said:
Related article: “Polkadot founder Gavin Wood proposes to abandon the ‘slot auction’ model and introduce the ‘core time’ framework to create a flexible version of Polkadot.”
Five major technological advancements
Wood stated that 2024 will be a busy year for Polkadot, with four key infrastructures set to be implemented: agile core time, On-Demand Parachains, Ethereum Snowbridge, and Kusama bridge. Additionally, Elastic Scaling is the fifth major technology he expects to achieve next year.
Wood also anticipates the expansion of Polkadot’s DAO underlying products next year, including new Fellowships, multi-asset sub-treasuries, expanded XCM, and other new primitives under development. He also noted that Polkadot’s new non-forking block production consensus algorithm Sassafras has taken shape and is expected to be used in the test network starting in 2024.
With the emergence of tokens from new public chains like Solana, Avalanche, and NEAR skyrocketing, Polkadot ecosystem tokens have also seen a general uptrend. Within two months, the price of Polkadot’s native token DOT rose from around $4.1 to $9, an increase of over 110%. Tokens from prominent Polkadot parachains like Moonbeam, Astar Network, and Acala also saw increases of over 180%, 115%, and 140% respectively during the same period.
(Data source)
Price trend of DOT token in 2023 (Source: TradingView)
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