Does Polkadot Have Serious Quality Issues?

Polkadot is often praised for its cutting-edge technology—and to some extent, rightfully so. But recent events have significantly shaken my confidence in the project’s overall quality and execution.

Several issues have come to light that suggest not just isolated mistakes, but systemic problems in architecture, oversight, and prioritization:

  1. Performance Degradation on Polkadot and Kusama
    Recently, both Polkadot and Kusama experienced notable performance issues. Developers appeared to struggle to identify the root cause, which raises questions about the system’s complexity and maintainability. Gavin Wood himself has hinted in interviews that the architecture/code base may be overly complicated.

  2. Coretime Sales Disaster
    From the beginning, many in the community raised red flags about the coretime sales model, and from day one people jokingly talked about “block time barons.” These warnings were largely dismissed, yet recent events revealed precisely the kinds of flaws critics feared. It feels like a foreseeable disaster.

  3. Secure Bridges That Don’t Deliver
    Roughly two years ago, secure bridges were promoted as a vital step in fixing Polkadot’s liquidity bleed. Yet when users tried to bridge assets like USDT/USDC via Turtle.cool, they found that the bridged assets (e.g., Snowbridge USDT) had no utility within the Polkadot ecosystem (see also ref. 1491).
    This begs the question: were the developers unaware of this user experience gap—or worse, indifferent?

  4. Inconsistent Core Sales Data (Lastic vs RegionX)
    A marketplace should be the polished front door to your ecosystem—clear, professional, and reliable. But Lastic and RegionX show conflicting data on Kusama core sales. As of today, Lastic reports 63/94 cores sold, while RegionX shows 94/94. This kind of inconsistency undermines trust and suggests poor coordination.

I’m still (cautiously) optimistic about Polkadot’s long-term potential. But these recent events point to deeper, structural quality issues that need urgent attention. The tech may be solid, but execution, coordination, and ecosystem maturity appear to be lagging behind.

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Strongly wondering the same.

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You can use the wiki until the main website fixes the issue.

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I agree with you. In addition, I would like to mention that the implementation of Polkadot 2.0 is complete. Final step: Elastic Scaling successfully tested on the Kusama network. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no mention of this in the news.

Who is in charge of PR at Polkadot? Why isn’t there an effort to make Polkadot more well-known in the media, and to heavily promote new developments or innovations?

I love Polkadot and fully support the coin, but I feel like Polkadot is losing more and more of its appeal and, due to a lack of its own PR, is dropping in value among the crypto top 20.

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