Now is the time to pay attention to altcoins. With the recent pullback for Bitcoin and altcoins in general, you can now get the same altcoins for 10 or even 20% less than you could just a few days ago. I like to keep you all updated on the coins I'm watching and keeping my eyes on. One coin I have covered previously and want to provide some further updates on is Polkadot (DOT).
While Bitcoin has been on a massive uptrend over the last few weeks and Ethereum is also on a very nice run, many altcoins, including Polkadot, are still quite far away from their all-time highs. Of course, not every project will return to its previous all-time highs, and some coins will die off during the bear market. However, Polkadot is not one of them. Polkadot has been continuously improving and growing since its creation and has emerged on the other side of the bear market with massive plans for the future. The next huge step for Polkadot is the rollout of Polkadot 2.0 throughout this year.
Before I dive into nine other reasons to be paying attention to Polkadot right now, make sure to subscribe and activate the bell icon so you do not miss out on more videos like this, as well as everything else I post on the channel. If you want a deep dive into how Polkadot works and all the details of what is included in the 2.0 upgrade, then you should watch the last video I made on Polkadot. For today, I will give a quick overview of the project and what is changing in version two before going into some of the catalysts I have not covered before.
Overview of Polkadot:
Polkadot is an efficient and scalable base-layer network protocol with native interoperability. The core Polkadot chain is known as the relay chain and provides security, consensus, and interoperability for all the other blockchains, known as parachains, that build within the Polkadot ecosystem. Each of those parachains can have its own token and be optimized to best fit the needs of different types of projects. Polkadot launched in 2020, and they have been working on improving the network since then. Some of the biggest improvements will be integrated in version 2.0 this year:
Dynamic Core Allocation: To improve Polkadot's flexibility, efficiency, and scalability by allowing projects building on Polkadot to access resources without going through the complicated auction process to obtain a parachain slot.
Asynchronous Backing: To improve the throughput of the network by allowing more transactions to be processed at the same time, making the network more scalable and allowing for a greater number of applications that require higher levels of scalability to build on Polkadot.
Trustless Bridging to Chains Outside of the Polkadot Network: This will be integrated through Beefy and Snowbridge. These bridging protocols will function without the centralized burning and re-mining system, which has caused many other bridges to suffer exploits in the past.
One specific type of project that can benefit from building on Polkadot is gamefi projects. Polkadot has secured a massive partnership with Mythical Games and its Mythos Partners to build on top of the Polkadot Network. Mythical Games has over 650,000 users of their app, which is top-ranked in the App Store with over 3 million downloads, and those users will be moving into the Polkadot ecosystem as Mythical Games and its Mythos Partners build there. This partnership is a huge sign of the quality of what Polkadot has built, as partnerships of this size in terms of active users are fairly unusual in crypto.
Other Projects Building on Polkadot:
PAK: A project taking advantage of Polkadot's scalability and flexibility to offer up to 10,000 transactions per second for the use of applications in the DeFi and machine RWA sectors. Some major non-crypto companies are already building with PAK, including Bosch, Airbus, and Continental.
Tokenization of Real-World Assets (RWA): The largest financial institutions in the world are bullish on RWAs, and the market size is projected to grow by trillions over the coming years. Centrifuge is a leading RWA project building on Polkadot, which has already grown to see over $250 million in TVL and $500 million in investments from massive projects, including Maker, FRAX, Block Tower, and Susi.
Polkadot's Developer Community:
One of the core reasons why Polkadot has seen so much growth and improvement is their massive community of developers. In 2023, Polkadot had 2,17 monthly active developers, with only Ethereum having greater levels of developer activity. A primary reason Polkadot attracts so many developers is their Substrate software development kit (SDK). Substrate was created by one of the co-founders of Ethereum, Gavin Wood, and he used all the knowledge he had gained from helping create Ethereum to provide a great developer experience for anyone using Substrate. The quality of Substrate is evident as it is now trusted and used by some top projects even outside of the Polkadot ecosystem, including Cardano and StaFi. Substrate allows developers to quickly and easily build optimized blockchains without needing to start from scratch, which saves massive amounts of time, effort, and money for projects creating new applications.
Along with developing the Substrate SDK, Gavin Wood also founded Polkadot to fix the things that were not scaling with Ethereum and to offer a more agile and adaptable network than Ethereum. A big part of his vision was scalability. Over the past few years, it has become more common for projects or chains to scale through app chains or parachains. Scaling this way involves having a shared security layer and then creating purpose-built chains utilizing that security layer so they can focus on their own specific use cases without having to worry about their security model. As the first network to implement parachains, Polkadot has a huge head start in this area and has helped redefine how security and scalability are implemented.
Polkadot is a true decentralized chain and is led through community governance. One popular measure of decentralization, the Nakamoto coefficient, reveals Polkadot to be one of the most decentralized proof-of-stake chains in existence. The DOT token is used on Polkadot's open governance platform to provide the community full control over the future of the network. One notable feature of open governance is that anyone can make treasury proposals to obtain funding for any project, for marketing, or for business development or other initiatives. If the community approves, then that funding will be supplied.
Conclusion:
There is a whole lot happening for Polkadot, and even more is going to be coming through the rest of the year as Polkadot 2.0 is implemented and ecosystem growth continues. If you want to learn more and get involved in the Polkadot community yourself, you can do so through the links down in the description. I hope you all enjoy today's video, and a massive thank you to the Polkadot community for being a partner of the channel. I will see you guys in the next one.