, Author: Gavin Wood, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.Although it has been a tough year for pretty much everyone (except maybe Amazon and Food Delivery), the Polkadot network and community set sail in 2020 without a hitch. It’s now 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, roughly 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 of them one from the US and China). In the 3 years the code has existed, almost 5000 separate improvements have been made. Now

There are already more than 2,600 developers on , which is a nearly 2-fold increase from less than 1,000 at the beginning of this year.

In 2020, a total 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, with awards totaling 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.

image description

Global Projects of Web3 Foundation Funded Projects

As of press time, the 1.02 billion DOT in Polkadot is worth about US$6 billion, of which about US$3.7 billion (61%) is locked in the staking system, which can obtain an annual return rate of about 14.1%. In just 6 months, Polkadot has become the number one network with capital value as collateral. An additional 10.4 million DOT (approximately $60 million at current valuations) is held in Polkadot treasury for major proposals and will grow at an annual rate of approximately 1.6 million DOT (approximately $9.2 million), partially funded by Based on Polkadot's 10% annual base inflation rate.Mainnet launchWhile there were a lot of releases in our ecosystem in 2020, the most notable one was definitely Polkadot itself, which rolled out smoothly and in stages. In May of this year, we launchedPolkadot’s release roadmap, unveiling the prelude to what will be released in the future, and also introduced the "

Polkadot: Behind the Code

This process truly showcases the power of Substrate's incredible Webassembly-based meta-protocol, allowing for seamless upgrades over time, which change the fundamental nature of the network and allow high-value networks like Polkadot to evolve incrementally. Easy, low-risk steps to roll out.to splitOn the eve of the launch of the Polkadot network, it is quite exciting DOTto split, that vote was on the fledgling network. Let the community come together to decide on the split denomination of DOT tokens, the indivisible unit of Polkadot - Planck. Subsequently,

The days of the network opening transfer and splitting are coming one after another

, Polkadot's native DOT tokens began to rank among the top 10 by market capitalization.

After a smooth launch, Polkadot has been steadily increasing the size of its validators, starting with 197 at launch and adding one 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.

But the year has not been all smooth sailing from the start! 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.

This year,Finance, Governance and DecentralizationThis year,The first Polkadot fiscal proposals are submitted and approved, making Polkadot a heavyweight platform in the DAO and on-chain governance space (although all credit goes to Kusama for blazing this particular path). After renaming vote, validator set size increases

Element and Polkasembly

Between the votes and the lively discussions on Twitter, it's clear to see a healthy community interest in the future of Polkadot.Treasury DOTs are worth over $60 million and unless there is good advice the DOTs in the treasury will slowly be destroyed, so let this be a call to action! Propose something great to Polkadot, and if the elected council agrees, Polkadot will fund you!Regarding staking, although we are the number one staking platform, we will not stop there.

1000 validator projects(Known to receive "1KVP") After its success on Kusama, it has been released on Polkadot and is backed financially 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.Furthermore, in addition to 1 KVP, the Web3 Foundation has also 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.

architecture bridge

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 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.Moonbeam、AcalaFrontier 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

Projects such as Ethereum can provide full Ethereum compatibility with developers and users, while still being derived from Polkadot.

In addition to this compatibility, two cross-chain bridges have been actively developed in 2020, both expected to be released in early 2020: one developed by Interlay for the Bitcoin (BTC) mainnet, and the other developed by Snowfork For Ethereum's mainnet, it also collaborates with the Web3 Foundation's collaborative research team and the bridge development team from Parity Technologies. 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 ParachainsThis fall, the long-awaited upgrade to the Parity blockchain development platform

Substrate 2.0 released

up. 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.RococoAlthough often an unsung hero, over the past year Parity has developed a number of important tools behind the scenes 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.The first "v0" version of , 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, many community teams began to deploy their own parachain testnets, and eventually more than a dozen teams joined the team,。

and happily leverage Rococo's interoperability to message each other

image descriptionTwo different community parachains communicate with each other in a trustless manner through Rococo v0On September 12 this year, the new

XCM message format and Rococo-v0Rococo v1The HRMP messaging protocol successfully carried out inter-chain asset transfers. 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.

Launched a few days ago as a seasonal gift to the community. Cumulus is also in the initial stages of being fully functional, 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.

Community and Events

China trip in 3 citiesHackusamaAttracted more than 700 Polkadot enthusiasts to learn about each parachain.Sub0First Polkadot/Kusama Hackathon

Released with great success. also held twiceAn online conference for developers, successfully spreading knowledge and understanding about the Substrate platform and its incredible community of builders, the second session attracted around 1500 attendees.Substrate Developer Course

Web 3.0 Bootcamp, most of whom have graduated. This has already happened in three separate cohorts and we will continue this program through 2021 with a fourth cohort already underway.

Web 3.0 BootcampThe two biggest events of the past year wereandPolkadot DecodeWeb3 Forumand. The Web3 Forum was an impressive live conference held in Shanghai. The event lasted for two days and attracted more than 500 guests, the chairman of Wanxiang BlockchainDr. Xiao Feng, Executive Director of BSN

He Yifan

More than 70 well-known guests expressed their views and opinions. The forum also provides a bridge for communication and cooperation between different teams.

PolkadotDecode is an online event, the largest single-protocol blockchain conference in 2020, and the first community conference since Polkadot launched. The video attracted over 7,000 signups, over 4,500 views, and counting. We are already planning for Decode 2.0 and communicating with those who submitted proposals.

EquilibriumTeams and Projects

Over 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 opened a door.

In fact, the Polkadot community now consists of over 100 teams and projects covering a wide range of uses. In China alone, there are more than 30 teams building systems, projects and components for the Polkadot ecosystem. Many of these are household names active in the community and on our Element channel, includingAcala、Phala、CrustandDarwiniawait.

and

We have seen some household names from other ecosystems commit to the Polkadot ecosystem. Chainlink has chosen Polkadot as the next network after Ethereum, as has 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.

expect

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

expect

But travel hopes aside, if we deploy Polkadot and demonstrate its core technology in 2020, 2021 will see the technology integrated into the mainnet. External audits of the "parachain v1" code as well as 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, along with parachains, slots Lease auctions, crowdloans, bridges, XCMP-lite, XCM, and Cumulus land, not to mention the 50 or so parachain teams that will be fighting for their slot release slots.

Summarize

In addition to all of this, the next major version of Substrate, version 3.0, is likely to be released in the first half of next year, which will bring compatibility to Ethereum, as well as new improvements and more idiomatic Frame Pallet APIs, a new (faster ) database backend and end-to-end weighting system.