Gavin Wood summarizes Polkadot's achievements in 2021: 31 mainnets based on Substrate have been launched, with over 3 million users

Source: PolkaWorld

The holidays are here again, and with the arrival of the new year, let's quickly review the achievements of the Polkadot project in 2021.

It seems to have become a tradition to start by looking at the codebase of Polkadot's core technology. The Polkadot ecosystem is rapidly evolving, and of course, the core of Polkadot is no exception. The Substrate repository, which supports the Polkadot and Kusama relay chains as well as every parachain in the ecosystem, occupies only 500,000 lines of code. Adding the sizes of the Polkadot, Cumulus, and Smoldot codebases, our total line count exceeds just over 750,000. However, more and more work is falling outside of these three main repositories.

There are now many tools available to assist with using Substrate-based chains, including those for handling transactions, viewing chain history, checking ongoing activities, or helping to test chains, which together account for about 300,000 lines, bringing the total well over 1 million lines.

Over time, the Polkadot codebase has grown larger. A significant green area indicates the vast amount of logic written throughout the year, primarily to ensure that Polkadot's sharding (for scalability) is both secure and decentralized, although this is a challenging combination to achieve.

But there's more: in the realm of smart contracts, including the Ink contract language and tools, as well as the Substrate EVM (Ethereum) compatible platform Frontier, there are about 200,000 lines. Additionally, Polkadot-JS, the JavaScript-based API, UI, and partial implementations, contribute another approximately 600,000 lines. Even looking only at the core code, Polkadot may exceed 2 million lines of code, spread across implementations, tools, user interfaces, and key functionalities. Considering Polkadot's grand vision, this might not be surprising, but it is still an astonishing amount of code. Last year, I estimated it to be around 600,000.

Today, nearly 10,000 developers are in Element's Substrate and Parachain technology channels, compared to just 2,600 a year ago. Over 300 contributors have made more than 6,000 individual improvements to the Substrate codebase. It has attracted over 6,000 stars from the entire developer community and has been forked around 2,000 times, both of which have doubled this year.

In terms of Polkadot's staking, the numbers have also increased significantly. Last year, we had about 6,000 nomination accounts securing the Polkadot network. This year, in addition to improvements in Substrate's staking logic, there are over 20,000 nomination accounts on Polkadot, electing a total of 297 validators to maintain network security.

As of this writing, the Polkadot treasury has distributed nearly 200,000 DOT to teams and individuals, while the Kusama treasury has distributed about 70,000 KSM, with over a thousand individual funding proposals. Currently, the Polkadot treasury holds over 22 million DOT, and Kusama's treasury has about 500,000 KSM. For more information, you can check the doTreasury website, which is also a project funded by the treasury.

By the end of this year, we see that 31 mainnets based on Substrate have gone live. All parachains on Polkadot and Kusama have created nearly 3 million user accounts and are run by 6,000 validators. There have been 540 non-fork upgrades, most of which were conducted through a decentralized governance process.

From an investment perspective, our ecosystem continues to grow rapidly. We estimate there are now about 350 teams (250 more than last year's estimate). In 2021 alone, around 50 teams raised over $670 million in early funding (seed and Series A).

1. Launch

2020 was a pivotal year for Polkadot with the launch of the mainnet, and 2021 has been filled with tremendous challenges. However, I believe 2021 did not disappoint; we had an incredible year, launching parachains, slot auctions, and crowdloans on not just one but two relay chain networks. Kusama went live at the beginning of the year, and Polkadot launched in December.

Before Polkadot and Kusama could host parachains, special logic needed to be designed and written to ensure that each parachain operates with an equivalent level of security to the relay chain. Enhancing this security through sufficient decentralization while maintaining scalability is no small task. After completing Polkadot's sharding logic, it needed to be deployed on a real environment chain before parachains could be launched.

I want to clarify that we are trying to transform a single chain into a "multi-chain" through sharding, and furthermore, there is the so-called heterogeneous multi-chain, where each shard is specifically designed to efficiently accomplish certain tasks. Moreover, it must be done on a real network whose total value can rival that of most companies in the Fortune 500.

If the powerful capabilities of the WebAssembly meta-protocol were ever in doubt, this statement would certainly be a strong rebuttal. The governance and real-time system upgrades of Substrate have made what was once nearly impossible remarkably simple, which is quite magical, at least in the blockchain realm. On block #7,229,126, every node in the Polkadot mainnet upgraded to runtime version 9110 with the support of a decentralized voting process. Thousands of nodes distributed around the world are operated by thousands of different individuals, from maintaining "ordinary" single chains to helping run the heterogeneous multi-chain shards, with block production and the time to create the next block taking only six seconds, setting a world record on multiple levels.

Shortly after this, Polkadot's first parachain "Shell" went live. The purpose of the Shell chain is to preheat a parachain slot so that it can later upgrade to the public parachain Statemint, which launched in late December. In addition to Statemint, several community parachains also went live. To select which teams could launch first, five parachain slots were rented to the teams that bid the highest over a two-year lease.

Polkadot completed its first five auctions and saw them go live one by one just a few days ago, completing the final stage of the launch process. In total, over 100 million DOT (106 million, accounting for 9% of the total supply) has been locked for two years to rent the first few slots. Thanks to extensive testing on the Rococo testnet, all five parachains on Polkadot and Kusama have begun operating and started producing blocks the moment their slots went live.

Another six auctions are currently underway, starting from December 24 and ending on March 11. Unless there are significant technical issues, Polkadot auctions will not stop in 2022.

Meanwhile, Kusama now has 20 parachains launched and running on it, with over 3 million KSM locked for 12 months, accounting for 31% of the total supply. For more information on parachains, please visit the Parachains.info website.

With the launch of parachains, Rococo's initial positioning as a testnet for parachain logic has concluded. However, it will have a new role as a community parachain testnet hub, a plan initiated not long ago. Community teams can test their parachains on Rococo, testing technologies like XCM between them in a risk-free environment.

In 2021, we also saw the launch of some significant third-party services. Powerful multi-chain indexing services SubSquid and SubQuery have launched and are widely adopted in the ecosystem. SubSpace and OnFinality have initiated their Kusama archiving plans, using Web3 technology to archive all chain data in the entire Kusama parachain ecosystem. On the institutional side, Deutsche Telekom announced its participation in the security and maintenance of Polkadot, while also announcing that it has acquired DOT tokens and is running validator nodes as a way to promote Polkadot and XCMP. About 12 months ago, at the beginning of 2021, Fireblocks (a cryptocurrency custody service primarily for institutions) also announced support for holding and staking DOT.

2. Technology

As the features and functionalities of Polkadot continue to be developed, in 2021 we also released several core components of the Polkadot ecosystem puzzle. The new metadata format represents a significant change for many developers in the ecosystem, minimizing development friction and reducing the chances of bugs.

Metadata is crucial for checking, understanding, and transacting between various different systems connected to Polkadot, Kusama, and Substrate-based parachains. Whether it's block explorers, dashboards, mining operations, exchanges, or user interfaces, a deep understanding of what the on-chain business logic is doing is required. Since Substrate chains are heavily customized for their specific tasks, complex data types are often introduced to effectively represent the information they handle, making this daunting task even more challenging. The upgradability of Substrate adds to this complexity, meaning these data types may change at any given time through on-chain upgrades to the core logic.

With the new metadata system, Rust language developers writing on-chain business logic can easily ensure that all distant systems (often written in different languages and running on different platforms) deeply understand these different data types, making the entire process seamless and effortless, while being aware of any changes that may occur.

Another major delivery for Polkadot this year is XCM version 2, Polkadot's message format that allows different consensus systems to interact easily. XCM v2 is the first "production-ready" version of XCM and debuted on Polkadot last week, converting governance upgrade instructions into content for the Statemint parachain.

The primary purpose of XCM currently is to allow various forms of asset transfers between chains and to provide a universal transaction layer that allows chains that understand each other to interact with their specific functionalities. It also introduces version awareness, allowing chains to upgrade at their own pace without worrying about losing contact with others that upgraded earlier. It includes several features to provide protection in case of unexpected errors, from error detection and reporting to a special "safety net" that can capture unexpectedly unused assets at the end of messages.

Polkadot's staking technology has also evolved throughout 2021. The number of nomination accounts it can support increased from 6,000 at the end of 2020 to a peak of 22,000 this year, doubling in size. This was primarily achieved through a change to ensure that staking elections can occur in multiple phases.

FRAME, the API and framework that allows for easy composition of on-chain business logic modules, has also undergone a comprehensive upgrade, so now all modules use cleaner and more idiomatic program macros. In 2021, it added several modules, including Assets and Uniques, unlocking Polkadot's capabilities in tokens and NFTs. The Statemine and Statemint chains will use these modules for their core functionality sets.

Many underlying improvements have also quietly made their way into the Substrate codebase, particularly the production readiness of ParityDB, our highly optimized blockchain database designed for Substrate chains that require maximum performance. Tools, especially the weight system—why Substrate chains do not need the slow dynamic measurement of smart contract platforms—have been refined and are ready for release.

Smoldot has also been making progress in the background. Smoldot started as a part-time project, an alternative implementation of Substrate/Polkadot nodes designed to perform particularly well in resource-constrained environments where maintaining large databases and executing each transaction is impractical. Smoldot has proven that using Polkadot and its Substrate-based parachains in environments like the web and Raspberry Pi is feasible.

3. Social Media & Websites

One of the first things that happened last year was the on-chain governance of the network approving a rebranding of Polkadot. A few months later, Polkadot became the world's first globally decentralized system to have its brand decided by over 2,000 DOT holders. A secondary voting system was used to balance DOT ownership with personality and to try to ensure that the results had broad appeal.

Polkadot's online growth has been rapid in 2021: the website had approximately 2 million page views, with about a quarter being unique users, nearly quadrupling the total from the previous year. Twitter followers grew more than tenfold, from less than 100,000 at the end of 2020 to now over 1 million, while WeChat subscribers increased from 18,000 (in 2020) to nearly 50,000 now, almost tripling. Meanwhile, Kusama's Twitter following grew from about 30,000 to over 200,000, a slightly smaller but still over 500% increase.

Other media channels have also grown, with Polkadot Reddit now having 70,000 members and Discord having 20,000. The YouTube channel now has over 40,000 subscribers, with 1.1 million viewers watching 126,200 hours of Polkadot educational material. Over the past twelve months, we have published hundreds of articles, news, and videos related to Polkadot and Substrate.

Meanwhile, the Polkadot Wiki underwent some significant renovations in 2021. 160 contributors created its content, with annual visits reaching 1.5 million and page views hitting 3.2 million. The ambassador program has also continued into 2021, with the total number of candidates and ambassadors increasing to 2,391.

It is clear that the Element chat room is not the best forum for 24/7 technical Q&A, especially regarding the ability to search for previous answers. We view Stack Exchange as a potential practical tool that can help in the near future. After just a few months of "self-proof" time, we now have a Substrate beta Stack Exchange site. Many thanks to everyone involved in this effort.

4. Polkadot Gatherings

Despite the pandemic, this year we saw many community events, with nearly 400 gatherings (both in-person and hybrid) happening globally, the most popular being the event held in Lima on December 15, which had 500 RSVPs. Community-led online events also made up the majority, with hundreds of participants, and the Polkadot Korea gathering had over 1,500 registrations.

However, the Polkadot Decoded event in May was undoubtedly the largest conference for the Polkadot community. It invited over 40 community-selected speakers covering everything from parachains and NFTs to privacy and identity. Over 27,000 people registered for the live stream, quadrupling the number from 2020.

However, compared to Decoded, the recently held Parachain Launch Party was on a whole different scale, being the largest Polkadot event ever. 220,000 people watched the event, where winning parachain founders and some key figures behind Polkadot shared their insights.

Polkadot and Substrate were also topics at some of the largest conferences in the crypto ecosystem, appearing at major events such as Coindesk Consensus, Messari Mainnet, Unfinished Live, Paris Blockchain Week, ETH Denver, EthCC Paris, Blockchance Europe, and Digital Euro Summit.

In 2021, in China, we held over 50 online and offline events and talks in collaboration with the community and local partners, including invitations to some of the most prominent blockchain events, such as the Wanxiang Blockchain Summit, World Blockchain Conference, and CNBC Global Technology Conference, showcasing Polkadot and Substrate to the world.

Wanxiang Blockchain Summit 2021

In 2021, over 1,000 developers participated in one of the ten Substrate courses, with 70% graduating. Meanwhile, four hackathons were held in the ecosystem, with 50 teams developing projects within our ecosystem, ten of which have already won relay chain slots, such as Acala and Astar, with some teams bidding for these slots through crowdloans.

Additionally, twelve teams graduated from the Web3.0 bootcamp, selected from over 50 projects in the US, Europe, and China. The bootcamp is an incubator and educational re-operation program that includes four online cohorts, regular check-ins, numerous promotional activities, public lectures, and one-on-one meetings, providing the maximum chance of success for teams through comprehensive support. Alumni teams like Acala and Moonbeam have successfully secured parachain slots on Kusama and Polkadot.

5. Substrate Builders: Working Alongside Projects

The Substrate Builders Program is thriving: 163 new teams applied for spots in the program in 2021, with 36 lucky ones being accepted. Over the year, project teams conducted 53 technical reviews, with 11 teams completing all set milestones.

Some highlights of this year include Ajuna Network launching a fully functional SDK for integrating Unity and Unreal with Substrate. Bit.Country, a metaverse and gaming platform, also completed its first milestone, finalizing the logic for its economy, governance, and global NFT marketplace. SubSpace (a scalable platform for storage and computation based on Substrate) completed initial work on its novel consensus mechanism Proof-of-Archival-Storage and launched the Aries testnet, which is their testnet for this groundbreaking new technology.

In terms of infrastructure, the privacy-focused DeFi middleware stack Automata Network completed its first milestone, launching an ERC20 token cross-chain bridge and ContextFree canary network.

In the asset space, Chainflip Labs (cross-chain asset exchange experts) crossed their second milestone, deploying their technology on the Ethereum testnet as well as their main State-chain testnet (which is naturally based on Substrate!). The decentralized exchange Firefly (dTrade) that brings fast trading to DeFi reached their third milestone, deploying on Moonriver in Kusama and finalizing plans for deployment on Moonbeam in Polkadot. Back in April, Chainlink brought some good news to the Polkadot community: it made its oracle services available to all Substrate-based chains, meaning parachains can effectively utilize it as needed.

As a (in fact, the world's only) Layer-0 platform, our Layer-1 platforms are building their own developer communities. Astar and Moonbeam have now launched their own Builders Programs.

At Parity, we have seen some significant team expansions, with the team growing to 200 people in 2021. The Parity team remains distributed globally but will see some new hires concentrated in London and other regions around the world. The Web3 Foundation has also seen a surge of excellent staff, particularly since bringing in Bertrand Perez as its Chief Operating Officer.

6. No Scams

In 2021, people from the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies came together to form an anti-scam team, determined to stop scammers from running rampant and to make Polkadot an ecosystem that can ensure stakeholder safety. The Polkadot treasury and Web3 Foundation also spent $130,000 to combat scams.

Over the year, nearly a thousand websites and other scam sites have been taken down, with the community identifying over 460 scam websites. To incentivize reporting, whistleblowers have received rewards of 550 DOT. The phishing scam repository is a complete list of phishing and scam websites and addresses, now containing over 2,300 entries.

In 2022, the "Anti-Scam Community Initiative" will continue to evolve, covering more scam websites, driven by the community, collaborating with other ecosystem projects and teams, and laying the groundwork for the first on-chain and distributed anti-scam activities.

7. Fully Committed to the Future

Looking back at what I wrote 12 months ago, I hoped to gain more physical freedom from COVID restrictions and wished for the return of the global gathering culture at the core of the crypto industry. Unfortunately, these wishes did not truly materialize in 2021, but I hope for better in 2022. I look forward to enjoying Chongqing hot pot and sukiyaki again—it's been too long.

Putting aside travel wishes, 2021 was a year of final deliveries and the conclusion of a chapter we began in 2016 when we released the initial white paper. 2022 marks the beginning of the next chapter in the story of Polkadot, different from any previous year. As more and more parachain teams win auctions and join the Polkadot party, we will see the prospect of expanded hyper-connectivity under the single security umbrella provided by Polkadot. Over 150 chains serving various purposes are currently in development, many of which already have testnets, with much to look forward to. We also anticipate the launch of decentralized bridges, starting with the bridge connecting Polkadot and Kusama developed by Parity, followed by the bridge connecting Polkadot and Ethereum developed by Snowfork.

In core development, we will spend some time refactoring and optimizing the code and introducing new technologies that help reduce messaging-related costs and delays. Our goal is to enable each parachain on Polkadot to achieve 1,000 sTPS per shard. (sTPS is our standard for transactions per second, which is the standard for cross-chain transactions, simply meaning transferring balances from one existing account to another existing account, where neither account is read or written to the block.)

In addition, the Polkadot team's energy will focus on parachain threads, ensuring that teams that did not win auctions can also benefit from the security provided by Polkadot and enjoy all the advantages of XCMP.