The Polkadot Cloud

I think it’s time to open a thread dedicated to the ideas which have been spreading like wildfire (very much by intention) around the Polkadot Hub and Polkadot Cloud.

First, before we even get started, it is important to note that this is just a discussion of ideas. Nothing here is locked in yet, official, or anything like that. The point of these conversations is to get community alignment of ideas, terminology, vision, and direction.

The phrase I have been using is that Polkadot is like a bunch of cats in a room, totally doing their own thing. We need a laser pointer for us all to focus on a long-term vision, and to move together towards that goal.

Such a vision should allow us to:

  • make better decisions as a community
  • better represent Polkadot outside of our community
  • ensure that we are building things that are relevant for our needs

What is also important is that our vision is not made up. It must be something we can actually achieve, and that we have ideas to support.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. - Blaise Pascal

I am sorry for the length of this post. It is in many ways a full brain dump of every conversation I have had around the Polkadot Cloud and Polkadot Hub to this date.

I think best to digest all the top level content, and then dig deeper where you have the appetite. I have hidden those deeper details behind a Read more details... button that you need to click to see the full text.

What is Polkadot?

Polkadot is not a blockchain. Polkadot of course, has a blockchain, and a token, but the meaning of Polkadot extends far beyond that.

Polkadot is a vision toward a world with less trust and more truth.

This is the friendly way to tell people that we are trying to build and innovate with Web3 principles.

I think if you look at all that Polkadot has done in the past, is doing now, and will do into the future, this single vision will permeate every decision and action we take.

This vision will likely never change, nor should it. I think Polkadot is defined by the journey we take toward this vision.

Polkadot has a mission, which describes the direction we go in achieving that vision. Our mission can change, but practically, changes in our mission should only occur over long periods of time. Only when what is needed to reach our vision changes, or we have achieved our current mission.

We can describe Polkadot’s mission up until now and into the near future:

Polkadot’s mission is to provide a scalable, secure, and resilient platform for Web3 applications and services.

An image to put in your mind is:

That is to say, Amazon Web Services has fundamentally changed the internet today by making it cheap, easy, and scalable to launch Web2 applications and services into the cloud.

Polkadot’s current mission is to do the same thing, but for Web3 services. We believe this is the way that the Polkadot ecosystem can currently bring this vision of a world with less trust and more truth to the world, and while we acknowledge achieving this vision requires more than just technology, we think it is the first primitive the world needs to get started.

So what does it mean to have a vision towards less trust and more truth?

To answer this, we must ask “What is Web3?”.

What is Web3?

Web3 is a fundamental shift of removing trust from Web2, the technology stack that we currently use to power the internet.

In my recent presentation, I represented this as a difference in resilience.

But in fact, there are other principles of Web3 we should not forget:

As quoted by Gav:

Driving Factors and Web3 Maxims

  • Resilience
  • Generality
  • Performance
  • Coherency
  • Accessibility

I would also like to include the 5 pillars of open blockchains from Andreas Antonopoulos, which was certainly the predecessor to Web3 ideologies:

  • Open
  • Public
  • Borderless
  • Neutral
  • Censorship Resistant

This post is probably not best suited to be the introduction into the principles and philosophies of Web3.

If there are nice posts which consolidate and teach the ideas of Web3 which can be linked here, please feel free to post them in this thread. Otherwise, perhaps look at the old youtube videos of Gav or other Web3 leaders about their vision of the space.

Polkadot’s Products

So we have established our vision, and have a clear mission to bring technologies into the world which can power Web3 applications and services.

How does this actually manifest into products?

Well my perspective is that Polkadot has always been building toward two products, which attempt to satisfy this mission:

  • The Polkadot Cloud
  • The Polkadot Hub

NOTE: It is important at this point to not get too attached to these specific names. Many resonate with the Polkadot Cloud, but some have opinions about the “Polkadot Hub”, and this is the time to discuss those opinions and come to a consensus. I personally prefer these two names, and would be happy to have those discussions with anyone here in this thread.

Unfortunately the history of developing the Polkadot, we had not clearly defined these two products. But it does not change the fact that if we think about what we have been building so far and the vision we are going toward, we have ALWAYS been building these two products.

So, what is the Polkadot Cloud and the Polkadot Hub?

The Polkadot Cloud

The Polkadot Cloud is a secure, scalable, and resilient platform for Web3 applications and services.

The Polkadot Cloud is our current mission.

If you were to make a sales pitch for the Polkadot Cloud, it might look something like this:

The Polkadot Cloud is a platform for Web3 applications and services.

On the Polkadot Cloud, we provide services with high throughput, native interoperability, and shared security. Our cloud platform is elastic, dynamic and multi-core.

With over 100 execution cores we are able to achieve 150,000 transactions per second across the Cloud, and over 150 MB/s data availability throughput!

The Polkadot Cloud offers a number of different Web3 Services such as:

  • Cloud Execution Service
  • Settlement / Finality Service
  • Data Availability Service
  • Object Storage Service
  • Blockchain Hosting Service
  • and more!

All of these services work together seamlessly to create an all-in-one platform for deploying your app. We provide everything you need, so you can focus on what you are building.

Using the Polkadot Cloud, you are able to deploy any kind of Web3 application or service cheap, easy, and at scale.

Note here that the Polkadot Cloud represents all that we have accomplished so far, and even looks into what we want to do in the future.

It also breaks down the various features of Polkadot into separate services that are offered and bundled by the Cloud. And this better represents what you can actually do, rather than what we have currently built.

There are teams already experimenting with using our individual services like data availability or cloud execution to secure rollups on other ecosystems. We could be part of every “modular blockchain” story. It’s just that we have been focused on building an all-in-one solution.

Read more details about the Polkadot Cloud

History of the Polkadot Cloud

With this framing of the Polkadot Cloud, I think we are able to actually look back at history, and define a clear story of what we have been building so far.

Not to make up history, but to re-frame what we’ve done.

  • Polkadot Cloud - Genesis: May 2020
  • Polkadot Cloud - Milestone I (Parachains): November 2021
    • First Cloud Services Deploy: December 2021
  • Polkadot Cloud - Milestone II (Elastic): October 2024
  • Polkadot Cloud - Milestone III (JAM): TBD

So really, the initial Polkadot launch was really around creating an all-in-one blockchain hosting service for other blockchains on the Polkadot Cloud.

Initially that blockchain hosting service was very simple in how it created, allocated, and used blockspace.

Our work since the launch of Polkadot have been to make our hosting service more agile, elastic, and flexible. This is what we previously called “Polkadot 2.0”, but it really isn’t a new product at all! It is an iteration of the Polkadot Cloud vision.

Just like JAM is also not a brand new idea, even though the architecture of the Polkadot Cloud will change significantly from it. It is yet another iteration on the mission to create the best platform for Web3 applications and services.

With the third milestone of the Polkadot Cloud (codename JAM), we are looking to extend functionality of our Web3 Cloud platform to support even applications and services which are NOT blockchains.

I think this kind of positioning helps explain to the world what the heck is going on with things like JAM, which we have really struggled to explain in respect to the existing Polkadot Cloud.

And certainly there will be milestone 4, 5, 6, etc… The development and improvement of the Polkadot Cloud will always continue. It is wrong to look at the development of Polkadot as “building new products”. The product is the same, it is just iteratively (or sometimes radically) getting better.

The question you need to ask when digging into technical development, is:

“How does this improve the Polkadot Cloud?”.

This is what we need to be communicating.

Comparisons to Web2 Clouds

I think that this vision of the Polkadot Cloud allows us to evaluate what we have been building, and where we should be building toward. Thankfully, we have large businesses like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft who have all built Web2 clouds, of which I argue we are not that different from an architectural standpoint.

For example, look at the service offerings for Amazon:

  • Amazon EC2
    • EC2 = Elastic Compute Cloud
    • “Amazon EC2 is AWS’s service that provides secure, scalable computing capacity in the cloud.”
    • “Reliable and scalable infrastructure on-demand, with 99.99% availability SLA”
    • “purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload”
  • Amazon S3
    • S3 = Simple Storage Service
    • “Amazon S3 is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.”
    • Benefits:
      • Scalability
      • Durability and availability
      • Security and data protection
      • Lowest price and highest performance
  • AWS Lambda
    • “Run code without thinking about servers or clusters”
    • “AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that runs your code in response to events without requiring provisioning or management of servers. It automatically scales compute resources and you pay only for the compute time used. The main benefits are no server management, automatic scaling, pay-per-use billing, and performance optimization options.”

Doesn’t this draw a lot of parallels to:

Take a look at the Google Cloud landing page. Couldn’t you see this structure and style being an effective way to explain and sell the Polkadot Cloud?

Imagine all that we can learn about creating a better Web3 cloud for the world by really framing ourselves as a product architected similar to the traditional cloud services we want to replace.

A “10 Year” Vision of the Polkadot Cloud

What is important about this broad narrative for the Polkadot Cloud, is that it allows us to not be limited by what we are doing today, and think about what we could be building tomorrow.

Many teams around the Polkadot ecosystem are looking for the right ideas to support, and decentralized organizations like the Polkadot DAO have a hard time understanding if we really need some of those things.

With the Polkadot Cloud mentality, we can easily ask the question: “How are you looking to improve the experience for applications and services using the Polkadot Cloud?”

We can also get ourselves out of the gutter of thinking we are just a blockchain product. The Web3 Cloud will have many services that are NOT blockchain based! (or at least not directly related to Parachains)

For example:

  • Mix Nets (a la Nym)
  • Privacy Layers (a la ZCash)
  • Oracle Services (a la Chainlink)
  • P2P Communication Services (a la Whisper)
  • Persistent File Storage Services (a la IPFS)

It’s really not crazy to think that the Polkadot Cloud would want to build or directly integrate these services into our offerings and how such services will bring better experiences to our users, and allow them to build more secure, scalable, and resilient Web3 applications and services.

The Polkadot Hub

The Polkadot Hub is the home for the Polkadot community, the DOT token, and other tokens across the Polkadot ecosystem.

If you were to make a sales pitch for the Polkadot Hub, it might look something like this:

The Polkadot Hub is a Layer 1 blockchain that supports smart contracts and is deployed on and secured by the Polkadot Cloud.

The Polkadot Hub has native features such as:

  • Smart Contracts
  • Staking
  • Governance
  • Treasury
  • Stablecoins
  • Token Registry
  • etc…

The Polkadot Hub uses a Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform. This allows anyone to add their own programmable layers to Polkadot.

The purpose of the Polkadot Hub is to bring coordination, funding, and direction for the development and future of the Polkadot Cloud.

So the primary vibe of the Polkadot Hub should be community.

Every part of the Polkadot Hub is about tapping into the Polkadot community, and using them as a coordination machine bringing decentralization to the Polkadot Cloud.

Read more details about the Polkadot Hub

History of the Polkadot Hub

Our mission to create a platform for Web3 applications and services necessitated the creation of the Polkadot Hub.

You cannot have a decentralized platform without having a decentralized set of decision makers. In many ways, the Polkadot Hub is what separates the Polkadot Cloud from products which are “blockchain” or “web3” only by name.

So let’s again re-frame our history with this product in mind:

  • Features launched on the Polkadot Cloud, but no Hub yet
  • Creation of the Polkadot Hub, with Token Registry (Asset Hub)
  • Proper Launch of the Polkadot Hub with Ethereum-compatible smart contracts (TBD, see launch details below)
  • Transition Staking, Governance, and Treasury to the Polkadot Hub (TBD)

Since the genesis of the Polkadot Cloud, features of the Polkadot Hub have always been present. But these features lived directly in the Cloud, and were initially built this way because the Polkadot Cloud did not have its Hosting Service ready to use yet.

A number of projects have been ongoing, which would now be captured by the idea of the Polkadot Hub:

  • The Asset Hub
    • Token Registry
    • Pay fees with any token
    • Hold tokens without DOT
  • The Minimal Relay Chain
  • Smart Contracts on Polkadot
  • etc…

Again, these projects were mostly being done in parallel, but without a clear vision of the goal and how they will all work together to paint a cohesive story. The Polkadot Hub brings a vision of what we are trying to build, and gives meaning to these various features.

Launch of the Polkadot Hub

The Polkadot Hub is an opportunity to “relaunch” the Polkadot brand.

For the first time, Polkadot will be open season for any developers, tinkerers, or builders to be able to quickly and easily deploy applications and contracts to the Polkadot Ecosystem. You no longer need to be a “cloud developer” in order to use Polkadot. Making smart contracts is easy, and thus building in Polkadot is easy.

Imagine messaging like the following:

Polkadot is proud to announce the Polkadot Hub.

The Polkadot Hub is a new L1 blockchain running on the Polkadot Cloud, and a launchpad for builders to tap into over 6 billion dollars in tokens across the Polkadot ecosystem.

The Polkadot Hub will be Ethereum-compatible, meaning you can deploy your favorite Solidity smart contracts directly to the Polkadot ecosystem.

The Polkadot Hub has native access to stable coins like USDC and USDT, as well as all of the tokens from the Polkadot ecosystem. The Polkadot Hub also has trustless bridges to Ethereum and other top blockchain ecosystems, meaning that you have worry-free access to essentially any token within the crypto market.

On the Polkadot Hub, you can pay transaction fees with any of these tokens, meaning you can even hold and use stablecoins without needing any other token!

The Polkadot Hub is a brand new, untapped resource for explosive product growth by tapping into one of the largest developer communities in the blockchain ecosystem.

With millions of users at your fingertips, there is no better place to launch than the Polkadot Hub. You can have your launchpad ready In: 3, 2, 1…

The Launchpad

A relaunch is not something that can be done without planning.

I would expect a number of specific initiatives to make the Polkadot Hub feel new, exciting, and like a proper launchpad for the next big projects in Web3.

  • The Polkadot Wallet

    The goal is to have a clear and concise story around how users onboard into our ecosystem, and use applications and services across the Polkadot Cloud.

    • It should have fiat onboarding flows.
    • It should allow you to purchase in the real world with your Polkadot ecosystem tokens.
    • It should give you a mobile gateway into the hub.
    • It should allow you to “log in” to any Polkadot Ecosystem application or service.
      • With a standard like Wallet Connect.
  • “Polkadot Bundle” Token Sale

    The goal is encourage people to buy and use Polkadot ecosystem tokens, thereby rebooting the ecosystem.

    • A new token sale coming from the Polkadot Treasury.
    • Sold at the market price of the DOT token.
    • “Bundled” with ecosystem tokens which are provided by ecosystem teams.
      • Some amount of compensation from the treasury can be used.
      • Many should contribute just based on it being a bootstrapping event.
      • Very much “airdrop” vibes.
    • Fully locked for 1 year. Fast vesting period afterward.
      • But with the ability to participate or spend the tokens on the various Polkadot Services.
    • Sold tokens go back to the treasury as stables, or to purchase more ecosystem tokens to include with the bundle.
  • Micro-grants

    The goal is to get a bunch of people building in the Polkadot Hub, bringing and executing new ideas.

    • Bounties for different application verticals:
      • DAO templates for opengov
      • staking pools templates
      • account abstractions (on top of our native abstractions)
      • cross chain messaging templates
      • memecoin communities
      • on-chain games
      • etc…
    • Rewards to the top teams in each vertical driving organic growth, and sustained usage for 6 months, as reviewed by a DAO / curator set.
  • Participation Lotteries

    The goal is to drive engagement of the Hub by end users.

    • Imagine some percentage of all transaction fees get funneled into a special smart contract which holds weekly lotteries.
    • You receive tickets from the lottery by submitting proofs that you have interacted with the Polkadot Hub.
      • Any interaction where you Pay a fee should qualify, for a ticket.
      • Users get a proportional number of tickets to the fees they have paid.
      • This should not be gameable or exploitable.
    • The contract selects a winner at random from among the tickets.
      • Can’t really expect the lottery to be lifechanging, but is certainly a non-zero incentive.
      • This adds some positive EV to simply using the Polkadot Hub!
  • Hackathons and Education

    The goal is to radically shift entry level hackathons and education from the Polkadot Cloud (as it is today) to the Polkadot Hub.

    • Create and work with teams to build new entry level educational material about the Polkadot Hub.
    • Tutorials, videos, guides, templates, etc…
    • Hackathon kits, which can be deployed by around the world for their local communities.

Journey To Scale

The Polkadot Hub will now be an entry point for developers into the Polkadot ecosystem. But we know that the true power of Polkadot lies in the Polkadot Cloud.

We must have a story for how we transition these developers and teams from the Hub to the Cloud.

For this, there are two components:

  • Unified Programming Language
  • Universal Tokens
The Unified Programming Language

I won’t go into too much detail about the unified programming language, because I have already written about it before here.

The short summary is that we need a language (like ink!), which can be used to both program on Smart Contracts on the Hub, and Services on the Cloud.

With such a language, we can literally tell the story about how your developers, team, and codebase can all seamlessly transition into the cloud whenever the time is right.

Obviously, building a contract and building a cloud service won’t offer the same functionality, but it should be a smart contract is a subset of whatever a cloud service could do, so we really should aim to make that experience as seamless as possible.

Universal Tokens

Universal tokens is the idea on how we should support tokens in the Polkadot ecosystem through the Polkadot Hub. As noted above, one of the native features of the Polkadot Hub is a token registry system.

Today, when new Cloud Services launch, they mint their own token local to their blockchain, and then transfer them over to the hub for interoperability.

In smart contract ecosystems, they mint tokens in storage specific to smart contracts.

Also, unfortunately, the DOT token is not treated the same as other tokens on the Polkadot Hub today.

If we allowed this to continue, the Polkadot Hub would have like 4 different kinds tokens across the product!

Universal Tokens is a vision toward having all tokens in the Polkadot Ecosystem natively minted and managed on the Polkadot Hub. Ownership of those tokens can then be assigned to contracts on the Hub or services on the Cloud.

What is key here is that Universal Tokens will allow a seamless pathway to transition ownership of the tokens from a contract to a cloud service. So even without a Unified Programming Language, end users of a product in the Polkadot ecosystem, will feel no pain at all when a transition like this happens. And in the scenario where we do have a Unified Programming Language, it might literally be seamless.

The other key feature of Universal Tokens is universal compatibility! If you launch your token natively on the Polkadot Hub, any contract or cloud service should be able to recognize and interact with that token in a standard way.

Imagine getting an NFT from a gaming service in the Polkadot Cloud, and then easily using or trading it on the Polkadot Hub, thanks to the fact that it is built using the Universal Token standard.

A “10 Year” Vision of the Polkadot Hub

This is where I will put some ideas in your head about the immense vision of what the Polkadot Hub could be. Not that this is what SHOULD happen, but it is perfectly possible given the mission of the Polkadot Hub.

If we are imagining a community centered product, it is easy to see how it could manifest similar to Web2 social networks. Why not when you open up the “Polkadot Hub”, it could land you on a page similar to Facebook?

Imagine seeing an activity feed of everything going on in the Polkadot Hub and broader Polkadot Ecosystem:

  • What proposals are currently being discussed.
  • Latest announcements / features.
  • Technical discussions / RFCs.
  • Collectives reporting their activity.
  • Ambassadors providing proof of their work.
  • Memes and marketing.
  • Education and tutorials.
  • etc…

Now imagine in your head the left sidebar:

  • Groups: The various DAOs / chat groups you are a part of.
  • Events: The next in-person or online meetups for the Polkadot ecosystem.
  • Marketplace: A place to use cryptocurrency trade for digital or real-world goods!
  • Finance: A home for all things DeFi.
  • Apps: Gateways to other applications and services hosted on the Polkadot Cloud.
  • Games: A portal into Web3 enabled games and communities.

Imagine in the top right, clicking your avatar, and managing your settings / profile:

  • The accounts, wallets, and balances you have control of.
  • Various account abstraction settings, like multisigs and proxies.
  • Contracts you have deployed and their activity (users, revenue)
  • Posts you have made in the Hub, and revenue generated from engagements.
  • Your public identity.
  • Your private individuality proofs.
  • etc…

Finally, a cohesive and familiar experience for all the craziness we currently feel in the space.

And all of these features would be built with the principals of Web3! There is not a single team which builds this whole portal. It is a collection of work from the Polkadot ecosystem, unified by the Hub’s vision and mission.

We can literally rebuild the systems which spy on and extract profits from us, with trust free alternatives!


Key terms to use in discussion:

  • Polkadot Hub
  • Smart Contract
  • Polkadot Cloud
  • Cloud Service
  • Universal Token

Key terms to avoid in discussion:

  • Asset(s)
    • Use Token(s)
  • Plaza
    • Use Polkadot Hub
    • If needed, use additional qualifiers about what features you are referring to.
  • JAM
    • Use Polkadot Cloud
    • If needed, refer specifically to the JAM milestone of the Polkadot Hub.
  • Parachain
    • Use Rollup, or Cloud Service depending
  • Polkadot 2.0
    • Use Polkadot Cloud with qualifiers around the features you are referring to
  • Relay Chain
    • Use the appropriate cloud services you want to describe (settlement, DA, execution, …)
    • Or refer to the Polkadot Cloud directly

Some additional references:

ACTION ITEM:

The action item for readers of this thread is to participate in the discussion.

  • What are your reservations around this plan?
  • What did we get wrong / can be improved?
  • What is unclear to you?

Let’s start a discussion and create alignment.

31 Likes

This is a collection of very exciting and compelling ideas.

I would like more clarity on the “Journey To Scale” section: What about dApps written in Solidity? As you say part of the current improvements being worked on is Ethereum compatability on the Hub. For all the applications starting this way on Polkadot, how do they scale?

1 Like

Since, you use the AWS analogy, I think part of the messaging should include the Polkadot commitment to backwards compatibility. E.g. what you build on Hub will still work when the JAM upgrade rolls out, it will just run faster, better, etc.

1 Like

Those applications would be able to leverage Universal Tokens as a pathway to help them more easily migrate their users into a cloud service.

Additionally, the easiest “journey to scale” hack for a solidity smart contract is to deploy a cloud service which is it’s own dedicated smart contract chain with only their smart contracts deployed on it, ensuring they get the full bandwidth of whatever cloud compute they rent, versus sharing it on the Polkadot Hub.

For this, we could create simple cloud service templates.

However, I personally think such a path would not be as good as what a universal programming language could provide in terms of bringing cloud features to an application over time.

Regarding backwards compatibility, of course you know that this is what we plan to have already for all parachains.

I don’t think we need to explicitly mention it here because the worry about backwards compatibility is exactly the manifestation of problems that arise when you think things like JAM are a new product.

Since JAM is just an improvement of the Polkadot Cloud, I am not sure that such concerns would show up to begin with.

That being said, I mention that the Polkadot Cloud will continue to have a Polakdot Rollup Service, so this is my nod towards the statement of backwards compatibility with the existing version of the Cloud.

1 Like

I like the phrase “less trust and more truth”. It highlights the trustless nature of blockchain technology—where systems operate without needing to trust a central authority. However, I wonder if the part “less trust” could be misinterpreted by some to have a negative connotation, suggesting that we shouldn’t trust others. While I understand that “less trust” doesn’t mean “zero trust”, perhaps emphasizing the positive aspects could avoid potential misunderstandings.

Perhaps this would be a better way to phrase it (just my opinion, which could be wrong):

Polkadot is a vision toward a world of verifiable and indisputable truth.

Emphasizing “verifiable and indisputable truth” highlights Polkadot’s commitment to transparency, security, and decentralization, which are the pillars of a trustless system without the need to mention trust.

Regarding the section about the Polkadot Cloud:

The whole section is really good. The part I think is missing is how the Polkadot Cloud ( or services on the cloud) can be used by non blockchain applications ( Web2 businesses, enterprise, governments, etc). We already have some examples:

I think this is powerful because it shows that the Polkadot Cloud can provide solutions that also help non-web3 applications.

Regarding the section about the Polkadot Hub:

Fully agree with this.

The Polkadot Hub can become the “top of the funnel” for onboarding people into Polkadot. And it lowers the entry barrier tremendously for developers/builders.

Again, great because it lowers the entry barrier for onboarding more developers into the Polkadot ecosystem.

This will help change the narrative that only “cloud” developers can only build on Polkadot. The hackathons can be a great way to market the Hub to developers.

This will make it easier for developers to transition form the Hub to Cloud.

I like the concept, but I wonder if perhaps we would be putting way too many things together. It could get clunky / hard to navigate. But the overall idea of making the Hub a “community place” is great.

2 Likes

I see this vision as like years out.

It is certainly NOT the thing to build today, and not the tools that our customers need today to be successful on our platform.

But if we can get consensus that the “10 year vision” for a Polkadot Hub that looks like a Web3 social network, then you can imagine how much it can help inform decisions, designs, and products of the decentralized Polkadot community.

It would be much harder to build something like this with our decentralized community without having a shared vision on where we are headed.

The exact products we need to be building today for the hub, are the basics like the Polkadot App, various dashboards / portals, and of course solid documentation.

To clarify this, I will add “10 year vision” to the title of that section.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with all your feedback, thanks for the time to provide it.

4 Likes

Should we be worried about a “mere” L1 governing the Cloud? It sounds like it should have a special mode of communication with the Cloud (e.g. for runtime upgrades) that’s not accessible to other L1s… Which could be an attack vector or something. But I may be getting into details too early here.

Other than that I like the idea of extracting functionality from the Cloud, leaving it generic enough for anyone to use, and practically demonstrating how to use it. Cool!

This is going into details about how the Polkadot Cloud is architected. Indeed not “any L1” can upgrade or modify the cloud. Only the Hub, and that relationship is enshrined in the Cloud’s design.

But that relationship imo is a lower level detail than the products we are shipping to the world, which is where we gain a lot of clarity by making clear the Polkadot Hub has the capabilities of any L1 Blockchain you are familiar with.

1 Like

You’ve done a great job condensing Polkadot into a cohesive story.

However…

When you reference AWS (Amazon Web Services) or Google Cloud for that matter, it is worth considering just how those businesses came to be.

AWS was launched in 2006 as a solution to Amazon’s own infrastructure needs at a point when the company was already doing over $10bn in annual revenue.

Polkadot is effectively a pre-revenue startup with a unicorn valuation.

In this regard it is definitely not alone in the world of web3.

You state (emphasis mine):

Vision’s are great, but even with a decade long horizon, this positioning is big on dreams and low on validation given current and predicted demand/income for coretime.

You omit that Polkadot’s primary product, as with all of Web3 is its token DOT.

People dance around this fact, but to ignore this is to walk blindly into the future filled with naive optimism.

Thanks for your hard work it is appreciated - please receive these critiques with love.

2 Likes

I really think to me, this is not the case.

The DOT token, unlike many other tokens in the ecosystem, is not a speculative financial asset.

It is a utility token, NOT a cryptocurrency.

AWS generates a lot of revenue by selling / renting access to its Cloud Services. On Amazon, you pay for these things using centralized, government controlled currencies. Governments do have the ability to control what you put on the Amazon cloud by limiting your ability to pay or even pressuring Amazon to take your content down.

On Polkadot, to access an open and decentralized Web3 Cloud, you pay with a permissionless token. The ONLY way you can purchase Cloud Services from Polkadot is with the DOT token. Even if we obfuscate those details by swapping your stablecoins into DOT, the final payment into the system will ALWAYS be DOT.

Similarly, the only way you can govern the Polkadot Cloud is with DOT. But again, DOT is not the product, the product is our Open Governance system, which lives in the Polkadot Hub.

I totally conceed that it could be that a need for a Web3 Cloud is something a bit too early for this world.

But events like the 2008 financial crisis was the trigger for a revolution like Bitcoin. If you look at the world around us today, you can see rising tensions and distrust among individuals, and the central powers that control the world.

The catalyst moment which sparks a need for Web3 Cloud will inevitably come, and I guess we can only build in a way that positions us to be most successful at that time. This is the vision of Polkadot IMO, and so doing anything else wouldn’t be Polkadot.

I think to understand how such technologies get adopted, we must review the history of:

  • Public-Key Cryptography
  • HTTP → HTTPS
  • (other good examples?)

Thanks for your feedback, let me know what you think about what I wrote here.

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Hey Shawn,

We touched on this face-to-face when we debated the marketing approach. It was a suggestion we could position Polkadot as the infrastructure layer, similar to AWS or Google Cloud. I also included this idea in a proposal: Polkadot Referenda #1222, where I stated:

“Polkadot faces challenges in growing the ecosystem due to a lack of clear communication and structured governance. Polkadot aims to be swift, lean, and efficient; however, our organizational setup and Polkadot’s unclear vision or direction are hindering this goal.

The biggest challenge to scaling quickly and effectively for Polkadot is simple: Who are we, and how do we position ourselves? What is our identity ? What consistent message are we sharing with potential users and partners?

It all starts with a clear mission and vision. This might sound basic (and sooooo Web2), but without a solid understanding of who we are and where we make a difference, growth will be limited - even with world-class technology.”

My solution a month ago was to establish a Governance Collective – a team to define Polkadot’s overall vision, values, and KPIs.

But honestly, I think your approach is even better than my original idea of a Governance Collective. And a developer who suddenly brings simplicity to the Polkadot world, giving us something we can leverage in marketing—I’m a huge fan!

Now, instead of “Polkadot Cloud” or “Polkadot Hub,” I think about our audiences, which I see as three distinct groups:

  1. DOT Holders – believers in Polkadot who might stake or participate in OpenGov voting.
  2. Infrastructure – the backbone that ensures Polkadot remains the most advanced blockchain available.
  3. Developers and End Users – those building applications on Polkadot and enterprises using these products.

Here’s how I envision categorizing these:

  • Web3 Cloud: Targeted at developers and partners who want to build on Polkadot’s infrastructure layer.
  • Web3Connect: A marketplace showcasing all products built on Polkadot, where customers can also connect with partners to develop custom Web3 applications. Payments here would be made in DOT.
  • Web3 Community: Focused on everything related to the DOT token, governance, and treasury. This is also where funding can be requested to develop products within the Web3 Cloud.

Let me know what you think, happy to brainstorm !

Mario Schraepen

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I’m not sure I fully grasp this post but doesn’t the text below omit people outside of the polkadot bubble, who may actually be the primary target of this messaging?

Ah, damn – the term “end-users” is incorrect here. Good observation! I meant “customers.” The ones actually using the product(s)
They can find the products or builders they like on Web3Connect

In particular, PKI gained adoption in web retail to address a very specific problem: secure browsing. This was primarily to counteract phishing.

However, PKI completely failed to achieve mass user adoption—consider, for example, PGP and secure email communications. Today, there are initiatives like certificate transparency to mitigate issues in the trust chain, but these are primarily targeted at a small audience of certificate issuers.

So, the question is: how do you connect PKI and HTTPS as examples for the adoption of generic Cloud/Hub products?

I like your vision on the simplified structure with Polkadot Cloud and Plokadot Hub and it will surely work very well in marketing to the web2 people, however I still prefer the Plaza, Jam and rollup names for the products :innocent:

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Absolutely massive fan of this new break between Hub & Cloud.
It’s very clear that Polkadot is so big that it’s quite hard to place it in one general statement of thought - this addition really helps break up the two worlds - each as valuable as the other.

HUB
If we (as users) could have a place where all the features are available for usage of the DOT token - this could solve an immense amount of fragmentation issues.

Stake
Vote
Swap
Hold (Wallet)
Lend / Borrow
Bridge
Data (Analytics)
Block Explorer

All things that many of our internal wallet teams (including JS) have available - as one coherent unit, could really help the user experience for things like - Assethub & USDT or airdrops from chains that are difficult to claim.
Single-click staking or SwipeGov - amazing features.
Metamask & EVM support for tokens outside of Polkadot.
Bridging - easy to use and secured by Polkadot - how wonderful.
Debit Card with Nova
Reward with Polkadot App

HUB could really make the user feel like they are using Polkadot and many of the features, from one place, instead of having to figure out where else to go to use them.

Ontop of this - we could add all the amazing documentation, the wiki, tutorials, news updates, governance updates, Live Chat for Help (??)

Developer Portal for builders / Appchain creation with Tanssi

Anything to decrease the user dropoff would be welcome.

Adding to this thought - I believe there is way to cross Hub and Cloud activity, which inherently increases the usage of DOT as DOT (through hub) would be the first point of contact - by offering some of the very great features available from other chains.

For example:
Direct Liquid Staking of Bifrost VDOT or Stella stDOT
Offering Polimec Funding Rounds direct from the Hub
Marketplace listings from Kodadot or Mythical
Marketplace with Region X & Lastic (Crazy!!!)
Social Profiles with MeWe
Multisig with Multix
Game Portal with Ajuna & Mythical
MemePad Portal
RWA Investments with Centrifuge

Essentially, however we can start consolidating the Polkadot end user features into one place, the better - this would make the Polkadot user experience very competitive with other chains.

Finally, the informative nature of having a live news feed, dedicated & informative pages for projects on Polkadot Cloud will help create interest between different projects built on the network - further solidifying the interest of the user to build, explore and be part of this growing community (might even be a organic sales pitch for building on Cloud itself, too)

Once projects start seeing this collaborative, unified portal into the world of Polkadot - I believe it will all start to ‘make sense’ - and we would see a rush of new activity from users, developers, speculators and all else coming to our world.

Cheers.
Juba

PS - thinking about the integration of Coretime statistics, which is essentially the first live, permission-less commodity market (native to blockchain offering) ever.

Seeing that on the data and analytics page with usage and stats is just mindblowing stuff to me.

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A “10 year vision” is great because it sets the “north star” for what we want to achieve with both the Polkadot Hub and Polkadot Cloud. Some items/milestones on the roadmap might change as we build towards that 10 year vision, but it’s good to have it as a north star. It will provide a sense of direction.

More comments on the Polkadot Cloud:

This could be a way to explain how Polkadot Cloud enables solutions also for Web2 businesses:

The rollup service is what enabled cloud developers to build rollups for specific use cases. Some of these rollups focus on providing solutions that help Web2 businesses and enterprises solve their problems. The examples I used previously were Aventus and Kilt. There are other examples like Mandala and Origintrail.

Yes, this draws a lot of parallels to the services we already have and the ones we want to add to the Polkadot Cloud. This also makes it easier to market because when a new tech upgrade comes out, we can say “this upgrade improves this service because [ fill in the blank].”

More comments for the Polkadot Hub:

This will remove a lot of friction.

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@LinkedCar Hey Mario, my interpretation of your comments is that you feel we should have an emphasis on “customers”, i.e. explicitly defining some “user experience” as one of the core products of Polkadot.

Indeed, Polkadot has not done justice so far in building great user experiences. Instead, Polkadot has had a history of building just solid infrastructure. So i totally understand your viewpoint, but I would argue that this user experience focus should be a subset of the Polkadot Hub and Polkadot Cloud products.

First we need to acknowledge that the UI side of these two products will be quite different. For the Hub, I described something which looks like a social network, emphasizing the importance of community building and interactions between peers.

But the Polkadot Cloud probably wants something much more like a Developer / IT Portal, just like you find for Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure. In these situations, focus on seeing the activity of other users, or even interactions with other users will probably be near zero. Instead, they will be talking directly to the cloud to purchase their services, or looking at costs, performance, activity, etc…

I certainly could integrate more requirements about beautiful user experiences into my definitions above. Something I will certainly consider. Do you agree with this assessment?

If not, tell me more specifically why Web3 Connect is its own product, and how exactly it would be manifested. For example, is it just UI? or will it also have its own L1?

My viewpoint is that these are things which are super important to users, but end users as a whole were really not technical enough to know. I mean, could you imagine an internet without public key crypto or encrypted communication today!? But how many people can you expect to answer what the difference between http and https is?

Instead, these things were globally integrated by large business on behalf of their customers.

Why would they want to do this?

Usually for liability concerns. Take Cloud Storage for example. When files are not encrypted, governments exert their power to force tech businesses to divulge customer information for whatever reasons they feel are justified. The solution to this is to encrypt everything, so Apple can say “i cannot access these photos/phones/files even if I wanted to.”

It seems this could be one way which Web3 systems are onboarded to the world. Businesses will want to remove liability about where money is coming from, what applications are running, how users are interacting with their business. Their concern is just their business, and the rest should not be their liability or responsibility.

When businesses are able to remove liability, then they are able to save money. When people use products which remove trust from businesses, they get more secure experiences. Everyone wins.

I think this conversation can go much deeper, but I will leave this straight forward response. So there is a lot we can learn from exactly these kinds of technologies, and how they were introduced as the default experience for how we use the internet.

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My point of view on the long-term:

Polkadot is a crypto-native economic meta-infrastructure that enables diverse, aligned, and incentivized communities to generate real-world value—value connected to the broader economy, rather than being self-referential. This is achieved through mechanisms like governance, financial funding, and revenue-generating activities.

The speculative bubble and initial inflation phase are necessary to bootstrap the economy, but they cannot sustain it long-term. The mission, therefore, is to transform that initial capital into lasting value as described above.

It would be incredible if legal interfaces could be developed to allow these communities to purchase revenue-generating businesses or real-world assets, such as land.

In my view, the focus should not be on selling decentralized cloud computing or related technical services for “web2” audiences (it could be a revenue generating activity).

Wdyt?

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I agree with basically everything you said, but I think this is not “the mission”. I think this is one of the goals. I say this only because if that was the mission, it could heavily compromise many of the important fundamentals we must keep to actually achieve our vision. I guess I am worried about “the ends justify the means” thinking.

In any case, if I were to go one level deeper: vision → mission → goals, I would certainly include what you wrote there.

I think you are missing here the intrinsic value and utility of the DOT token, which is selling Web3 cloud computing and other technical services (blockspace, etc…).

I think we must agree that Polkadot in design and vision is a platform for other Web3 projects to build their products more easily, scalably, and cheaply, else it wouldn’t expose the publicly accessible “Polkadot Cloud” layer at all.

I think the Hub is about bootstrapping community, and a solid community is what makes the Polkadot Cloud actually resilient and powerful. Anyone could just fork the code, and many teams have been recently, literally or by design.

But these teams cannot just “fork” the community and community infrastructure we have built. This is what will continue to separate us from others who are just “web3” by name.

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