The Shape of What Comes Next

Today I informed everyone at Parity that we are reducing our cost base, and that the changes we are proposing will mean fewer roles within the organisation. This is my decision, and I want to explain the reasoning behind it, what it means for Parity, and why I believe it is right for the work that lies ahead.

Parity was founded in 2015 with the ambition of building technology that would make a different kind of digital world possible. One in which individuals could exercise meaningful control over the systems they depend upon, all without requiring the permission or goodwill of those who operate them.

This was always going to be a difficult engineering problem, and one which required us to rethink some fairly basic assumptions about how we could build, maintain, and govern software systems. Over the following decade, we developed Substrate, built and launched Polkadot, and continued to advance its architecture through shared security, on-chain governance, asynchronous backing, elastic scaling and, more recently, smart contracts running on PolkaVM.

These were substantial technical undertakings: many of the problems had no established solutions, and many of the things we now take for granted seemed impractical when we began. Solving them required a considerable concentration of engineering talent and an organisation capable of supporting research and development over many years.

Parity became that organisation, and I think it is important to recognise what this achieved.

The technology we have today exists because people were prepared to spend years working on difficult problems, often with little certainty about how, or even whether, they would be solved. But the circumstances we operate in now are different from those in which Parity was founded. Polkadot is an established, functioning network. Its underlying technology has matured considerably, and we're already working to make it useful to a much wider audience.

Over the past year, we deliberately invested in that transition and expanded our activities beyond the underlying protocol to address the practical questions of how developers build Personal Software - what we used to call Proofs of Concept, how users interact with them, and how the technology becomes accessible to people who have little interest in its internal workings.

That investment has produced meaningful results. Polkadot Hub is live, and developers now have access to a platform which increasingly allows them to build without having to understand the particular complexities of blockchain infrastructure. The establishment and now growing presence of the Polkadot Community Foundation also means that responsibility for encouraging adoption and developing the wider ecosystem no longer falls so heavily upon Parity.

These are important developments because they change what is required of us, but most importantly, I believe an organisation built to invent a technology is not the same as one built to see it adopted. The goal itself has not changed. What has changed is the shape of the organisation needed to reach it.

There is a tendency, particularly in technology, to assume that an organisation should grow in proportion to the ambition of its work, and I don't think this necessarily follows. An organisation is a means of achieving something, but its structure, size and activities ought to reflect the problems it exists to solve, and as those problems change, so too must the organisation.

Parity's greatest contribution has been, and continues to be, the development of the underlying technology upon which others can build. The next stage requires us to be considerably more focused about where we apply our resources and where our particular capabilities can make the greatest difference. This means concentrating primarily on the engineering work that advances Polkadot's capabilities, while simplifying the functions and activities that surround it. It also means recognising that the broader ecosystem must increasingly take responsibility for what is built with that technology. The point of creating an open, decentralised system is precisely that its continued development and usefulness should not depend upon the organisation that originally created it.

In practical terms, Parity's focus will be on three things. First, completing the platform functions that developers need to build on Polkadot, with a small amount of Personal Software work to demonstrate what that platform makes possible. Second, the engineering that will allow Polkadot to become a genuine application platform, including work in support of proposals for a new basis for its economy, which will ultimately be a matter for DOT holders. Third, JAM.

There is also an economic reality to address.

The industry has experienced a difficult period, and we cannot reasonably assume that favourable market conditions will always be there to support our activities. An organisation undertaking long-term engineering work must be capable of sustaining that work through changing circumstances. We have therefore reviewed the cost and structure of Parity against what we believe is required for the next phase of development.

These changes are in line with our long-term financial planning, and are intended to ensure Parity has the resources to carry out its mission well into the future.

The intention is to make this a single, considered change. No further restructuring of this kind is planned and, barring the unforeseen, we don't expect to revisit our cost base in this way within our next two-year budget cycle. Two years is a budget cycle, not a horizon, and making this change now is what lets us plan with confidence well beyond it. None of this lessens the consequences for the people affected

Some of those whose roles may be affected have spent a substantial part of their careers building this technology and have contributed to things of lasting importance, and I am acutely aware that the organisation's change in direction comes at a personal cost to them. We will approach the process with care and fairness, and everyone affected will be informed directly about their individual circumstances in the coming days.

To them, I say thank you. What you have built is not undone by this decision, and in fact, it makes the next phase possible. For those continuing at Parity, our responsibility is to make the best possible use of the foundations that have been established.

There remains an enormous amount of important engineering work ahead, and we are still some distance from realising the full potential of decentralised computation and the problems that motivated us to begin this work have certainly not disappeared. If anything, the increasing concentration of control over digital infrastructure makes the availability of credible alternatives more important than ever.

But a technically sophisticated alternative is not enough on its own; it must also be practical, accessible, and useful. Above all, it must provide capabilities people genuinely want to build on and use. That is the next challenge for Polkadot, and it is one to which Parity still has a great deal to contribute.

Parity was never supposed to be the centre of Polkadot indefinitely, and in many regards, the measure of our success will be the extent to which Polkadot can grow and develop without requiring us to be.

I remain as committed to that objective as I was when we started, and these changes are intended to ensure that we can continue making a meaningful contribution towards it for many years to come.

Gav