Build on Polkadot: September 2025 Product Engineering Update

September's engineering update highlights continued progress in making it easier to build on Polkadot. From reliability metrics and data analytics to cross-chain tooling and the Polkadot Deployment Portal.

If you're looking to build on Polkadot, September brings important progress. From reliability metrics and standardized data to cross-chain smart contracts and better developer tooling, Parity engineers are working hard to make Polkadot stronger, simpler, and more practical for builders across the ecosystem.

At the same time, momentum around products is building, and the excitement is palpable as early prototypes move from whiteboards into working code, laying the groundwork for tools and applications that will serve both developers and end-users. 

Here are six concrete areas where Parity engineers and collaborators moved the needle for builders and data teams across the ecosystem. First, a quick reminder from Parity CEO Gavin Wood on the mission driving our work.

TLDR: September 2025 Product Engineering Update

• Kusama Asset Hub Migration: With migration now complete, we've helped the core engineering team to unburden the Relay Chain and delivered lower fees and flexible asset handling for users. 
• Reliability Dashboard: A new framework for measuring Polkadot's end-to-end reliability as experienced by users, replacing block-time averages with meaningful metrics that set enterprise-grade SLOs for a truly distributed system.
• Dotlake Data Platform: Preparing for Asset Hub migrations (Kusama Oct, Polkadot Nov) with redesigned Coretime views and analytics.
• Dev Experience: Smart Contracts DevContainer live; new docs Information Architecture rolling out to streamline onboarding.
• Cross-Chain Tooling: Full XCM support for smart contracts, XTransfers library progress, and OpenZeppelin's Contract Wizard coming at Sub0.
• Polkadot Deployment Portal: The closed beta continues with zero failed deployments to date. A new Coretime Auto-Renewal Guide has been released.

Platform Milestones & Infrastructure Highlights

One standout achievement during this period was the Kusama Asset Hub migration, a shift in how asset logic, staking, and governance are managed within the network. While this wasn't a 'user-visible feature' in the traditional product sense, it's a structural event with ripple effects across everything we build going forward.

What we did:

• Assisted the core engineering team to seamlessly move balances, staking, treasury, governance modules, and related state from the Relay Chain to the Asset Hub parachain.
• The core team ensured that user accounts, proxies, multisigs, vesting, and inter-chain assets transitioned without requiring manual intervention.
• Established guardrails, fallbacks, and monitoring to catch and resolve edge cases, especially around XCM, non-native assets, and cross-account logic. 
• The Product Engineering team assisted throughout on comms, testing, and more.

With the successful Kusama Asset Hub migration now behind us and Polkadot on the horizon, we've taken a significant step toward a cleaner, more scalable Polkadot architecture. The Relay Chain is no longer burdened by heavy asset logic, enabling it to concentrate on core consensus, security, and routing. At the same time, users benefit from an improved experience, including dramatically lower fees, significantly smaller transaction deposits, and the flexibility to pay gas in non-native assets where liquidity permits.

Why it matters: The migration confirms the path to a modular architecture. Asset logic, staking, and governance can now evolve independently of core consensus, giving us the freedom to iterate without risking the core. And perhaps most importantly, this foundational shift isn't just about infrastructure; it unlocks new possibilities such as richer NFTs, cross-asset DeFi, token utilities, and multi-asset dapps now rest on a cleaner Polkadot SDK. 

Network Reliability

We're developing a Reliability Dashboard and public status page that measures end-to-end user-experienced reliability, covering transaction lifecycle latencies, confidence in signals, throughput, and cost, with alerting and on-call integration wired into our monitoring stack. Expect early showcases at upcoming community events, followed by more general access.

The aim is for this to evolve into a standard metric framework for blockchain reliability, a way for Web3 to benchmark uptime, latency, and service health as rigorously as Web2 companies already do.

For developers and teams inside the ecosystem, it means faster incident detection and clearer SLOs. For enterprises transitioning from Web2, it provides a familiar lens to directly compare blockchain performance with traditional infrastructure, removing a key barrier to decision-making and ultimately, adoption.

Why it matters: Faster incident detection, clearer SLOs, and a shared source of truth improve resilience for all parachains and end-users.

Dotlake Data Platform, Asset Hub Migration & Analytics

The Dotlake platform is preparing for Asset Hub migration (AHM) windows (Kusama in October and Polkadot in November). We've aligned schemas, Sidecar integration, and cross-chain queries to ensure uninterrupted data consumption in existing dashboards and products despite the underlying architectural changes.

On analytics, the first cohort of standardized parachain integrations is live on external dashboards, with more in flight. In addition, the Coretime page on Dotlake has been redesigned with updated charts and tooltips, offering a clearer view of how resources are consumed across the network.

Coretime page on DotLake: https://data.parity.io/coretime

Alongside this, two new additions make the data even easier to access and share: the Polkadot Overview, an introductory page featuring live, up-to-date network metrics that also doubles as a ready-to-use presentation deck, and the Polkadot Hub Dashboard, which provides statistics and analytics focused on smart contracts and the Polkadot Hub.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WfQPHyandgs

Polkadot Hub Data: https://data.parity.io/polkadothub

Why it matters: Stable, standardized data unlocks better ecosystem metrics, research, and institutional dashboards, without fragile one-off pipes. The Coretime view helps both developers and stakeholders understand real usage patterns, making resource allocation more transparent.

Dev Experience: Smart-Contracts DevContainer, Docs & UX Bountry 

The all-in-one Polkadot Smart Contracts DevContainer is now available, featuring video walkthroughs and a dedicated forum thread for feedback. In parallel, legacy smart-contracts docs have been sunset and redirected to docs.polkadot.com.

A new, approved information architecture for the docs site is now being implemented to accelerate the "hello world → production" journey and increase the speed at which we can prototype and build products at Polkadot.

Meanwhile, UX Bounty has launched a new community program, inviting contributors to identify UX and DevX issues, such as confusing user flows, inconsistent terminology, unclear developer documentation, or AI tooling ideas, and earn symbolic DOT rewards for valid reports.

Why it matters: Faster setup, clearer documentation, and community-driven UX feedback combine to reduce time-to-first-deploy and strengthen Polkadot's builder experience.

Cross-Chain Smart Contracts & Tooling - Hub-ready

We progressed full XCM support for smart contracts with new XCM precompile functions and continued work on the XTransfers library, making it simpler for contracts to move assets and messages across chains.

On the tooling side, builders can look forward to OpenZeppelin's Polkadot Contract Wizard (beta) debuting around Polkadot's flagship event in Argentina, Sub0, as well as ongoing work to ensure a smooth experience for Solidity developers targeting the Polkadot Hub.

OpenZeppelin's early support on Polkadot marks an important first step toward a more familiar developer experience. Their work in the Ethereum ecosystem has been key to its success. It introduces trusted contract templates and tooling that many Solidity teams are already familiar with. It won't replace custom development, but it lowers the barrier to experimentation, builds confidence, and lays the groundwork for deeper integrations.

Why it matters: Native, ergonomic cross-chain flows, combined with familiar tooling, enable Solidity teams to ship on Polkadot without reinventing their stack.

Polkadot Deployment Portal (PDP) - Zero Failed Deployments

The Polkadot Deployment portal is making strong progress ahead of our flagship event, Sub0, in Buenos Aires this November. Designed to make building on Polkadot radically faster and simpler, the PDP enables teams to deploy rollups in under 15 minutes, with seamless support for Coretime management and runtime upgrades.

The first closed beta (apply here) concluded with zero failed deployments and exceptionally positive feedback from the builder community. The team is now incorporating insights from testers to refine the experience before opening access to the broader builder community.

The latest addition is a Coretime Auto-Renewal Guide, an interactive tool that allows parachain teams to paste in an RPC URL and receive tailored instructions for funding sovereign accounts and generating the necessary XCM calls to keep their cores secure. By automating renewals, parachains can avoid the risk of losing their slot at the start of a new cycle, ensuring continuity and reducing operational overheads.

Why it matters: The PDP dramatically reduces setup friction, enabling teams to go from concept to deployed Rollup in minutes and build sustainable businesses on Polkadot with minimal operational overhead.

What's next

• Public reliability views: Community previews at events, then a phased rollout.
• Asset Hub migrations: Ecosystem guidance and dashboards aligned to the October/November windows.
• Docs refresh: New docs information architecture rolling out sections progressively; feedback welcome as it lands.
• Builder tooling: Continued improvements to XCM precompiles, libraries, and Solidity-friendly workflows for Polkadot Hub.

Get involved

• Test the Smart Contracts DevContainer and spin up your environment in minutes. Share feedback directly in the forum thread.
• Explore the upcoming Polkadot Hub: Solidity teams can start reviewing XCM examples and identifying which contracts or flows to port first.
• Join the Deployment Portal early-access group and help shape onboarding, deployment workflows, and integration guides before the public release.

At Parity, our focus is on strengthening and simplifying the network while unlocking new layers of utility and adoption. Behind the scenes, our engineers, designers, and contributors are advancing Polkadot's evolution toward its next phase, where technical excellence meets real-world impact.

As Gavin Wood emphasized, technical excellence remains Polkadot's foundation, but adoption and utility are now its top priorities. Polkadot is entering a new era, evolving into the "World Supercomputer" that will power the next generation of Web3 applications.

The excitement inside the team is real, the impetus is building, and while there's still plenty of work ahead, we want you to know: we hear you, we're on it, and together we're building something that lasts.