How is Polkadot preparing to compete with the broader crypto narratives that are currently being driven by AI, privacy, perps, stablecoins, etc.?
Is Parity focused on the right long-term product vision, or does the ecosystem need to evolve its narrative beyond being “the best multi-chain infrastructure”?
Why don’t you ask Parity? I’m sure they are happy to inform you about their plans and share their roadmaps.
Maybe it’s time for W3F to start fully funding Solana protocols as well. 
Based on what’s been shared, what’s available on GitHub, and, most importantly, the actions taken over the past year by the powers that be, it seems clear that the original goal of multi-chain, anti-maximalism is not the intended direction going forward.
The generality and domain specific chains are still an option, but instead of reliance on secondary teams, we are seeing more and more the business infrastructure being integrated as system chains. Asset hub now hosts EVM (almost nativity) which directly competed with moonbeam who now seeks relevance. People chain made Kilt obsolete. I suspect Bulletin chain will likely push what remains of Crust network to spin down anything they still serve.
It seems counter intuitive that the host system would actively compete and consume the very customers’ business it is trying to attract. Reasonable logic would state that the business model of Polkadot would be to maximalism profits. But not all profits are tangible assets. The intangible rewards of education, research, and development of better ways to implement Web3 technologies not just for value creation (or more likely value extraction), but rather, are categorically better for society as a whole when they are non-profit seeking or extracting rents.
It is mad to think of how much you might lose out on monetarily if you give away the means of production for free, but imagine how much the world might change if the means of production were free, or nearly free?
A slight aside story: earlier this year my family planted tomatos from seed. After they sprouted and we had ours set aside to plant in the ground, we still had a few dozen plants left over. We discussed selling them, but decided to simply give them away for free. One woman who stopped and picked up several, offered to pay $5/plant and pulled out the cash. My wife politely turned it down. The woman asked why we would ever teach our young children to turn down money.
The reason was because they were free (as in beer). The value of providing the means of producing fresh tomatoes to our neighbors, without an upfront cost to them, outweighed the nominal short term reward of a few dollars in our pockets. The day we have those tomatos away, men, women, and children all stopped and picked up 1-2 plants each. Never more than what they needed.
From those plants, we see numerous have been planted in the yards of our neighbors. Children and grandchildren have the experience of tending a garden of their own, learn of the time and effort it takes to produce a single tomato, and take the responsibility that the means of their tomato’s production is solely in their hands. Whether they know all of this or not is not quite the point, but the fact they get to experience and learn of the alternative to simply buying a tomato from the store is worth more than any price per plant.
Circling this tangent around, it would be convenient if the technical direction of W3F, Parity, "Open"Gov acted in the direct interest to increase the token price, drive scarcity, and provide a clear exit path for everyone here. But I don’t think that is the goal they have in mind. They are providing the tools, the soil, the sunlight, the water, and the seeds to grow our own tomatos. We stake our claim and work our earth, write our code and connect our plots. The road network is established, XCM. The tools are robust and scalable, Core time. The water flows, Elves. And land is cheap, Dot.
It is a lot of hard work. It would be much easier to buy produce from the store. There is significant risk with staying on the frontier. I don’t think anyone could be blamed for derisking and moving back to Ethereum/Solana for safety.
I see the opportunity, still, and my livelihood isn’t at risk if my digital homestead fails. I’m happy to turn my soil and know that what is mine, is mine. And that’s valuable enough for me.
My attempt to explain how the Polkadot vision evolved:
In 2016, building a blockchain was hard. And trustkessly connecting blockchains impossible.
Gavin and the gang set out to make building blockchains easy and connecting chains possible.
Along the way we learned some crucial lessons.
If you build a chain and delegate consensus to another chain (the relay chain model), the case for building that new chain comes down to just a handful of properties you get to define
What you are giving to earn those properties are
As it turns out, most products in Web3 today don’t need these properties and are much better out just building on a more constrained space where they still have far better composability with other products → network effects
Good use cases for the Polkadot model are some of the survivors:
But overall, the big insight is that these are highly specialized products that have a huge upfront cost before they can go to market.
Most successful products don’t start as specialized chains, but rather as simple products with close proximity (asynchronous composability) with other products that later on might decide to specialize further to gain some of the properties that we discussed above. A prime example is Uniswap starting on Ethereum and then adding Unichain to support intents and internalize revenue.
While the properties mentioned above are extremely valuable, Polkadot‘s decision to forgo „short path“ composability created a situation where network effects within the Polkadot network have an extremely high barrier and are almost impossible to achieve. They require a level of dedication and 10 years of your life that only people that are named „Jakub“ or „Seun“ will ever be able to commit.
Parity‘s vision (I hope I am forgiven to dare to speak for them) rests on a medium term and a long term initiative that aim to capture the benefits of the multi-chain vision while evolving and transcending it.
Hub introduces the place where „short path“ network effects can happen through (synchronous) composability, all while preserving easy access to the multi-chain Polkadot Cloud.
Hub rests on 3 pillars:
The idea is that if you bring these things closely together in „native“ form you have solved most problems that crypto has solved today in an integrated manner, and create something that resembles human society in cyberspace
This is sugered with some secondary products that come along with it: a human oracle, good onboarding UX, App Store + a range of products intended to jump start the new society.
The bet rests on the idea that solving all these problems at the same time creates a big bang release that makes up for the time lost by delivering a superior integrated experience (it’s a big bet)
You can observe how this vision walks away narratively from a multi chain world, while underneath everything rests on it. People chain, bulletin chain, Hub all leverage these. „Third Parties“ like Hydration, Hyperbridge & Co all amplify the access to services that you can consume on the Hub. A bit akin to how a city with strong industry in proximity does well.
Long term, JAM adds to the vision in ways that our small monkey brains cannot comprehend yet.
Transactionlessness will free developers from Plato‘s cage and allow them to just build without consideration of those pesky blocks that have been humbling them for way too long. Gone will be the days of forced transactionfullness and here will be the days of glorious continuous operation in a while(true) loop if they dare to dream and can spend the coin.
By this point, chains might lose their meaning as much as virtual machines have lost theirs in the age of the cloud. Reduced to a mere helper construct to facilitate the creation of applications. Sure you can build them, just how some guys today are still driving around with Oldtimers. But what is more likely is that chains will just dissolve into cloud services that rent a core and auction off their execution to their favorite work package builder cartel.
And for composability of those heterogenous services? There will be abundance. A data lake larger than you can imagine will be available that captures the whole world state of the JAM is accessible to them.
This future vision is somehow multi-chain… or multi construct… or multi STF. We don’t yet have beautiful words for it. It will be the equivalent of how we feel about multi chain today, but in a more evolved and elegant and expressive and powerful manner.
In a way Web3 was always about breaking the chains of slavery and as it turns out it might also be about breaking down blockchains into state transition functions that can access the full world state of the world computer.
Somehow the vision is to transcend all the crypto terminology, to just provide the substrate upon which the new Web rests, which somehow will look much more similar to the cloud based web that we have today. But built to protect our freedom and self expression.