I’m very supportive of Tommi’s proposal to add some clarity around the “Polkadot 2.0” nomenclature. We’ve already seen a lot of interest in the term, inside and outside of the eco, because people want to know what the next wave of innovation will look like on Polkadot in the current market cycle. It has marketing utility for this purpose.
Very much understand the concerns around versioning and catering to the ‘marketingese’ nature of it. But like “Dotsama,” it’s already become so broadly used and adopted that the risk of NOT defining it will be that other people will lead this conversation. This is a narrative we can and should wholly own.
To give folks some sense of what I’m talking about, here are some search volume numbers (US-based, for the purposes of giving you a sample).
Searches for “polkadot 2.0” (monthly) = ~140/mo in the US
That’s a small percentage of overall searches for Polkadot (what we can assume are Polkadot Network-related searches, at least) but it shows a pretty strong interest and curiousity about the term and what’s next. Other than price chatter, the only categories where we see more interest than this are “polkadot staking” and “polkadot wallets” which isn’t terribly surprising.
Purely for comparison purposes, here is what the volume looks like for some other Polkadot-related terms (again, US-based just for simplicity)
Part of this, of course, will be promotion – how can we start amplifying some of these other features and storylines so that they get some visibility?
But I’m using this purely as a way to gauge demand and appetite for some very simplistic way to position “the next big wave” of Polkadot, and the 2.0 term does seem to have organic traction.
I think it’s a great idea to define Polkadot 2.0, tie some features to it, and also make it more tangible and discretely deliverable. Otherwise, the folks who are trying to figure out what’s next in this eco are depending on pay-to-play media sources to give them the information they’re looking for:
(pages 1-2ish of “polkadot 2.0” search results)
I don’t expect this will detract from the “holy shit!”-ness of JAM. Everyone I’ve spoken to has very much absorbed the potential impact that JAM could have, and IMO it would be underselling JAM to slap a “3.0” version on it. We (as marketing folks) need to find a better way to communicate just how many leagues ahead of current state JAM will bring us.
But in the meantime, Polkadot 2.0 brings us some much-needed tangibility for talking about the near-term upgrades and I for one am very excited that so many in the community are on board with putting some formality behind it.