Yeah definitely - was this messari report their own independent research report or funded by DOT? i’m not entirely sure how this works but yeah the timing was pretty crazy. Its a much deeper quantitivate analysis than the above, but really it draws pretty similar conclusions:
1. Relay chain value accrual
In Q3, Polkadot’s revenue was $115,000 with a circulating P/S ratio of 19,945x. For comparison, Avalanche’s revenue was $2.3 million with a circulating P/S ratio of 665x, and the Cosmos Hub’s was $142,000 with a circulating P/S ratio of 4,965x. By traditional standards, each of these base layers have abysmal metrics. The poor revenue-centric metrics paired with high valuations highlight the difficulties in valuing base-layer protocols.
Joel Monegro’s original fat protocol thesis has come in and out of fashion, but the ability for an on-chain governed chain to begin accruing assets aligned to its operations from other chains to secure longer term value/s alignment will do another circle back I think.
Check Joe Petrowski’s thoughts on statemine re KSM/DOT treasury, its future location and features in this issue.
Quoting from that:
- One of the advantages of a Treasury on Statemint is that it could hold other assets. Users should be able to make requests for other assets, and governance should have the ability to manage asset holdings of the Treasury and acquire other assets.
- The Treasury should be able to hold:
- Its Relay Chain’s native asset
- Fungible assets registered on Statemint
- Non-fungible assets registered on Statemint
- Native assets of other chains under the same consensus system (member parachains)
- Native assets of bridged chains (e.g. DOT in Kusama Treasury)
- Treasury shouldn’t be limited to holding other assets, it should be able to spend them
2. Auctions as primary adoption / marketing / demand driver of KSM/DOT
Polkadot’s financial and network activity largely reflects native Relay Chain activity. Closely correlated KPIs like active accounts, new accounts, revenue, and token transfers all experienced double-digit percentage declines. The declines were likely driven by the expected declines in parachain slot auction participation and bear market woes.
3. The good news of XCM growth
This was maybe less well stated in the post, but will be tackled more in an upcoming one and this relates to the innovation XCM (and XCMP) enables as a technology - the composability between parachains, however this adoption is really just a first phase of testing, and we’ve yet to see anything really novel emerge as a result of this unique relay/parachain capabiltity.
This again returns to the issues of ETH clones and therefore the expectation of novelty to emerge through the cross-collaboration / fertilisation of relatively commoditised functions.
What this technology really needs is for genuinely new parachain models and concepts that break out from the ETH bubble and then the novelty and composability will be using entirely new lego blocks.