Polkadot Roundup 2025

This article was originally published on the Polkadot Medium Blog 30.12.25.

It's lunchtime and yet it feels like evening is approaching. For us up here in the Northern-hemisphere it is that time of the year again; log fires and hearty food, frosty mornings and wind chill. It's time for my year-end round-up. This year I have to hand it to the Parity Data team who have outdone themselves with their own very comprehensive data-driven Round-up of 2025. If you'd like more infographics or a deeper insight of the numbers, do head over there. As for the present work, I'll focus a bit less on being comprehensive and a bit more on the elements with which I can add a bit of flavour.

Over the last 12 months, we have been getting accustomed to seeing Polkadot and its underlying technology truly begin to flex its muscles. This year, with Elastic Scaling, the Great Migration and Hub Contracts, Polkadot poises itself not merely as a host chain for L2 app chains, but as an L1 in and of itself. JAM only underlines this feeling as we see Polkadot's technology make its way into a much more flexible format and be paired with the PolkaVM to be able to run Doom and Quake without modifications.

2025 has been a year of change in Polkadot. This has been the case on all sorts of levels, not least my change of role, but also the recent change of website including a renewed and intentional commitment to the underlying Web3 philosophy, Parity's refocus around platform and product, and even on the technical level, a change of blockchain for most Polkadot transactions.

The Great Migration

Polkadot achieved much this year. It's not always so easy to reason about and compare the importance of different initiatives but one interesting way of thinking about it is the potential for disaster in relation to the subtlety of the change. The winner on this measure for 2025 was the Great Hub Migration. This was a manoeuvre to move Polkadot's various user-level functionality (like DOT account balances, names, governance and staking) from the Relay-chain into the Hub-chain. Success means relatively little obvious change. Failure means catastrophe.

The Great Migration, possibly the largest ever migration between two live blockchains, was completed just a few weeks ago. In all, 1.6 billion DOT across 1.53 million accounts was moved between the two chains in about eight hours, not to mention 2.1 million individual on-chain storage records representing the state of business of various Polkadot services. Contributing to its completion was 7,400 cross-chain messages and a completely rewritten staking election system. Neither chain skipped a beat and third-party infrastructure stayed functioning just fine.

This is a true testament not only to Polkadot's technical and operational prowess, but to its enduring commitment to self-improvement, innovation and evolution, even when it means difficult, time-consuming and complex procedures must be taken. Beyond the technical aspects, effective communications were crucial to ensure that users and centralised infrastructure operators were informed of the coming changes and advised comprehensively throughout.

With Hub Migration complete, key elements to Polkadot's "Second Age" are unlocked. Onward migration from the Polkadot Relay-chain to the Polkadot JAM-chain becomes possible. Polkadot Hub, a single environment for mashing up everything natively Polkadot with anything else known to Polkadot, is now viable --- whether smart contracts, parachains or chains bridged in. Hub makes it dramatically easier for parachain tokens to get integrated into external infrastructure. Users notice that DOT transfer fees are 100 times lower. Minimum balances are reduced similarly. Transaction times are lowered to two seconds and will be lowered to 500ms in the near future. One chain, one surface, one vision.

The Hub

So the Hub Migration merged pretty much all of Polkadot's user-visible Relay-chain functionality with the Polkadot Asset Hub functionality into the new Polkadot Hub chain. (Pedants will be quick to point out that the chain itself isn't new, but I'm talking conceptual here 😝.) This final piece in the puzzle of the "Polkadot Plaza" plan is to mix this newly merged chain with native, permissionless smart-contract functionality, the sort of which we pioneered in Ethereum back in 2015. While Polkadot has hosted various chains with this functionality (Moonbeam being a notable one), it has never done so natively. Until now.

Introducing smart-contract functionality onto the Polkadot Hub marks the final major piece in the Polkadot Plaza jigsaw puzzle. And what functionality it is. Our newly delivered Revive project combines our highly performant RISC-V PolkaVM backend with a fully compliant EVM interpreter allowing developers to select between 100% Ethereum compatibility (including full support for Hardhat and Foundry) and maximum Polkadot performance and value. Full Solidity-based Ethereum tooling support is available and no matter which side a developer deploys their smart-contracts into, it's all perfectly compatible and synchronously interoperable.

The work doesn't end here of course. 2026 will see The Hub's block speed increase by more than 10x as 500ms Polkadot blocks become a reality and PolkaVM integration will further increase the gap between compatibility and performance mode. 2025 is the year that Polkadot Hub became a reality. 2026 will see it mature and form the basis for a new generation of Polkadot-based products.

Capping Supply

2025 heralded a substantial change in Polkadot's economics. To the backdrop of a depressed market, this autumn the Polkadot governance apparatus took the not entirely uncontroversial decision to limit the total supply for the DOT token.

This idea had been mooted in years past, most recently leading to a moderate alteration in issuance from 10% per year to 8%. The new supply cap comes with an ever-decreasing issuance curve styled after Bitcoin. The curve comes into effect on Pi day (March 14th) 2026 and will cap supply to a total of 2.1 billion DOT. Aside from the obvious economic effect, limiting supply rather forcibly introduces a new mindset to the mentality of Polkadot economics. The days of the decentralised Treasury directing its funds to highly speculative spending on promotional activities are decidedly over.

Supply-side economics won't change much alone, of course; as mathematicians say, this is necessary but not sufficient. Conventional thinking requires that some demand must ultimately exist beyond the speculation rampant in the cryptocurrency space. In 2026, it will be Polkadot's mission to utilise its superior technology to create products and a platform for them to sit upon in order to deliver utility. I can attest that Parity, for one, is excited about the prospect of finally seeing its own technology get put to real-world usage.

Scaling Elastically

While 2024 saw the deliver of two of the three deliverables marking "Polkadot 2", the final element, known as Elastic Scaling, was delivered two months ago. This introduces the ability for parachains to utilise more of Polkadot's underlying resource, coretime, in order to build blocks faster and give both more throughput and a lower apparent latency.

High throughput and a snappy user-experience are two perennial problems with utilising blockchains in massively multiuser products. They matter little when the economic impacts are high, overall usage figures are low and the services are compared to those offered by financial institutions and governments. However, as banks and institutions increasingly assimilate blockchain into their offerings, Web3 will need to live up to its name and compete with classic "Web" services which sit much closer to their users.

Elastic Scaling enables its constituent parachains to do this, opening up higher performance when and where it is needed without the need to decide this all in advance. This functionality, called "elastic scaling", went live on Polkadot two months ago. It heralds a material difference to the economic model of parachains and represents an increasingly complete L2 developer stack.

"Basti-block" optimisations were also completed this year, further helping ensure that Polkadot's cores go maximally utilised as one core can be used to secure several of a parachain's blocks in a row. This again opens the door to our parachains having fully secured blocks with a frequency in the 100s of milliseconds.

CEO, Again

This year I decided to retake the reins to Parity and refocus both my own and the company's efforts in rather a fresh direction. Coding makes way for calls and meetings as well as markedly increased attention to prioritisation and products.

Several factors were behind this move, but it primarily speaks to the fact that the JAM protocol design and specification --- where much of my time and attention was spent --- has largely stabilised. As CEO I can have a much greater and more direct impact on not only the Polkadot platform but increasingly the products which are developed on it.

I'm happy to say that the initial months of returning have been delightful. Parity is in a great shape organisationally and the excitement of closing the loop and developing useful products on the base layer which we've spent so long researching, designing and building is palpable.

Outreach

The Polkadot community saw several great events across 2025. The year began with a tour hitting various universities mostly in India and China on JAM, demonstrating the latest prototypes and educating on the protocol. We visited Cambridge, Peking University, Fudan University, Shenzhen University, Zhejian University, National Taipei University, IIT Delhi & Mumbai, (complementing last year's talks at University of Tokyo & Stanford) all also supported and welcomed by the local student blockchain clubs/communities. In total, the tour reached 1,300 people attending physically across nine locations globally. The lectures received 800,000 views and the ensuing documentary garnered half a million views online.

The JAM Experience happened in Lisbon during May, bringing together numerous JAM implementation teams from around the world to a series of deep technical talks and to collaborate over a week on their development. (Not to mention an impromptu musical jam involving a few of the developers.)

Beyond organising the JAM China and India tour and taking part in the JAM Experience, Pala Labs made waves as a new driving force in the ecosystem, advocating for a much more philosophically-aware Polkadot through presentations, events, community engagement, information visualisation and website development.

The Web3 Summit returned to form in Berlin, gathering many from across the broader Web3 space and provided us with various perspectives on the wider Web3 mission. Our developer conferences this year hit Thailand and Buenos Aires to help educate and inform on the latest thinking in Polkadot engineering.

Polkadot continued its global outreach programme with presence in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America and Europe. An expansive grass-roots programme was emphasised and the DOT Treasury Events bounty saw a total of 138 individual events receive funding out of a total of 214 submissions.

The Polkadot Builder Party Hackathon, a joint effort of Web3 Foundation, Parity, and ecosystem teams focusing on user-centric apps gathered almost three thousand participants globally and received more than 230 submissions

Outside of the Polkadot sphere, the project maintained a strong presence in industry conferences including Consensus 2025, ETH Prague, ETH Belgrade, Token2049 and TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. The latter in particular was notable, with Polkadot being the only blockchain presenting to the mainstream technologist audience and the effort yielded around 10,000 booth visitors. The forum report contains more detail if you're interested.

Technology

This year saw the completion of desired features of the Polkadot blockchain technology stack, bringing it far more in line with its potential than ever before. There's still some work to be done, but the use-cases which this year's technology improvements have unlocked are enormous, from on-chain gaming and large-scale personhood systems to broad ZK-privacy.

One notable testnet which launched this year was our Yapchain, demonstrating the existing Polkadot blockchain technology stack working end-to-end with 500ms blocks. This chain was used to host a number of interesting demonstration apps both trustless and permissionless but also inheriting Polkadot's security model and with minimal apparent latency in the user experience. Expect this underlying technology to be rolled into the overall Polkadot offering in 2026, including in the Hub, the canonical Apps and the products they host.

In the backend, 2025 saw the dust settle on our rewrite of the networking layer. An unsung hero of the more sophisticated decentralised systems, the p2p networking layer facilitates the optimum connection and communication between nodes while keeping the resource utilisation low and tractable. Lite-p2p, as our new system is known, has materially improved the performance of the network as a whole, lowering transaction times, improving block confidence and propagation.

Polkadot's Reliability Dashboard came into being in 2025 and it makes Polkadot engineering discipline visible by translating blockchain performance into user-relevant, enterprise-grade metrics. Polkadot's reliability is now clearly visible for all to see, reporting end-to-end transaction lifecycle latency in percentiles, lifecycle confidence, throughput under load, and predictable costs. Its real-time telemetry enables early anomaly detection and root-cause analysis. At P95, transactions show 28ms ready latency, 5.95s block time, with 99.8% in-block confidence and a predictable transaction cost of under two cents. The result is steady finality, predictable block production, and a stable, low-uncertainty environment for builders and users alike.

2025 saw the productification of two new Polkadot services to complement the Polkadot parachain stack and create a true Web3 platform capable of hosting the full-spectrum of applications we have come to expect from the Web. The Bulletin Chain, a medium-term permissionless and trustless data storage solution, moved from prototype to production in anticipation of the launch of project Individuality. During late 2025 as Parity begins to dedicate more of its engineering might toward product, it has become utilised by a growing number of product teams as their default storage solution, avoiding the need to rely on centralized IPFS pinning services. It will likely expand during 2026 before the functionality becomes provided by the JAM chain's data lake directly.

The other service which 2025 saw added to the Polkadot production portfolio is the Small Statement Store. Harkening all the way back to 2014 when I first conceived of Whisper, this is a redesigned version of the same overall concept. Now placed under a permanent team and it is undergoing performance optimisations and service envelope improvements. 2026 will see substantial work done on its underlying networking, including to maximise privacy guarantees and to provide much higher performance at much greater scales.

This year also saw the development and initial deployment of Polkadot's native proof-of-personhood Individuality infrastructure using our native ZK cryptographic element, the Bandersnatch RingVRF. This piece of infrastructural cryptomagic is useful in all sorts of ways, sitting inside Safrole and Sassafras block production systems, but also powering the Individuality system to ensure that users retain total privacy, even as they claim free services on Polkadot and move between different products.

Overall 2025 was a watershed year, as the Polkadot core technology stack has become acceptably powerful and mature for hosting sophisticated applications for large numbers of people. 2025 was the year that Parity's focus decidedly began shifting from Technology and Protocol towards Platform and Product.

Connectivity

True to its beginnings, 2025 saw Polkadot continue development into connecting disparate blockchains. XCMv5, the latest improvement to Polkadot's native messaging infrastructure, became not just "live" but properly active, humming away beneath the surface as wallets and Polkadot products begin to weave it into the user experience. We've cracked the code on true cross-chain flow with "Empowered XCM cross-chain origins". Gone are the days of juggling multiple messages and signatures for a single intent. Now, a user can sit on Polkadot Hub with their USDC and set up a DCA into DOT on Hydration, or register their credentials on the People chain, all in a single, effortless action. It's the seamless, one-click experience we promised. Better yet, with the new fee estimation mechanics, we're seeing complex, multi-destination transfers --- like cheap, trustless bridging to Ethereum or arbitrary cross-chain smart contract calls --- become a reality. It serves as a stark demonstration that Polkadot's interoperability isn't just a theory; it is the engine of a truly connected, friction-free Web3.

Originally launched in late 2024, Snowbridge went through significant improvements this year with the introduction of direct ETH bridging facilitating the secure representation of both ETH and ERC-20 tokens across the Polkadot ecosystem. The following launch of Snowbridge 2 in November led to Polkadot-Ethereum transfer times being halved and lifted the limits to smart contract interoperability, allowing Polkadot and Ethereum-based smart-contracts to interact with each other in whatever way they want, not merely sending tokens. And all without a multisig in sight. By the end of the year, Snowbridge saw almost 100 million USD in TVL across the bridge.

This year Hyperbridge demonstrates Polkadot's developing technological prowess as the base infrastructure for inter-ecosystem communication. It can now relay messages from any Polkadot parachain over to any Cosmos Tendermint chain as well as many within the Ethereum L2 ecosystem together with a number of other L1 chains. The relaying is secured using ZK proofs on top of Polkadot's cheap and resilient ELVES protocol. Further aiding this security was a move this year to decentralise its network operators and use crypto-economic incentives. To help ensure that these facilities get the use which they deserve, Hyperbridge introduced its intents-based system this year which has resulted in more than US$250m of volume transacted.

Academic

Meanwhile, Polkadot continued its academic and educational engagement throughout 2025. The Web3 Foundation's research team presented the Polkadot technology at a number of the world's best universities over the course of the year including Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley, University of Zurich and HSLU. Our technical education continued apace, with the Polkadot Builder Party Hackathon having around 2,700 participants globally seeing hundreds of submissions most of which being from first-time blockchain developers. More detail is available in the report.

Polkadot's mainstream technical education efforts were bolstered this year by the 14 or so Polkadot Made Easy video tutorial series, widely used to help ensure everyone is on the same (right!) page for The Great Hub Migration and a few other common Polkadot workflows.

Our Blockchain Academy saw further evolution of the syllabus and content, creating new tracks to emphasise not merely core technology but product-building also. This year we worked with universities in Lucerne in March and Bali in August.

Important as it is, the PBA's mission is not simply rote-learning of technical doctrine, but broader advocacy into the underlying reasons and implications of architecting systems, as we do, in line with Web3 principles. Since we are designing systems to help build a more resilient society, not merely to help institutions shave their costs a little to improve their dividends, advocacy --- especially at the decision-making level --- is a crucial activity if we are to see our systems selected for use. The PBA's activities have reflected this need as it expands its focus to the education of policy-makers about the comparative advantages of Polkadot.

For more theoretical work, this year saw a number of academic articles relating to Polkadot's underlying technology layer get accepted for publication in various well-reputed outlets. The IACR's Crypto 2025 alone saw two papers published by the Web3 Foundation's Alistair and Elizabeth (see page 94 and 144). The paper proposing Polkadot's new consensus algorithm (specifically for chain-extension) Sassafras, which also happens to form the basis for JAM's underlying block-production protocol Safrole, was published under the proceedings of the 23rd Applied Cryptography and Network Security Conference.

Governance & Ecosystem

2025 saw Polkadot's OpenGov remain the largest functioning DAO in the space and a veritable living laboratory for on-chain decision-making and meaningful community participation. Indeed, Polkadot's OpenGov offered unparalleled opportunities and flexibility for anyone wishing to participate, from proposing expenditures to forming arbitrary sub-organisations for decision-making. This level of autonomy stands in quite dramatic contrast to other ecosystems. During the course of the year, the Decentralized Voices program ran multiple cohorts with 90%+ participation and full rationales. As experimentation continues, we all get an increasingly better idea about what works and where further development and, possibly, sophistication is warranted.

The Kusama Vision, a plan for the 10M DOT assigned pre-launch to act as a basis for value on Kusama was passed. The Web3 Foundation now coordinates this token pool, injecting it into the Kusama economy specifically for ZK and innovation initiatives.

Within the Polkadot ecosystem, a number of teams have been making strides. Peaq, the Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Network aiming to build underlying infrastructure for the machine economy, saw substantial growth with onboarding several million humans and machines in the first half of 2025. Mythos, Web3's biggest game-focussed blockchain, also saw substantial usage with over a million downloads of its game FIFA Rivals and, generating $1.4m in fees during 30 days this summer, has been ranked globally as the third biggest L2 blockchain. Origin Trail, has moved forward with its supply-chain infrastructure being used substantially for the Supplier Compliance Audit Network in the US and analysed for usage by the Swiss rail network. Polkadot's Defi ecosystem grew steadily over the year, with Bifrost and Hydration seeing around $300m in combined TVL by November.

The last few weeks saw the Web3 Foundation's Voting Guidelines published and the Foundation began systematic, transparent voting on OpenGov treasury proposals, signalling a new stage of participation with the aim of maximising the quality of spending proposals and reducing voter fatigue.

Aside from the increased participation, a number of concrete steps were taken in tandem to maximise signal-to-noise ratio in the system and the decision-making efficiency and efficacy. These included increasing decision deposits, reducing the number of simultaneous deciding proposals and tightening turnout thresholds. These steps were buttressed by collaboration of ecosystem teams like JUST and Scytale for transparency and with initiatives such as OpenGov.Watch and Pala Labs' latest contribution, OpenShore, a tool to bring radical transparency to OpenGov, even for bounties. The findings from this tool have been regularly shared to the governance team and key figures around DVs. Such information helps onlookers grok the underlying social currents and spending context and helps ensure Treasury spending is rational and well-informed.

This all represents a maturing treasury DAO, balanced with a commitment to continued experimentation and improvement. The Foundation now steps in as it believes is in line with its Treasury policy, providing a far greater level of scrutiny than before. A more accountable internal structure ensures resources are allocated responsibly. Change is rarely comfortable especially as regards to polities where there are inevitably losers as well as winners, but this continued evolution is critical for the long-term health of the network, its community, and the ecosystem at large.

JAM

Over the course of the last 12 months the JAM protocol, Polkadot's next-generation base technology, stabilised. Marching toward version 1.0, the near-final version 0.8 of the JAM specification (known as the Gray Paper) is poised to be released, with the expectation of the final pre-audit draft in early 2026.

JAM is characterised by its large and passionate independent implementor community providing substantial network diversity and reducing the possibility of the human error in a single team compromising the wider network. This year saw the completion of the Milestone One Conformance Suite, used to help identify correct protocol implementations and reduce the later possibility of accidental network forks. Fuzz-testing has done its intended job of revealing the inaccuracies in many teams' implementations and I hope that the first fully conformant implementations are identified and rewarded early next year.

PolkaJAM, Parity's implementation of the protocol, has continued its development. At its centre is the PolkaVM AOT recompiler, a VM based on RISC-V facilitating high-performance, platform-independent, untrusted code execution. 2025 saw the introduction of the final part of the PVM specification, the gas-cost model. This is an extremely sophisticated piece of logic which must characterise, at a high-level, the various mechanisms which allow modern CPUs to speed up their code execution. Amongst other affordances, it includes means of modelling branch prediction & pipelining, instruction combinations and caching. With its completion, PVM implementation teams are now faced with the task of making their implementations execute code at a speed in line with the gas costs.

This year saw the completion of the JAM Toaster, a cluster of high-performance CPUs designed to run JAM at full scale. By providing an experimentation and test bed, the Toaster has already helped the PolkaJAM team identify issues and performance problems. 2025 saw the Toaster host the first full 1023-node JAM network, with Parity's PolkaJAM stress-tested to utilise 64 of the 341 maximum cores which JAM can operate with. For PolkaJAM, 2026 will see substantial optimization work to deliver maximal resource utilization. Together with this, the Toaster will open to conformant teams, especially those passing the second milestone and able to operate as validator nodes, to afford all implementation teams the same ability to optimise and harden.

The JAM Tart (Testing, Analysis and Research Telemetry) project got off the ground this year with its first release. Partner software to the JAM Toaster, the Tart allows JAM implementation teams, as well as curious onlookers, to get a detailed but easily-comprehensible view into the underlying operations of a JAM network. It's a "Mission Control Centre" for JAM. Expect to see much more about this in 2026, especially if you're a JAM team!

Finally, JAM's first substantive service known as CoreVM went through substantial development this year. It is now able to run sophisticated PC software (such as Quake and the musl C library) entirely permissionlessly, trustlessly and with on-chain levels of economic security. Through CoreVM and the associated software JAM is now able to stream audio and video directly into a browser, trustlessly, as well as receive audio from a browser instance in real-time, pass messages between CoreVM instances and receive general data from external actors.

After concluding the optimisation work, 2026 will see CoreVM development focus on improving the scheduling infrastructure and introducing transaction pooling and processing.

Onwards, All Ye Faithful

Those at Sub0 Buenos Aires this year got a small glimpse of what Polkadot might look like to its users by the end of 2026. With a strong focus on immediate usability, especially by the population beyond crypto-natives, we at Parity together with our partners in the ecosystem, will be focusing heavily on making Polkadot both usable and useful.

Web2, with its account-logins, constant data-entry, privacy leaks, reams of legalese and arbitrary blocking, sucks. Unfortunately, Web3 with its reliance on centralised RPCs, centralised exchange on-ramps no better than banks, mnemonics, pay-per-use services, overt complexity, faffy transactions, market volatility and lack of privacy sucks too. An important goal new to Parity in 2026 is to see manifested not merely the underlying Web3 technology but also the platform and some demonstrative products.

The Web3 Foundation, meanwhile, will work with well-aligned groups both inside and outside the Polkadot ecosystem to emphasise how Real Web3 technology can address some important challenges which modern society brings. It will seek to make clear not merely the "how?" of Web3 and Polkadot but moreover the "why?", which seems increasingly to be lost in the money-fuelled noise and in turn limits effective consumer choice.

Meanwhile, on the back of a strategic spend of $3 million to incentivize the growth of Polkadot's userbase and continued engagement, together with a revamped human-centric experience, I expect to see ecosystem entities such as the Polkadot Community Foundation take an increasingly incisive role to ensure that the right messages reach the right audience in the right way.

And so concludes another year in the story of Polkadot. Whereas much of this year could be characterised as being in a state of metamorphosis, from my vantage point I expect 2026 to be the year that the butterfly, fresh to the world, spreads its wings.

Happy holidays and see you on the app!