Meta Description: Decoded 2024 allowed learning and exchanging know-how with the richest diversity of Polkadot's community on the latest blockchain technology.
Decoded 2024 by Polkadot is its central event. It took place on July 11-12 in Brussels, Belgium, and brought into a single space a number of developers, investors, artists, business experts, industry frontrunners, and crypto freaks looking to learn about the latest in blockchain technology.
Decoded allowed learning and exchanging know-how with the richest diversity of developers, investors, artists, business specialists, industry leaders, and crypto enthusiasts on the latest blockchain technology.
Decoded 2024 themes
This year, the core themes have been technological innovation, community-driven development, and real-world applications that propel the Polkadot ecosystem.
These three themes manifested rather visibly throughout the varied schedule of keynotes, panel discussions, and interactive workshops that make up this event.
Polkadot propels real-world solutions
The evening opened with two compelling keynotes from innovative executives of Polkadot. Björn Wagner, CEO of Parity Technologies, gave his thoughts about the progress in the Polkadot ecosystem.
An accomplished list of tasks
He stated that in the last 12 months, Polkadot has executed and secured more deals than in the prior three years combined.
Meanwhile, staking on Polkadot has again picked up its pace since October of last year. That brings up to 850 million DOT, which is a big economic security ensuring the integrity of the Polkadot ecosystem.
Björn emphasized Parity's focus on high-impact collaborations that help drive engagement and adoption, like:
Mythical Games: Integrating Polkadot's tech in a manner that transforms on-chain gaming experiences.
Ledger: Improving security and user experience throughout the Polkadot ecosystem.
Raise: it powers payments in the newly launched Polkadot mobile app.
The gift card industry
A panel discussion was led by George Bousis, founder and CEO of Raise. George and Björn explored how blockchain technology intersects with the gift card industry, showing how Polkadot's platform can help solve some of the historical challenges of traditional sectors.
According to George, that is a trillion dollars of value transferred between brands and their consumers annually in the gift card industry.
But brands don't know who their customers are, nor where that money's coming from.
It's upon this that we were excited about how all of this technology could be applied to the gift card sector, solving many of the problems that have plagued that business for so long: fraud, money laundering, and companies having no idea who these customers are.
Gavin Wood on individuality in a purely digital world
The founder of Polkadot, Dr. Gavin Wood, gave an enlightening talk on Sybil resistance — a concept preventing one person from taking on many identities, to digital individuality.
Dr. Wood stated that his team has been working on one of the most important questions within this area: Sybil resistance. He said that the blockchain systems are based on game theory, and we normally reason about games in terms of limiting the number of players or managing the fact that they might be arbitrary in plurality.
He made a very sharp distinction between identity and individuality:
"I want to be very clear that I'm not talking about identity." That is, it's not finding out who some endpoint in the physical world is; but rather, being able to tell if a gadget is one of a gadget and it's not being manipulated by a human."
Man vs. Machine
Gavin went on to highlight the need to differentiate between human users and automated systems in digital interactions, for it encompasses many aspects of blockchain technology, from governance to fair resource allocation.
Various ways to address the issue were offered, but at the same time, the challenges and possible answers in building a fully decentralized and Sybil-resistant system that respects user privacy and preserves the integrity of the network were noted.
Join-Accumulate Machine
He closed out with JAM, which he introduced last year at Decoded. As a reminder, JAM stands for Join-Accumulate Machine and is a technology in development that tries to solve the scalability and interoperability issues current blockchain systems are facing.
Gavin was enthusiastic about the potential of JAM to increase interoperability between smart contracts across various chains, as well as higher performance by falling to a PVM, Polkadot Virtual Machine, which could realize "around a trillion EVM gas per second throughput."
He also shared that a JAM developer program by Web3 Foundation: 10 million DOT would be granted to teams producing production-ready JAM implementations in many programming languages as an incentive.
Core themes from Decoded
Decoded 2024 was shining a massive spotlight on the rise of decentralized governance and the impact it has had on the community of Polkadot ecosystem builders.
Future of Governance & Decentralization at Polkadot
One of the sessions, "Future of Governance & Decentralization at Polkadot", revealed novel approaches for decision-making on-chain, while another, "State of the Union: A Status Quo and Strategy for Polkadot Ecosystem Development", dealt with ways in which the network should approach decentralization challenges and initiatives to onboard new users and developers.
Technical innovations take center stage
Improvements to Polkadot's technology were highly visible across various teams within the ecosystem:
Tanssi's session elaborated on how Polkadot is transforming the Appchain scene
Appchains, otherwise called application-specific blockchains, are essentially blockchains designed to run only one application, unlike what is the case with public blockchains that support several apps.
Appchains provide web3 developers with more control over the economic structure, governance framework, and consensus method of an application. This gives developers some customizability and performance benefits with more ownership while leveraging the security of the primary blockchain.
How are Appchains built?
Appchains are built on top of pre-existing blockchain platforms, with all their consensus mechanism, fees, governance structures, and smart contract languages.
Coretime: First Step Towards Polkadot 2.0
"Coretime: First Step Towards Polkadot 2.0" examined Agile Coretime, a new approach toward the scalability and resource allocation mechanism of the Polkadot network.
Agile Coretime empowers the effective exploitation of Polkadot network resources while providing economic flexibility to builders, which broadens its scope beyond what it was stated or envisioned in the whitepaper.
Agile Coretime allows users to buy core time in "bulk" and allocate it for a month at a time. Heavy duty parachains who need to author a block every 12 seconds, or as frequently as every 6 seconds using Asynchronous Backing, could on a monthly basis "renew" the core.
The orders for coretime renewal are ordered before new orders and protect parachains from the fluctuation of prices, so they can make their project budget and expenses in a more predictable way.
Purchased coretime can be further divided and resold in slices as small as one block per month, allowing secondary markets to build up and increasing the efficiency of coretime allocation. Moreover, Agile Coretime is capable of providing on-demand core time; it is able to create a parachain block whenever it needs to.
Unified UX Strategy
On the "Unified UX Strategy" panel, forwards from Braille, Subwallet, Apillon, Novasama, and TeachMeDeFi led the discussion on what harmonious and natural user experiences could look like across the Polkadot multichain ecosystem.
On the development end, Polkadot gives you tautological leeway, but currently, UX is overwhelming.
Currently, it's only wallet teams that get a clear experience, while all other interactions in Polkadot and its parachains seem to mismatch the requirements of web3.
A harmonized UX
They presented the critical need for a harmonized user experience across Polkadot's ecosystem, reducing fragmented experiences to make the journeys of users intuitive and complete. This comprises the current UX issues and the strategic solutions required to bring immense improvement in user engagement across the ecosystem.
Discussion Points
👉Problems in UX: What are the most critical user experience challenges facing the Polkadot ecosystem today? Standardization: How might UX standards help in solving these problems?
👉Other projects that are within the scope of the plan: What other projects might possibly improve the user experience?
Real use case adoption
The following boundary-breaking application examples were shared across different verticals:
🔥"Mythos x Polkadot" or "HEROIC and Polkadot", which, while showcasing blockchain strengths in gaming and esports markets, takes advantage of Polkadot and its community-led connection with HEROIC.
🔥Polkadot's "Kinera, a Decentralised Media Platform" showed the new ways for creating and delivering content.
🔥The multi-chain feature of the Polkadot turned the phrase into a reality in applications of complex designs: "The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts".
In The Future
As the curtain fell on Decoded 2024, the mood reignited the passion for vision, technological innovation, community participation, and integration of real-world applications into Polkadot. Polkadot has set strong foundations for online interactions that are more secure, open, and user-oriented. The future is going to be multi-chain, and so Polkadot is going to redefine that.
Frequently asked questions
What is "Decoded 2024"?
The main event of Polkadot, Decoded 2024, took place on 11-12 July 2024 in Brussels, Belgium. It is an event that brings together developers and investors, artists and business specialists, industry executives, and simply cryptocurrency lovers who get acquainted with the newest blockchain technologies.
What were some of the main themes at Decoded 2024?
Decoded 2024 zeroed in on themes of technological innovation, community-driven development, and real-world applications that underpin the Polkadot ecosystem. These themes were addressed through keynote speeches, panel discussions, and workshops, all involving attendees.
What is Agile Coretime, and how does it affect the Polkadot network?
Agile Coretime is a new, more suitable way of scaling and resource allocation on Polkadot. The clients can purchase core time in advance to be allocated monthly and get economic flexibility with predictable budgeting for heavy-duty parachains. This also creates secondary markets for the Core Time allocation, bringing efficiency in its wake.
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