2024 in Review
As we approach the end of 2024, the Polkadot community has much to celebrate, having achieved significant milestones.
This year, Polkadot introduced Agile Coretime and Async Backing, revolutionizing blockspace allocation and phasing out the Parachain Slot Auction model. Over 50% of the DOT supply was locked in staking, reflecting strong community participation, while the active validator set expanded to 500, enhancing decentralization and increasing the Nakamoto coefficient. Governance continued to play a key role, with one highlight being the community’s decision to set a fixed yearly inflation of approximately 120M DOT. The Polkadot treasury also began holding assets beyond DOT and on different chains, most significantlyd USDT and USDC, which are now available through governance proposals.
The ecosystem saw a 150% increase in unique accounts, growing from 5.2 million in January 2024 to 13.2 million in November 2024. Additionally, total signed transactions surged by over 200%, rising from 13.1 million in January 2024 to 39.6 million in November 2024.
Three trustless bridges were launched: Snowbridge (Polkadot-Ethereum), the Polkadot-Kusama bridge, and Hyperbridge (enabling universal interoperability). Partnerships and onboarding efforts further enriched the ecosystem with new talent, projects, and use cases. To close the year, “The Spammening”, a stress test conducted on Kusama, Polkadot’s sister network, reached a record-breaking 143,000 TPS while maintaining network stability. This experiment demonstrated the scalability and resilience of the shared architecture, providing clear evidence of its capacity to handle more extreme network conditions. For a deep dive into the results you can explore the full report by Distractive here.
About the Report
We’re the Parity Data team and we’re excited to share our End of Year Report, capturing the Polkadot ecosystem’s remarkable achievements. From significant technical developments to governance and ecosystem milestones, this report provides a clear view of this year’s progress.
The report, presented in a slideshow format, offers a detailed look at Polkadot’s journey throughout 2024. For those interested in exploring the charts featured in the report and diving deeper into Polkadot’s data, visit our website at https://data.parity.io/home, where you’ll find detailed monthly reporting and additional insights.