Polkadot 2.0 Launch Party

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We are approaching the Polkadot 2.0 launch. A big milestone in Polkadot’s evolution! It consists of three innovations: Agile Coretime, Async Backing, and Elastic Scaling. Together, they finally allow Polkadot to provide an elastic market for its primary product, our big differentiator from all other ecosystems: coretime.

But Polkadot 2.0 is more than that. It marks the point in time where the overall ecosystem has matured. We now have things that work, are usable and mature: Wallets, parachains, SDKs, tools…

I propose that we celebrate this important milestone and run a campaign themed as a global, decentralized launch party. A month-long campaign that shows the strength of our community and pushes us to grow in our mindset to make Polkadot the best place to build Web3.

Ingridients for the party:

  • a global online hackathon. One full month that invites devs to build with PAPI, Apillon, Substrate, ink! etc… The theme could be to build radically in public, radically usable! Simple apps with simple use cases that work and have something interesting to them. Teams are invited to build in public and share their progress, creating the opportunity for the community to participate, get excited, discuss their favorites, join teams, etc…
    • SDK teams can join and provide guidance on how to use their SDKs
    • parachain teams can join and show how to use their on-chain primitives, APIs…
    • tooling teams can highlight how to use indexers, explorers, dashboards, etc…
  • physical meetups and events to gather Polkadot fans regionally and provide a boost to regional DAOs, the Ambassador program, and get the community updated on the latest in Polkadot, or physically collaborate on their hackathon project.
  • an online campaign where
    • official communication channels run a content series on the current best and most interesting products and projects in the ecosystem
    • teams like Parity, W3F can share their north star on the future direction of Polkadot, current projects and vision
    • parachain teams and protocols add their voice to the conversation with the latest they have planned
    • our social media communities are provided with material to disseminate outwards

Finishing Polkadot 2.0 is great opportunity to draw fresh attention to how the ecosystem is maturing and to invite

  • developers to try out and build against the different primitives available in the Polkadot Cloud
  • users to try out Polkado products again or for the first time
  • media to report about Polkadot’s next big steps

Our ecosystem has matured greatly in the 4 years since parachains launched and we should give everyone an opportunity to look at Polkadot with fresh eyes.

Organizing a Polkadot 2.0 Launch Party gives us an opportunity to create closure on the phase that lies behind us and gets us ready for the mindset shift that lies in front of us. The era of Polkadot Cloud, Polkadot Hub, and a new focus on finally delivering the apps that the idea of Web3 is promising us.

That’s the idea. It is permissionless. Every team can choose how much they participate. Every community member can organize a local event. Some parts have to be coordinated. I’d love to see this being co-created by all of us.

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Thanks for the positive messages so far!

I’ve been asked what I see as the start date of the campaign. Ideally we start with the activation of Elastic Scaling, but it’s dependent on if key stakeholders for coordinating the three pillars are able to pull it off by then. I’m in comms with them to sort this out now.

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That’s really great

As I shared on X
It’s a good strategy to both celebrate Polkadot, market Polkadot, Educate people about Polkadot, bring about connections and enable to people to build on Polkadot

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Distractive is ready to support this!
A community-wide push would need everyone’s attention, too. All teams should get ready to host a meetup, put up a banner on their website and a social post, and get their friends, family, and pets excited about it! :smiley:

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I’m down to talk polkadot 2.0 launch/growth strategies + can give updates on the Polkadot Cloud website development project announced earlier in the year. let’s make it happen :+1:

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As a very new team looking into Polkadot this would be a fantastic way to get some useful groundswell and something exciting to talk about and work on. Crypto has become stale with excessive focus on token prices, TVL levels, etc.

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Sounds like a great opportunity to make some noise, distribute knowledge and attract more people into the ecosystem :slight_smile:

Polkadot summer :fire:

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Good idea! But before this, I think it makes sense to have a Polkadot Hub Launch Party focussing around the primitives mentioned here

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I opened a thread for that here →

Hub launch will happen after Elastic Scaling activation, so the order is first Polkadot 2.0, then Hub

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Thank you very much for spearheading this initiative.

After discussions internally at W3F and with Parity folks, we are keen on engaging in the Polkadot 2.0 launch party - Global online hackathon with the following objectives:

  • Parachain Re-engagement Campaign: A dedicated track for existing parachain developers to try out the Polkadot 2.0 features pertaining to Agile Coretime, Async Backing and Elastic Scaling. For instance, we will have developer sessions and support around latest coretime features like enabling core auto-renewals, ordering on-demand coretime, things to consider before enabling async backing, elastic scaling demos etc. Parachains are the true customers of Polkadot 2.0 product, so it is apt to engage them in full capacity!

  • Polkadot Deployment Portal: Engage developers from other ecosystems to try out PDP and try out different use-cases with it

  • Parachain SDKs and APIs: What is Polkadot 2.0 without the parachains and their use-cases? It is important to have a bounty track that lets tinkerers tinker with parachain SDK and APIs. I will be pitching for a funding matching scheme with W3F for the benefit of participating parachains that like to post challenges/tasks for hackathon participants.

Overall, this is a great opportunity to make this an online and on-chain festival for celebrating all the work that has been put into making Polkadot 2.0 a reality! Looking forward to it.

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2025-06-30 Update

I am happy to announce that several entities have joined the preparation of the Polkadot 2.0 Launch Party. This is our current team:

  • Coordination: Tommi (OpenGov.Watch)
  • Hackathon: @radha (Web3 Foundation)
  • Meetups: @Tycho_Masius (Roots)
  • Social: @et90266 (Social Media Editorial Board)
  • Marketing: Eric (Distractive)

We are especially happy that the Web3 Foundation are supporting the global online hackathon.

As for the timeline, we are targeting at least 2 months of preparation, but don’t want to communicate a fixed start date publicly yet, as we are looking to sync with other anticipated launches coming up.

We will start reaching out to ecosystem teams in the coming days to invite them to be part of the Launch party in the hackathon, physical meetups, and the marketing campaign.

We will publish more information as the preparation progresses. If you have questions in the meantime, please use this thread.

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The R0GUE team is motivated and excited to support the hackathon with the Pop CLI and help builders make the most of Polkadot 2.0. Just let us know how we can contribute :rocket: !

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Online Hackathon Theme: Polkadot 2.0 Developer Activation

“I have not followed what is happening on Polkadot after 2021. What’s up?” - an average developer at every major blockchain conference

A lot has happened, and many features have been implemented on Polkadot that did not receive the spotlight they deserve. A comprehensive developer activation event gives a decent shot at addressing this issue, which can feature:

  • Hackathons with streamlined bounties
  • Demos and Workshops on Polkadot Cloud (and Hub)
  • Developer support, office hours from developers and product teams
  • Parachain developer (re)engagement efforts
  • Spammening 2.0

Strategy

Online Hackathon (4-6 weeks)

To try out the features and functionalities and develop a legitimate proof of concept using Polkadot SDK, it takes time and cannot be fit into the traditional 2 day to 1 week hackathon models. Based on the conversations earlier with the working group, here are the target audience for the online hackathon

  • Web3 developers from other ecosystems
  • Enthusiastic developers who have no or little experience in Web3/Blockchain
  • Existing developers in the Polkadot ecosystem

We could use one or multiple online hackathon platforms based on the target demographic we like to prioritize. Some of the platforms considered:

It is possible to run the 2.0 hackathon on different platforms at the same time, capturing different set of audience.

Polkadot Cloud and Hub workshops

W3F, Parity and any interested ecosystem team (Papermoon, OpenGuild, R0gue etc.) can actively engage the hackathon registrants with workshops and demo sessions on

  • What can be built with Polkadot SDK and its USPs
  • Runtime development, and how it differs from Smart Contract development
  • Hub Smart Contracts, intro to the pioneering work on RISC-V VM (PolkaVM)
  • Cross-chain applications, with emphasis on trustless bridges
  • Agile coretime, async backing and elastic scaling
  • Web3 usecases and verticals

Developer Support

Activate official Polkadot Developer support framework on official channels on different platforms

  • Polkadot DIscord
  • Polkadot Devs Telegram
  • Polkadot Devs Element
  • Polkadot and Substrate Stack Exchange

Have DevRel staff from W3F, Parity and Papermoon together with OpenGuild and R0gue be the first line of support and then direct advanced issues and questions to Polkadot Technical Fellowship. Arrange for dedicated office hours with Polkadot 2.0 core developers.

Parachain Developer Re-engagement

Establishing an active communication channel with existing or prospective parachain developers has not worked very well in the past. Though Polkadot continues to ship new features on its SDK, there is little or no feedback pouring in from the Parachain developers. Currently, there are 40 parachains running on Polkadot. How many of them have actually looked into or are considering upgrading to access 2.0 features like Async backing and Elastic Scaling? A re-engagement effort is needed to align Polkadot SDK feature development with the actual needs of parachain developers.

Spammening 2.0

While The Spammening showed what Polkadot can do, there has not been a full demonstration of what a parachain can do. Yes, Polkadot may have 100K+ TPS, but who cares? If I launch as a parachain, what TPS can “I” achieve? Time to show Polkadot SDK’s prowess with async backing and elastic scaling and showing the world what peak performance can be achieved by chains that plan to make Polkadot their future home.

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Who is responsible for coordinating this part?

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answered here :backhand_index_pointing_down:

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Hey everyone,

I created a short video brief if your audiences prefer that format:

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Hello, community! My name is Carlos Rodríguez (@Juminstock), and I’m currently the Community Manager and DevRel for Astar Network. It’s a pleasure to greet you all.

I’d love to take part in this conversation because I believe what’s being developed here is fantastic, not only for developers, but also for end users and the parachains themselves. So I’d like to share a few thoughts.

The online hackathon represents a great opportunity to showcase and demonstrate the true potential of Polkadot 2.0, just as Radha mentioned. However, I don’t think the hackathon should be the main focus, the real core should be the set of workshops or study sessions provided. This deserves major attention because there are many significant updates that developers need to understand, and if they try to learn everything on their own, the process can become unnecessarily difficult.

That’s why I believe these workshops should be the heart of all subsequent actions.

Additionally, from Astar’s engineering team, we’d be happy to contribute our knowledge by leading one of these sessions you’re planning, we’re definitely open to collaborating.

Involving parachain teams could also be a great idea.

At Astar, we’re already doing this! We’re allocating human resources to deeply understand the technological implications of Agile Coretime and Elastic Scaling.

We already support Async Backing and are actively keeping up with Polkadot’s technological trends.

In summary, Astar is open to collaborating on this amazing initiative, we’re following Polkadot’s cutting-edge developments closely and are currently working on our migration to Agile Coretime. I’ll be keeping an eye out for your messages.

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Parachain Developer Re-engagement

As far as I’m aware, Polkadot Alpha Program used to be provided as a link on the Polkadot website here https://wiki.polkadot.network/general/alpha-program/, but now it returns a 404 error, however there’s still a link to the Polkadot Alpha Program in the Kusama Network Guides (that appear to be maintained by W3F) here https://guide.kusama.network/docs/alpha-program that was “Last updated on Sep 30, 2024”, but that has links to https://polkadot.com/alpha-program/ that returns a 404 error.

In the past I was in a parachain team from Aug 2019 until May 2022 when I resigned after giving a couple of months notice to the company that was developing it for personal reasons when the Substrate Builders Program was around. Then they changed it to the Polkadot Alpha Program so I rejoined it in June 2024 for the parachain projects that I was developing by myself through Clawbird, and I received a link to the Polkadot Alpha Program website on Notion at Notion.

On that page it says the Point of Contact is Nico Morgan on Element: @nicholas:parity.io, and that the “Builders Program - General Chat Room” is the invite-only communication channel.

Below is the latest status of that Matrix/Element channel and others:

  • Substrate Builders Program “Builders Program - General Chat” #substrate-builders-program-overall:matrix.parity.io associated with this information
    → Last post May 2025 had requesting coretime help no response

  • Substrate Builders Program “Builders Program - Chains Track” #substrate-builders-program-chains:matrix.parity.io) associated with this information
    → Last comment was in Nov 2023.

  • Parachain Announcements #parachain-announcements:matrix.parity.io ?
    → Last comment Oct 2022

  • Parity Support (Public) #support:matrix.parity.io ?
    → Comment in Feb 2023 asking if it was active received no response, and two subsequent technical questions in Sept 2023 and June 2025 received no response

  • Parachain Technical #parachain-technical:matrix.parity.io?
    → Last post was in May 2023 by RSS Bot called “RSS Bot [@shawntabrizi:matrix.parity.io]” but it appears to have been deprecated for some reason

Why were those parachain channels in Element/Matrix effectively abandoned?

Why isn’t there a requirement and incentive for admins/moderators in parachain-related technical support channels to have to stake DOT/KSM whilst they’re active and if they plan to discontinue providing that service they only receive their deposit back after the Technical Fellowship has confirmed that they’ve perform proper cleanup like public backup/archiving and providing notifications and redirection links if the channel has been replaced?

For example, if I go to Polkadot Direction #polkadot-direction:parity.io, it conveniently provides a notification This room has been replaced and is no longer active. The conversation continues here. https://matrix.to/#/#Polkadot-Direction:parity.io.

Historically I’d proactively create Pull Requests to fix the broken links since it was even encouraged in the Polkadot Ambassador Program, but I don’t believe those efforts get recognised and I think maintenance of these websites to check for broken links should be automated by now. There was a time when Kian Paimani proactively created a script to automatically check and fix broken links in the Substrate documentation from recollection.

The new Polkadot Agents Program WFC Polkassembly - Referendum #1660 highlights the problem and even suggests that a new structure including promoting “accountability” might be on the horizon to support real contributors.

It suggests that there might even be a “Developers” track (which looks similar to the original Polkadot Ambassador Program that had a “Developers” track before it was disbanded), and indicates that it might include a reimbursement process for operational expenses with a focus on impactful expenditures that deliver value to the ecosystem that mentions dev onboarding and strategic content.

Would simply fix those broken links and communication channels contribute to metrics and KPIs since it impacts dev onboarding, community engagement, and retention?

Would contributors who manually fix them or create scripts to automatically fix them be rewarded through recognition, NFTs, and access to exclusive events and trainings?

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Sounds good! Will get in touch with you early next week

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Thanks for providing very valid feedback and context! This shows the sense of priority with which we need to act to get this effort together. Regarding the Polkadot Alpha program, this should provide more context Remove references to Polkadot Alpha program on the Wiki · Issue #6778 · w3f/polkadot-wiki · GitHub

I could not understand from your post if you were holding me accountable or responsible for every failure or issues you mentioned. While I do work at W3F and have close ties with Parity, formally I took over DevRel and DevEx responsibilities a couple of months ago (citing the same issues you mentioned in this thread and more :wink:)

I’m now starting to work together with teams and people I can hold accountable and creating developer frameworks that can last longer (and less 404s). This Polkadot 2.0 fest is one of those opportunities to test a few hypothesis on what works and what does not. If there are things that I screw up, I will be accountable and responsible for them going forward.

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