At the beginning of Q4 last year, @joyce and I worked alongside a few ecosystem members on identifying key criteria assessing different blockchain infrastructure on the market.
Hence, we scouted amongst 4 big target audiences (decisions makers/C-level people spread between commercial, technical, investor and infrastructure providers roles) on what metrics are they prioritizing evaluating their choices:
- where to deploy
- with whom to integrate
- who to invest in (or in projects from which ecosystem), etc.
An additional important point to mention is that all of these subjects would come outside of the Polkadot ecosystem.
How did we approach the project?
Based on the timeline and deadline we’ve received for the project, we reached out to ∼50 decision makers (C–level) and managed to get around 30 of them for a call going through a pre-defined survey of questions helping us get the desired data. Additionally, we’ve sent out a quantitative survey to a few dozen more, which helped us get closer to the number of a total of 40-45 participants.
Deliverables and conclusions from vol.1:
- Prioritization of performance criteria/metrics
- Scalability aka performance/speed and cost came in as the most important (presented through KPIs such as through TPS, time to finality)
- Followed by DevX, Ecosystem development and Security
- The least ranked was Decentralization
- Assessing which data/metrics are important as a part of each pillar
TPS, Block times, Finality, Gas costs
Total no. of wallets, txs, liquidity (stablecoin distribution)
(De-validated): Financial performance (one of the least prioritized)
(De-validated): Horizontal scaling (one of the least prioritized)
- Blockchain of preference
- Solana came in at the first place
- Polkadot was mentioned only once (its tech–Polkadot SDK/Substrate)
For a full presentation/slide deck, visit this link
On another note, we have received a few feedback points that the learnings/conclusions presented are not adequate or reliable enough due to the too few number of people we interviewed – however, it’s very important to mention that the project deadline and timeline resulted in a total of 1,5 months, while we were working on 3+ other projects at the same time.
What comes next?
We’d like to say that we learn from our mistakes and grow from our experiences.
Hence this time, and for part 2 of the Market Research project, we’d like to include Polkadot Community to present ideas or requirements for continuing with the project.
In order to inspire and provide examples, here are a few practical outcomes of the previous effort:
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Parity decided to build a Reliability dashboard serving as a competitive landscape tool comparing prioritized KPIs (TPS & Latency performance, predicting costs, etc.)
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Follow-up projects from the feedback targeted at two projects that Parity is focusing on: Plaza upgrade (“Polkadot Hub”) and Parachains (“Polkadot Cloud”)
- EVM developer requirements (prioritizing tooling integrations for Hub)
- Polkadot’s Omni-Infrastructure (GTM positioning Omni-node and Hub)
- Analysis on Tier 1 Projects that went from dApp to Appchain launched (positioning Polkadot Cloud)
- (TBD) Revamping ‘Alpha program’ into a new Polkadot Builders program (Polkadot in general)
With that said, we hope to see many reasonable ideas and requirements coming from quantitative and qualitative arguments based on projects you’re leading, or working on.
Additionally, Joyce and I will be welcoming every solution proposal and accept more practical resources in time allocation, sourcing networks/contacts, and more.
Let’s hear it