The Chicken-or-Egg of Polkadot’s Growth: Why We Need a Strategy & Coordination Role

What came first? Chicken or the Egg? Builders or Users?

Think of our ecosystem’s growth as a flywheel. The spokes: builders, products, infrastructure, funding, talent inflow, education, users, and community.

Every spoke must be stimulated simultaneously to create the unstoppable momentum we all know is possible.

Progress has been made recently on awareness (Polkadot now #8 in total CT mindshare) and community (Discord revamp & DOT Bulls TG). PBA is world class education blockchain education system, and there are many funding/grants options available from the Treasury and W3F.

But, we’re still lacking talent inflow and attracting new builders.

Therefore I’m advocating for a new role in our ecosystem: a Strategy and Coordination Board/Officer which would function in the same way as CSO.

This role could exist in the form an individual (CSO) or a bounty, an entity, a fellowship etc.

What’s important is that this person(s) can take action FAST, and operate with some level of authority.

Polkadot’s decentralized nature disperses focus and decision-making, which may be holding us back versus ecosystems that can make decisiveness one of their key competitive advantages.

This role would act as a unifying force by:

  • strategically aligning resources
  • ensuring efficiency
  • coordinating the community
  • attracting top talent
  • fast-tracking product development
  • advise on funding
  • aligning the focus of various bounties

Coordination and a unified strategy is where Polkadot is lacking most. Let’s fix it.

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A few days ago, I mentioned something similar to @DonDiegoSanchez, the need for a person or team to serve as connectors between all the initiatives (grants, bounties, marketing, etc.). My point of view was more focused on builders.

I would fully support this, especially if those involved are agents who are in constant contact with various teams within the ecosystem.

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Couldn’t agree more!

For our “State of BD” Report (which was more a side deliverable of our current project), we have also looked at that gap (see our recommendations on p. 43-47). That is So So Scaled! by the way, with @jashar and me.

Some thoughts:

  1. We don’t think strategy & coordination need to be a joint function (of course, there is coordination necessary for strategy development and distribution, that will sit with strategy)
  2. A decentralized function / unit in the ecosystem would make the most sense from our perspective
  3. We (the eco) have always shied away from a strategy because it feels “top down”. However, a) No strategy is no option @alice_und_bob , and b) there are other options than top-down, see the point above

Happy to discuss more & hear your thoughts!

Nat

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I think you’re identifying a real challenge in the ecosystem, and I’d support this as well.

There are several gaps in the flywheel where resources leak. (It’s not by far a Polkadot-only problem, but I think different ecosystems have the gaps on different stokes.)

A strong education program brings in talent, but without hands-on opportunities (hackathons, contributor-friendly projects, jobs) that talent won’t stay. Right now, much of it is lost due to a lack of clear pathways outside of founding. Even for those who do start their own projects, there’s a coordination and distribution problem. (From the side of the investors too; A well-structured support network would make the ecosystem far more attractive for investment.)

W3F is building in this direction and honestly I’m not sure if one person to kickstart this or a team would be more effective at this point, I can see upside for both.

Either way, I absolutely agree that fully activating the flywheel means systematically identifying gaps, removing blockers, and accelerating the right processes on all the spokes in parallel.

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Hello there,

Just pointing out some existing initiatives seeking to address the “Talent inflow” and “New builders” conundrum.

  1. Searching: Curator for a List of Ecosystem Tasks

  2. OG Rust Bounties

Thanks.

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I agree this is lacking and an impediment to acting quickly, pivoting in the face of new information, and reacting to opportunities that arise. If we think of Polkadot as a protocol in a “turnaround” situation, it makes a lot of sense.

Of course there is a dilemma of centralization - the less people that need to make and agree on a decision, the faster action can happen. If this becomes a team of curators, then that dilutes the impact that you would get from the “Chief” and “Officer” parts of CSO. If you go to the level of teams of teams of curators, then you’re kind of back where we are now.

But I think in order for Polkadot as a network and community to get behind an idea like this, it needs to be squared with the longer term ideological parts of the network, one that has been designed with decentralization and the resilience that comes from decentralization in mind - that the strength that can come from being decentralized, like in the “Starfish and Spider.” Have you thought about how this can be achieved? Does moving towards a CSO move us farther from our roots/strengths?

Finally, one way of tackling what you are proposing is doing something like the “OpCo” that recently passed in Arbitrum: “OpCo: A DAO-adjacent Entity for Strategy Execution” - how far this something like this go towards what you think would work for Polkadot?

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As the saying goes, great minds think alike. We also believe that Polkadot needs a growth strategy. In fact, we wrote a growth strategy for Polkadot in 2023. We think the strategy itself is more important than a Strategy & Coordination Role. You can check out this article for details. Although some of the conclusions may seem a bit outdated now, most of the strategic logic still holds true at present: https://medium.com/@polkadot_eri/polkadot-growth-strategy-report-building-a-continuously-growing-future-for-polkadot-bfc35ae70b45.

Besides, we wrote another programmatic article about strategy in 2024. You can find the details here: What If Polkadot Had an Election? How Should We Formulate a Development Program for Polkadot? | by Polkadot.ERI | Medium

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Interesting post. I am not necessarily opposed to the idea of a CSO.

There are two questions that come to my mind:

  1. Who decides who the CSO is?
  2. Who decides about removing the CSO?

Being decentralized doesn’t mean being leaderless. I think that the idea of a CSO could work if that person is elected by OpenGov. If the person proves to be ineffective, then there needs to be a mechanism for opengov to remove the CSO.

Anyone who wants to be CSO will need to dedicate 50+ hours per week on this. So this cannot be another community member that is already doing 6+ things/roles in the ecosystem.

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I also don’t see the role as a threat to decentralisation, as long as there are clear accountability rules set. As I understand it the initiative should not be replacing current/future individual programs, it’s more about having one instance that has an overview and makes sure that there is active support and building on all the stokes drafted above by @et90266.

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Agreed, a decentralized function could work as long as it’s given some sort of “soft power” to take action quickly and decisively


I understand concerns about centralization, but strategic coordination could be a temporary measure to build a strong foundation for Polkadot’s long-term decentralized vision.

If Polkadot cannot remain relevant, and goes the way of Tezos, then Polkadot’s vision and mission may be lost forever.

Products, Builders and Users coalesce around the top protocols. The rest may fade away. Dot-com era 2.0. Let’e be a survivor like Amazon and not Pets.com


Both of those articles are incredibly thorough. Well done!

A strategy that detailed will require some “CSO” type function to execute it.

Also, re: your thoughts on tokenomics, I agree 8% inflation is not low enough, and staking emissions are likely adding too much sell pressure. On the other hand, with lower inflation the total supply would not increase, would that mean our market cap would shrink and we sink lower in the rankings? How do we find balance?

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While reading, I thought about How can this be a group effort and not just one appointed person (who would probably be driven to burnout within the shortest time)?

The flywheel is moved by many people (see my incomplete list of actors in the respective sections), and this work could be further amplified by knowing what everyone else is doing or should be doing.
Like a holistic, decentralized funnel within our network, represented by every agent who knows to whom to pass a lead.

Maybe some individuals are so well plugged in that they can be in that center, but I believe it will be a panel of people and representatives that can bring all the pieces together to see where the wheel is squeaking.

To make decisions quicker, I’d suggest having a playbook for our ecosystem that covers how to move the wheel forward, e.g., whom to contact, what to do, showing what the process is, and making it visible where we might have gaps in terms of geography, resources and available hands on deck.

I think the Solana Superteam approach would also suit us, meaning that we’re building up local networks with a well-connected leadership group with the resources and decision power. We can call this “glocal Polkadot Sub-DAOs” (global + local) to stay in our wording :slight_smile:

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DISCLAIMER: My opinions are mine, and not of any of the projects I collaborate with.

I come here to disagree with the general approach of a centralised executive branch/person/entity, and highlight some of the points that have been mentioned here that are solutions to some of the problems that we are facing.

But let’s look ourselves into the mirror first.

We celebrated decentralization first - particularly when the treasury was in full swing -, to now ask for a “strong leader/leadership” now that we are facing the challenges of a decentralized approach. Strong leaders and/or leadership have a problem: they tend to stay in power. We have enough concentration of influence on the halls of power, to actually build more.

I think also Polkadot is viewed under a corporate approach as a mental model: being the corporation a centralized, closed, vertical and efficient structure. where power is executed top-down by decision makers. Corporate language, behavior and activities are used and performed. What we have here is an open-ended digital community (how big is the ecosystem? we don’t know, who is in? we don’t know), a fragmented cluster of companies which share a common technical infrastructure, some individuals that they hold some mandate from a DAO or a subDAO to perform some tasks, some support companies and individuals that deliver some services to the wider ecosystem (granted or after voting in one of the DAOs, which makes all more complicated), one big company that delivers code that supports and evolves the technical infrastructure and a foundation that gives support to the whole system.

This is a large sum of different objectives of different actors (business and personal), which differs the unique direction of corporate structure under the leadership of a person or a board - direction which cannot be questioned by the participants of the structure - because they don’t have the authority: in a vertical system, you are aligned or you are out.

As we are building something new, this needs new mental models.

Governing (or decision making) has two sides, the decision making and the enforcement of that decision. And here is where the problem resides, to have decision/policy enforced you need some kind authority over the affected. And here is when I find it problematic, as is contrary to the values of what we are doing here (permissionless/open, resilient, self-sovereign). We like to mention Web3, and we are craving for a central authority. We like to talk about consensus, but are looking for someone to make decisions for everybody. We are proud of our “nakamoto coefficient”, but asking for exactly the opposite.

We need to eat the food on our plate: What we need is alignment.

We need to reach a consensus on the bigger picture ( and assume than some parts they don’t agree and go by their own way, because the only enforcement Polkadot - today- can do, is deny $ proposals on openGov), and have the small parts to align and communicate between each other in their areas of interest/scope. GNU architecture at its best.

We have mentioned Talent Inflow.

Again, looking ourselves into the mirror: It is very very difficult to stay in the Polkadot ecosystem for solo coders, small teams and support functions. It is a hostile ecosystem. And, no, “joining the community” and pointing the people to the DAO, where you can see the spectacle of grown adults fighting over a pile of $, is not the best introduction for a digital community. We need to bring new faces to Polkadot, handhold and educate them.

We have overcome some barriers for builders ( financial - crowdloans - and accessibility - with a bit better documentation - thx Papermoon) but, in general, a lot of the openGov treasury proposals they are funding existing teams, or one-off multimillion this-is-going-to-save-polkadot activities that fund teams external to the ecosystem mainly (and they fail and don’t provide anything relevant ). There is little room for newcomers or new teams to establish themselves in the Polkadot Ecosystem.

What we need is to build the foundations to allow other newer teams in the core of the ecosystem, not ones that interact with us on the border ( for their profit ). I believe that there is room here to massively improve this aspect, in many ways, but I will mention the one that I see more evident.

Again, we mentioned Talent Inflow: we need a transversal DevRel team that connects existing documentation, educational programs, meetups and hackathons. This is a permanent team, should be geographically dislocated ( see Solana’s superteam here), and their function is to handhold, follow-up, give reference, sync and align with the other partners.

This is the team that picks up a promising team out of a hackathon or PBA, and follow-up and handholds them for 6 months, until they are ready to apply for JUST, easyA, W3F Grants…. This is the team who follow-ups in this pre-professional stage: Now after a hackathon or a meetup, there is only the cliff of the solitaire development. And a lot of financial resources and effort thrown by the sink. And this opinion comes from a person that was in the trench of 3 major hackathons last year.

But there is a problem, it is slow to build and you need the right people for that, and we have been used, in many ways, to try to solve problems with money, when not always is the right approach. Also, as it is a service, it doesn’t scale very well. Everything takes time, and the ecosystem should provide guarantees of financial security long term ( basically we need the Distractive of DevRel) to allow this team or teams to be built. And this should be their main task. Many agents in the ecosystem have their hands in too many pots (including their project/company and Polkadot).

Polkadot is a technology that can be very polifacetic, it can outreach business, community, academia and users.

We don’t need more people on the top, we need more people in the trench.

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So, simply reducing inflation is not enough; some measures are also needed to promote the development of the ecosystem. Reducing the inflation rate and the staking yield are both aimed at improving the business environment on Polkadot. Because if the staking return is too high, users will be more inclined to participate in staking rather than engaging in Polkadot ecosystem projects. Therefore, by first reducing the staking yield and then implementing some incentive mechanisms to encourage people to participate in ecosystem projects, once the Polkadot ecosystem develops, it means that the investment fundamentals of DOT are improving, which will help investors have a more positive outlook on DOT and be more willing to hold it. As long as it is properly managed, it is likely to achieve a situation where although the overall growth rate of the quantity of DOT slows down, the value of DOT increases, thus leading to the growth of our market capitalization.

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FYI my understanding is that this is precisely the aim of the nascent Ambassador Fellowship–to enable crucial functions to cohere and de-silo/defragment, a vitally necessary step as the ecosystem increasingly decentralizes.

Think of things like

  • a central BD clearinghouse, taking leads and distributing them to the (many, fragmented) BD desks
  • a central accounting desk, handling bookkeeping and financial admin for the various bounties (most of which now commit significant portions of their funding to these tasks and do so independently of one another)
  • a central helpdesk, receiving user questions and dispatching them to the appropriate responders (or responding directly when appropriate)

Obviously these are just a few possibilities, and there are surely many, many more. The Ambassador Fellowship makes sense as a place for them to happen, though, since its upper ranks will be populated by the most committed, knowledgeable, competent, and reliable people in the eco, and–like the Technical Fellowship–it will have some built-in oversight mechanisms and on-chain transparency.

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Nice analysis. Poor solution.

Apart from the ick factor of choosing someone for a paid role to choose our strategy for us, and apart also from the moral hazard (like every other paid strategy/ leadership role we have suggested, it will attract grifters and bullshitters and egotists that, if they get chosen, we then need to expend energy to hold to account), the fundamental problem is that expecting this person to have authority by virtue of appointment will not work.

The attraction of this idea is that is an easy solution - but, the more that Polkadot is decentralised, the more this solution will fail (and Polkadot is already quite decentralised).
Does the person in charge decide strategy for themselves? And then do the decentralised hordes of Polkadot obey that strategy even if they personally disagree with some part of it? Or with all of it? Or with the fundamental premise?
So, instead, does the person in charge consult first? How? How long does it take? How to resolve opposed points of view? And then… do the decentralised hordes of Polkadot obey?

These questions (and many more) which make it difficult to decide and propagate strategy in a decentralised environment will be there with or without a person in post to take responsibility for the difficulties they cause. We would be better off starting by doing the difficult work on how we resolve those questions, rather than placing some figurehead in front of the questions just to obscure the fact that we haven’t found the answers.

The best part of your post was this:
Every spoke must be stimulated simultaneously

For example, there is no point in marketing JAM when JAM is not yet built out. there is no point doing BD at a conference if there is nobody technical available to answer the questions that potential leads raise and, yes, even there is no point getting users to try your blockchain ecosystem if the products aren’t there, and no point building the products if the users are not in the ecosystem.

I see this not as a lack of one strategy that everybody follows, but a lack either of strategies or a lack of people following those strategies.
One of the beauties of decentralisation is that nobody needs to feel held back because the monolith (eg a corporation or government) is following a strategy they disagree with. You can just make your own strategy and do the work to make it take off.

For that to work for the individual strategies, we need three things:
1 - People coming up with ideas. Well, we’ve sure got those :wink: :+1:
2 - A culture of letting a thousand flowers bloom. We’re not doing too badly on that track, but a depleted treasury has certainly made folks more critical :woman_shrugging:
3 - The technologies, structures and mechanisms of incentivisation for people to find, access and meaningfully contribute on the strategies they want to support. This is the most difficult of the three and we are lacking on this score.

Even when we achieve all 3, there still remains the issue of stimulating every spoke simultaneously.
This is a timing problem. First we need to see whether we have all the spokes in place, and then we need to stimulate them simultaneously.
Sure, this part of the task is something that a person in a position could decide - that would make coordination easier. But they would still have the problem of authority. Significant dissent against their judgement would fragment the timing behind our big push and damage our reputation just like last year’s [coordination shitshow that shall not be named] did.

The answer, imho, is to collectively identify which all the ‘spokes’ are, collectively identify whether each ‘spoke’ is ready to start spinning and, once they are, and not before, collectively choose the time when we can all agree to commit our precious time on spinning those spokes.

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I think polkadot has the talent to build products but no users to consume them. Support products that attract retail users rather than add more centralization for enterprise adoption. Enterprise adoption is automatic once you have retail users.

Thanks for creating this post @et90266

This is Alex, been working in Parity (first BD, then Success) for the last ~2 years, and starting tomorrow (literally) at W3F as Ecosystem Growth Lead.

I really want to keep this short and concise, 'cause in the favor of the culture of what I (personally) think this post was created - the time for analysis is due, and we need to focus on action and results.

I strongly agree that it is very challenging to operate in a decentralized manner, especially in the last 1+ year of the decentralization efforts, that mostly impacted GTM (commercial) functions.

I firmly believe that a great progress has been made towards setting up this kind of operations – with numerous teams spun off from DFF (and Treasury).

But keep in mind that this is a very challenging effort, and there is a huge gap between the three:

  1. having decentralized infrastructure (tech) – Polkadot has ensured this, and data speaks for it
  2. having decentralized strategic input and decision making – Polkadot (still) doesn’t have this final outputs to this, but is in the making
  3. having a decentralized approach to executing efforts – Polkadot has this with 10+ commercial teams/projects fulfilling their mandates) but this factors in community agents / ambassadors (I am using this in generic phrasing, not concerning any program etc.)

The Community agents/ambassadors representation (i.e. on public channels) couldn’t (and IMHO, shouldn’t) ever be forced; meaning anyone can just speak about Polkadot in a different way.

In 20+ Polkadot’s benefits/perks and competitive advantages, I might not prioritize the same perks as you, or as someone else.

Anything against this could be considered as censorship.
And please, I am not saying that the approach we MUST have here is ‘every agent/ambassador for him/herself’, but that we should still aim and strive to get a simple and clear (somewhat unified) way we, as a community of contributors speak about Polkadot.

We should invest our time increasing UX for reading, learning, digesting about Polkadot, as well, meaning enabling community agents / ambassadors represent Polkadot in a unified way.

Actually, the “chicken-and-egg” challenge is more pointed at that, IMHO. Simply put, the bigger Polkadot ecosystem is, the harder it is to “tame the beast” and unify the way community agents/ambassadors represent Polkadot.

I’d rather have a challenge of striving for unification, than acquiring new community agents/ambassadors.

And now, a totally different story:

This is very different to whom we take accountable for results.

With W3F’s leadership, and Parity holding the strongest position (the closest to the Product development roadmap) to create awareness about this, the action has been taken (for at least 6+ months) now to identify those entities, and invest A LOT in enablement of them, with clear oversee of the results made.

If I need to summarize this (and this is a personal opinion), we should start with the Product development roadmap.

a) Polkadot Hub; i.e. Smart Contracts (targeted at developers first, then users, simply because developers building dApps are unlocking users) — perform quality market research, competitive analysis, think of key commercial pillars (like customer pain points, our offering, value props, key differentiators, etc.) to circle the GTM, identify key executive entities (firms), help Parity deliver this upgrade, and action, action, action. This is ongoing, btw, again between W3F, Parity, BD teams like Velocity Labs, investors, Distractive, etc. We are preparing an announcement/statement on this.

b) Polkadot Cloud; i.e. Polkadot Rollups — learn from past mistakes. Rely on distribution, overcome (non-technical + technical) challenges of selling and positioning Polkadot-SDK in the past, and try do that with accountable, proven (with experience, results) entities, firms, etc.

But as I said, W3F (with key stakeholders support) is investing heavily in taming this, yet another beast.

By the way, I stand by the opinion that overall speaking, Polkadot’s value props and offering is the same for both of these (i.e. Smart Contracts/dApps and Rollups), but just targeted at different infrastructure, and implemented/accessed in different way.

Anyhow, let’s chat and see if we can, together, deliver this message more widely. Thank you again.

It seems that my previous “short and sweet” didn’t work, but I hope it’s worth it.

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