Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood released the Polkadot Annual Summary on Sunday (24th), mentioning the development of technology and ecosystem, community and developer activities for 2023, as well as the technological progress to be made 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 every month without the need for trust.
Wood also stated that the final release of Polkadot 1.0 in July represents the completion of the relay chain functionality in Polkadot, in accordance with the original vision document. He said, “Related article: ‘Polkadot Founder Gavin Wood Proposes Abandoning ‘Slot Auction’ Model, Introducing ‘Core Time’ Framework to Build a Flexible Version of Polkadot’.”
Wood stated that 2024 will be a busy year for Polkadot, with four key infrastructure components to be implemented: Agile Core Time, On-Demand Parachains, Ethereum Snowbridge (cross-chain technology connecting Polkadot and Ethereum), and Kusama Bridge (technology connecting Polkadot and Kusama). In addition, Elastic Scaling is the fifth major technology expected to be realized 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, is in its early stages and is expected to be used in the testnet starting in 2024.
With the rise of tokens from emerging public chains such as Solana, Avalanche, and NEAR, the ecosystem tokens of Polkadot have also experienced a general uptrend. Within two months, the price of Polkadot’s native token, DOT, increased from around $4.1 to $9, with a gain of over 110%. Tokens from several well-known Polkadot parachains, Moonbeam, Astar Network, and Acala, also saw gains of over 180%, 115%, and 140%, respectively, during the same period.
Price trend of DOT token in 2023 (source: TradingView)
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