On 28.05.2026, this post becomes the subject of a censorship attempt by Polkadot mods. The censorship decision has since been reverted, and here we would like to provide our recollection of what happened.
Timeline
- Around 16:00 UTC, a Polkadot mod posted the following message on this forum post: “Is this intended as constructive technical feedback relevant to JAM/PVM, or primarily promotion of a separate competing project?”
- Several minutes later, we received a system notification from Polkadot Forum, that the post is marked as Spam.
- The post was censored, became non-visible even to ourselves.
- 8 hours later, probably due to the backlash from Twitter, we found out that the moderation censorship decision was reverted and the post is back to normal.
Our Statement: An echo-chamber is the very thing that will bring Polkadot to irrelevancy
Polkadot itself is not developed in a vacuum. Polkadot’s BABE is derived from Cardano’s Ouroboros. GRANDPA’s GHOST took heavy inspirations from the discussions in Ethereum’s Casper FFG. BFT from Cosmos (Tendermint). Various VRF usage has heavy roots from Algorand. NPoS is a refinement of DPoS which was pioneered by EOS. Tezos began on-chain governance much earlier than Polkadot. And finally, parachain is essentially an improved version of Ethereum’s earlier abandoned sharding design.
The observation couldn’t have been more clear: If you ban even technical discussions about competing projects, then Polkadot can’t even exist.
The issue wasn’t apparent 2 or 3 years ago when Polkadot still led in technology. Competing projects were generally worse off. This is not the case any more. Monad, Tempo, etc, dwarfs Polkadot Hub / Revive for its EVM execution performance, exactly as we predicted a year ago. Now, with our new benchmarks on PVM2 as specified in this post, we also know that PVM itself, as advertised by Parity/W3F as the “top-performant VM”, is probably also a sham.
You aren’t leading in tech any more. You can of course continue to do what you’re doing today – feel threatened and censor information. But your censorship will not change facts. If JAR/JAVM is 2x faster than PolkaVM, it will continue to be 2x faster regardless of your moderation decision.
If you don’t allow discussions about why “competing projects” are faster than you, the loss is on you. Praying that the “Parity/W3F god” will do all the work for you is of course still a strategy (I use the term “pray to the god” deliberately, because that’s essentially what this community is doing right now), but it should be apparent that it’s not a good strategy especially for something that is supposed to be “decentralized”, and Parity/W3F does not have a good track record of being correct.
JAR Chain and JAM Chain are both protocols. In a healthy decentralized community, open competition should have been allowed. For example, as a principle, the Polkadot community should decide the technical stack of its future – JAR Chain or JAM Chain. Not a decision made by Polkadot insiders and mods.
JAR Chain itself is coinless so we wouldn’t have been competing with any coins regardless, but labeling us as a “competing project” is exactly how you will get an actual competing project for Polkadot. And you’ll be happy to know that we’ll indeed be happy to “compete”. After all, we stay lean, and with software development itself now essentially costs 0 with the emergence of agentic coding, we have the financial freedom to pursue what we want to build indefinitely. Unlike Polkadot, there’s no pressure for us to urgently “turn a profit”.
I want to end this with a quote from Gavin: