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Gavin Wood's year-end summary: Polkadot is already the second largest DeFi ecosystem, and it will gradually be compatible with Ethereum next year

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Substrate 3.0 version, or will be released in the first half of next year, gradually compatible with Ethereum

Original title: "Gavin Wood's personal letter: Polkadot summary in 2020"

Original source: Gavin Wood

It's been a tough year for pretty much everyone (except maybe Amazon and Food Delivery), but the Polkadot network and community are sailing off in 2020 without a hitch. Now that we're at the end of 2020, for better or worse, let's take a look at what we've achieved and what we plan to do in 2021...

I tend to start my wrap-up with some stats, and this year looks to be no different. Development continues at a rapid pace, with the Rust codebase already at over half a million lines of code. Of the 577 kLOCs, about half are in the Substrate repository, which was hard-forked by more than 1,000 Github users and collected 3,515 stars from developers around the world (although about three one from the US and China). In the 3 years the code has existed, almost 5000 separate improvements have been made. There are now over 2,600 developers on the Substrate tech channel (https://riot.im/app/#/room/!HzySYSaIhtyWrwiwEV:matrix.org), up from less than 1,000 at the beginning of the year nearly 2 times.

In 2020, there are Funding of more than $14 million was allocated to more than 200 funded projects. Since launching the governance program just a few months ago, Polkadot’s treasury has funded 23 proposals totaling 118,465.63 DOT (worth about $7 million at current prices). During the year or so that Kusama was active, its treasury funded 40 proposals at the same time, awarding a total of 62222.92 KSM (worth about $3.4 million at current prices). Additionally, $4.1 million has been distributed across 145 proposals as part of the Web3 Foundation's ongoing grant program. Of course, there are also more and more Polkadot-centric ecosystem funds ready to support large-scale projects.

Web3 Foundation Grant Project's global project

1.02 billion DOT in Polkadot is worth approximately $6 billion at press time , of which about 3.7 billion USD (61%) is locked in the staking system, and an annual rate of return of about 14.1% can be obtained. In just 6 months, Polkadot has become the #1 network with capital value as collateral. An additional 10.4 million DOTs (approximately $60 million at current valuations) are held in the Polkadot treasury for major proposals and will grow at an annual rate of approximately 1.6 million DOTs (approximately $9.2 million), partially funded by Based on Polkadot's 10% annual base inflation rate.

Mainnet launch

While there have been many releases in our ecosystem in 2020, the most notable one has certainly been Polkadot itself, which has been rolled out smoothly and in stages. In May of this year, we unveiled Polkadot’s release roadmap, a preview of what’s to come, and the first episode of Polkadot: Behind the Code, about how we got there. From the beginning of the process (to the initial sale participants), then running as a proof-of-authority (PoA) chain, and then Polkadot evolved into an NPoS network, first permissionless, and later through decentralized voting to let the network shi xian transfer money .

This process really showcases the power of Substrate's incredible Webassembly-based meta-protocol , allowing for seamless upgrades over time, which changes the fundamental nature of the network and allows high-value networks like Polkadot to be rolled out in incremental, low-risk steps.

On the eve of the launch of the Polkadot network, it was quite an exciting DOT split. is on a fledgling network. Let the community come together to decide on the split denomination of DOT tokens, the indivisible unit of Polkadot - Planck. Subsequently, the network started transfer and split days came one after another, and Polkadot's native DOT tokens began to be in the top 10 positions by market value.

After a smooth launch, Polkadot has been steadily increasing the size of its validators since launch The initial number of 197 people will increase by 1 person every 24 hours. With 274 validators, run by approximately 200 independent operators, and supported by more than 7,000 personally designated accounts, Polkadot is arguably the most decentralized high-value network in existence.

There have of course been other releases in the past 12 months. Notable are the releases of two versions of Westend, Polkadot’s main long-term valueless testnet, and Rococo, Polkadot’s short-term parachain public testnet.

But this year has not been smooth sailing from the beginning! Kusama's first adventure took place on January 6th, shortly after its own release, and it certainly set us up for the excitement to come: a botched upgrade that required us to fast-track back to the future before catching up with reality." Rewind time" to fix the problem. Thankfully, we never had to repeat Polkadot's slightly "mixed" experience.

Finance, governance and decentralization

This year, the first Polkadot treasury proposals were submitted and approved, making Polkadot a heavyweight in the world of DAOs and on-chain governance (despite all the credit All credit to Kusama for blazing this particular path). Between the rename vote, validator set size increase votes and active discussions on Element and Polkaassembly, it's clear to see a healthy community interest in the future of Polkadot.

DOTs will be burned slowly, so let this be a call to action! Make some great proposals to Polkadot, and if the elected council agrees, Polkadot will fund you!

About staking, although we are the largest staking platform, we will not stop there forward. After its success on Kusama, the 1000 validator project (known to receive "1KVP") has been launched on Polkadot and is financially supported by the Web3 Foundation DOT. The number of validators on Kusama has reached 700 and is now heading towards 900, we hope Polkadot can follow the same trajectory while remaining decentralized with the help of this plan. The goal of 100 parachains requires at least 1000 validators, which is a cornerstone of the Web3 Foundation's mission to successfully manage the Polkadot ecosystem.

In addition to 1 KVP, the Web3 Foundation has recently deployed its initial automated identity registration service. This identity service is cheap, efficient, and highly recommended for validators, council members, and proposers to help build a little reputation. It, along with content provided in other communities, may also provide a bit of marketing optimization competition.

Building bridges

Although Polkadot is first and foremost a heterogeneous "shard" multi-chain. One of Polkadot's main goals is to facilitate interoperability, whether between its own parachain "shards" or with non-Polkadot-native chains and platforms.

Ethereum remains a key system in smart contract development, both as a network and as a Development Platform. In order to facilitate better interoperability and compatibility between the two ecosystems (and avoid teams committing to one or the other), we have invested our time and energy in several projects that have already been launched in 2020 The year bears fruit.

Frontier is the codename for Parity's Ethereum-Substrate compatibility project, which has recently reached an initial level of feature completion. As of the end of 2020, Frontier allows any Substrate chain (and thus Polkadot parachains) to appear, most importantly, as an Ethereum chain. Specifically, it can host EVM smart contracts and any tool that uses Web3 RPC (such as Metamask and Truffle). Beyond that, there is compatibility at the genesis state level, and there is even an additional "precompiled" contract that allows EVM smart contracts to interact with the rest of Substrate (so, in the case of Polkadot parachains).

This compatibility means that projects such as Moonbeam and Acala can provide full Ethereum compatibility while still being derived from Polkadot.

In addition to this compatibility, two cross-chain bridges are already actively being developed in 2020 , both expected to launch in early 2020: a mainnet for Bitcoin (BTC) developed by Interlay and another for Ethereum by Snowfork, which also has a collaborative research team from the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technology's bridge development team collaborated. The latter has undergone some very important design changes, allowing it to securely transmit arbitrary smart contract messages between Ethereum and Polkadot, not just tokens.

Substrate, Cumulus and Parachains

This fall, Substrate 2.0, the long-awaited update to the Parity blockchain development platform, was released. A series of important reforms followed, perhaps the most important of which was the introduction of off-chain worker machines, a framework that allows on-chain (and thus transparent, expensive, and deterministic) logic to seamlessly integrate, schedule, and interact, Off-chain (thus opaque, cheap and non-deterministic) logic. This opens the door to all kinds of opportunities, from oracles and drives, to backend storage, encryption and more.

Although often the unsung hero, over the past year Parity has been developing Many important tools to help Substrate users use these tools in real world integration, deployment and testing. Sidecar, TxWrapper, Substrate Archive, and SubXt are all good examples of bringing Substrate (and every Polkadot parachain) into the ecosystem.

Earlier this year, we launched the first "v0" version of Rococo, the Parachain testnet. This starts with three basic currency parachains, one of which is quickly upgraded to a Wasm smart contract parachain through on-chain upgrade magic. Subsequently, a number of community teams started deploying their own parachain testnets, and eventually more than a dozen teams joined the group and happily used Rococo's interoperability to message each other.

Two different community parachains communicate with each other in a trustless way through Rococo v0

On September 12th of this year, the first successful Asset transfer between chains. This demonstrates not only a new message format, but also a new way to allow chains to communicate with each other and integrate their native services into the format without compromising its ease of use, flexibility sex or code complexity. Compared to already existing interoperability formats such as ERC-20, XCM offers a significantly increased set of expressivities, including not only basic token transfers, but also inter-chain routing, scripting and swapping, arbitrary assets and An underlying trust model, as you might expect from the first layer-zero blockchain platform.

Following the launch and success of Rococo v0, Rococo v1 was launched a few days ago as A seasonal gift for the community. Cumulus is also in the initial stages of full functionality, ready to be used with the new Rococo testnet and "parachain v1" code. It starts with some basic parachains and induces community chains, which are expected to start in the new year.

Polkadot has more than 100 parachains under development, and more than 50 are looking for full parallel chain slots, so a thriving community in Rococo v1 is probably to be expected.

Community and Events

What a year it has been for community events. While most of the activity was online (the Web3 forum in Shanghai was a notable exception), the quantity and quality of online activity was astounding. In Asia alone, we have hosted more than 70 online and offline events and presentations with the community and local partners. In 2020, we have published more than 1,000 articles, news, and videos related to Polkadot/Kusama/Substrate, achieving a cumulative million views. The trip to China in 3 cities attracted more than 700 Polkadot enthusiasts to learn about each parachain.

The first Polkadot/Kusama hackathon, Hackusama, was launched and was a huge success. Two Sub0 developer online conferences were also held, successfully spreading knowledge and understanding about the Substrate platform and its incredible builder community, with the second session attracting around 1500 attendees.

Over 300 developers are currently enrolled in our popular month-long Substrate developer courses, most of which are graduates. This has already happened in three separate cohorts and we will continue this program into 2021 with a fourth cohort already underway.

Web 3.0 training camp has successfully incubated a number of teams and led them through the first round of financing. In 2020, 13 teams completed the project, and 8 projects raised about $10 million from VC funds in China, the UK, the US, and Europe. Teams at most bootcamps formed significant partnerships with other builders during the project, and organized many community events with more established entities such as the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies.

The two biggest events last year were the Web3 Forum and Polkadot Decode. The Web3 Forum was an impressive live conference in Shanghai. The event lasted for two days and attracted more than 500 guests. More than 70 well-known guests including Dr. Xiao Feng, chairman of Wanxiang Blockchain, and He Yifan, executive director of BSN, expressed their views and opinions. The forum also provides a bridge for communication and cooperation between different teams.

Polkadot Decode is an online event and the largest single-protocol zone in 2020 The blockchain conference is also the first community conference since the launch of Polkadot. The video attracted over 7,000 signups, over 4,500 views, and counting. We are already planning Decode 2.0 and talking to those who submitted proposals.

TEAM AND PROJECT

In the past 12 months, many projects in the community have had output worthy of our attention . LimeChain released their first proof of concept for Subsembly, a framework for building Substrate and parachain runtime environments in AssemblyScript, for AssemblyScript enthusiasts to use their favorite language to compile lightweight, fast parallel The chain opens a door.

Equilibrium released their publication of IPFS integration for Substrate off-chain workers ( Cleverly named offchain::ipfs). This basically lets you pin your Substrate blockchain (and by extension Polkadot parachains) in IPFS, and store and retrieve data from runtime code to the vast global storage network.

Another interesting recent release is the Metamask plugin for Polkadot released by Node Factory . However, Metamask can now be used without modification for any Substrate-based chain that can use an Ethereum-compatible Frontier layer. This project takes another approach, using snaps (a plugin) to fix Metamask to work directly with Substrate's RPC.

In fact, the Polkadot community now consists of over 100 teams and projects covering a wide range of uses. There are over 30 teams in China alone architecting systems, projects and components for the Polkadot ecosystem. Many of these are household names active in the community and on our Element channel, including Acala, Phala, Crust, and Darwinia, to name a few.

We have seen some household names from other ecosystems commit to the Polkadot ecosystem. Chainlink chose Polkadot as the next network after Ethereum, as did Gitcoin, showing real signs of adoption by infrastructure developers. For the latter case, we released the Hello World! integration effort that has become the largest hackathon Gitcoin has participated in this year.

Polkadot is now the second most active DeFi ecosystem after Ethereum (and growing quickly), and of any next-gen protocol, Polkadot also has the most developer traction and stickiness. Unsurprisingly, this success has attracted the attention of the media and venture capital circles.

Looking forward

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Let's hope that 2021 will bring us more freedom of movement than the virus-ridden 2020; The meetup will allow me to meet many great entrepreneurs who are creating amazing projects in this amazing ecosystem.

But travel hopes aside, if we deploy Polkadot in 2020 and demonstrate its Core technology, 2021 will see this technology integrated into the main network. The external audit of the "parachain v1" code and the key components of the various bridges are already progressing, and the first few months of 2021 will hopefully be a very exciting time for all of us, as well as parachains, slots Lease auctions, crowdloans, bridges, XCMP-lite, XCM, and Cumulus land, not to mention 50 or so parachain teams will be fighting for their slot release slots.

In addition to all of this, the next major version of Substrate, version 3.0, will probably arrive next year Released semi-annually, this will bring compatibility to Ethereum, as well as new improvements and more idiomatic Frame Pallet APIs, a new (faster) database backend and an end-to-end weighting system.