PR: Build It. Deploy It. Polkadot

Ecosystem
1

PR Campaign Proposal: Making Polkadot the Place Where Anyone Can Build

The Opportunity

Polkadot has a compelling story to tell — but the story needs to be made visible again.

The current Devnet demonstrates something potentially game-changing: with Claude and Polkadot, developers and non-developers can deploy functional apps with dramatically less technical friction. What previously required significant blockchain expertise can increasingly be turned into a working application through natural-language interaction.

This is not simply another developer feature. It has the potential to fundamentally change who can build on Polkadot.

The rollout of the Polkadot App should therefore be accompanied by a focused PR campaign designed to turn this capability into a public narrative — and position Polkadot as one of the most accessible and forward-looking ecosystems for building in the AI era.

Core Message

“If you can describe an app, you can build it on Polkadot.”

The campaign should make the experience tangible rather than explaining it technically.

Instead of talking about AI-assisted development, we demonstrate it:

  • “I asked Claude to build this. It deployed on Polkadot.”

  • Live demos from idea → code → deployment.

  • Non-developers building simple applications.

  • Developers showing how much faster AI-assisted deployment makes them.

  • A series of increasingly ambitious experiments using the Devnet.

The goal is to create a “Wait… you can actually do that?” moment.

Campaign Distribution

X — The Main Conversation Layer

Launch a coordinated series of short videos, demos, threads and quote-ready visuals from Polkadot, ecosystem projects, developers and community members.

Potential formats:

“Build this in 10 minutes”
Real-time Claude → Polkadot deployment challenges.

“Could a non-dev build this?”
Give creators a simple idea and let them attempt to deploy it.

“Built with Claude. Deployed on Polkadot.”
A recognizable campaign format that can be replicated across dozens of examples.

The emphasis should be on proof, speed and surprise, not marketing claims.

Brave Browser + Crypto-Native Media

Use Brave as a distribution and discovery channel for the campaign, supported by targeted placements and native content where appropriate.

In parallel, pitch the story to crypto and Web3 media as a broader narrative:

AI is changing software development. Polkadot is making blockchain development accessible to everyone.

This gives journalists a story beyond “Polkadot launches another app.”

Developers & Creators as the PR Engine

The strongest amplification should come from people actually using the product.

Provide selected developers, AI builders, creators and ecosystem teams with early access, simple challenges and campaign assets.

Give them a reason to post:

“Give me an idea. I’ll build and deploy it on Polkadot.”

The resulting content becomes distributed proof that the technology works.

The Bigger Narrative

The campaign should not primarily be about promoting an app.

It should be about repositioning Polkadot.

The narrative is:

Blockchain is entering an AI-native development era. Polkadot is where this becomes accessible.

If executed well, the campaign can shift the conversation from “What is Polkadot doing?” to:

“Wait — you can actually build and deploy this on Polkadot with Claude?”

That is the kind of narrative that can put Polkadot back on the radar — not through another announcement, but by showing people something they haven’t seen before.

2

While your point makes a lot of sense, I don’t think attracting more developers is the main challenge right now. According to Chainspect, Polkadot ranks third among all blockchains, with over 9,000 active developers. The focus now should be on attracting users.

Another important point is that Polkadot has already been explained extensively. For years, most campaigns have focused on explaining the technology, educating people, and showcasing how it works. I think it’s time to be more direct and start showing what the products actually do, specifically the apps being built.

Just as the network and the development experience on Polkadot have evolved, the messaging needs to evolve as well. Instead of saying, “Let me show you how to build on Polkadot” (theory), the conversation should become, “Here’s how to use this app” (practice).

In my opinion, that’s the shift that needs to happen.

3

Please @lilymendzdev don’t reference Chainspect as a valid source. They have been trolling Polkadot and laughing at our community for months already.

4

Token terminal
Developer Report

The point is that Polkadot already has a large developer base. I don’t think that’s the problem right now.

5

9,000 active developers? What kind of figure is that supposed to be?

Does it include everyone who has ever worked on the blockchain itself, participated in the Blockchain Academy, or run an app or parachain on Polkadot? The number is questionable and doesn’t really explain much.

I would argue that Polkadot currently lacks developers—specifically, developers who run actual products. In this context, these developers are essentially users—users of the blockchain. Ideally, the products created by these users—provided they are good—will attract further users.

So, we should really distinguish between active and passive users: the developers versus the people who ultimately use their products.

And that boundary is currently starting to blur, too, since the barrier to publishing an app has dropped drastically—any complete idiot can do it now.
The focus should therefore be on getting as many people as possible to publish an app. The smart ones will manage to develop an app that generates interest and market it effectively, ensuring it actually gets used.

But I also think the sheer volume of products adds value in itself, as it generates volume and drives transaction activity on the chain.

The rest is out of our hands. However, the possibilities available represent uncharted territory—and that is something that, yes, should be explained as widely as possible.

6

I want to set the developer count aside, because I don’t think it’s the interesting part of this. What’s interesting is the structure.

Yanis Varoufakis makes an argument in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism that maps onto this conversation almost too neatly. His claim is that platforms aren’t markets anymore; they’re fiefs, and the thing extracted from them isn’t profit but rent. His glossary is blunt about where it started: cloud fiefs are the digital platforms where algorithms match buyers and sellers, and “The Apple Store was the first cloud fief.” He puts the mechanism in one line elsewhere: “Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits. That’s a rent. That’s like a ground rent.”

The part I keep coming back to is the second half of his model. Developers pay the rent, but they’re not the only ones producing value on the estate. He defines cloud serfs as people unattached to any corporation who labour for free - posts, reviews, ratings, clicks - to reproduce the platform’s capital stock, and the effect of that labour is to make the fief more attractive to the next user. Two streams, running at once: “Due to the unpaid labour of cloud serfs and the cloud rents of the vassal capitalists, surplus value is syphoned off in the form of cloud rent to the cloudalists.” Everybody on the land improves the land. Only the landlord captures the improvement.

So if we take the new Polkadot App not just as an application, but as a decentralized app store, the analogy holds. It’s that the app store form is proven to work as a value engine, and the open question is who ends up owning the improvements.

Which is why I don’t think it matters much that a lot of what gets published early on is derivative. If somebody ships a clone of something that already exists elsewhere, the app itself isn’t the differentiator. The stack underneath it is. If the user experience is genuinely just “download the app,” and the keys, tokens, signing, and settlement are handled behind the scenes without the end user needing to know or care, then we’ve demonstrated something that hasn’t really been demonstrated at consumer scale: that a permissionless distribution layer can deliver the same experience as a monolithic store without the store. The clone is the proof, not the product.

And that’s the actual differentiation. Not features. Not novelty. The fact that the same experience arrives without a single party sitting at the gate setting the rate.

I’d caveat my own enthusiasm here that volume alone doesn’t get us there. The App Store has millions of apps and the vast majority of them earn essentially nothing; that long tail produced rent for Apple, not livelihoods for developers. Volume was good for the landlord. So “publish more apps” only means something if the ownership structure underneath is actually different, and that’s the part worth measuring and arguing about rather than assuming.

But that’s exactly what makes the 30% interesting rather than discouraging. It’s a number sitting in the open, on every transaction, on every store, and it’s the clearest target in the whole arrangement. Varoufakis calls it a ground rent for a reason. It’s charged for access to the land, not for anything done on it. Which means it’s not a cost of building software. It’s a cost of building software there. And costs like that are contestable in a way that engineering costs aren’t.

So the practical argument is narrower than “Polkadot should compete with Apple,” and I think it’s more defensible for being narrower. If the rent charged for deploying on-chain stays low enough to be a reason to build here rather than a tax on doing so, and if the user side really does collapse to one button, then you don’t need the apps to be better. You need the arrangement to be cheaper for the developer and invisible to the user. That’s a much lower bar than winning on product, and it’s the bar that actually decides where people ship.

The difference I’d hang the whole thing on: Apple’s 30% is set by Apple, and no developer has a vote on it. Whatever the equivalent ends up being here, it’s set by governance, which means the people paying it are also the people who can argue it down. That doesn’t make it free. It makes it negotiable, and under Varoufakis’s own framing that’s not a small distinction. It’s the difference between being a vassal and being a party to the arrangement.

Anyway, Technofeudalism is worth the read regardless of whether you buy the whole thesis. It gives a vocabulary for what these platforms actually are, and once you have it, it’s hard to look at any app store the same way again.