Where the Real Network Effects Are

Ecosystem
2

I think one of the common traps here is to compare the Polkadot relay chain to other existing layer 1 networks.

Polkadot is more of a layer 0 mulit-chain protocol, of which a blockchain is needed to provide value to the parachains built on it. The Relay Chain’s purpose is very meta, and mostly does not involve or provide value to “users”, so if we try to compare it to the kinds of metrics which we look for in layer 1 blockchains, certainly it will fall flat.

Here is a definition that @gavofyork wrote for the academy about the “blockchain layers”:

Polkadot is a Layer 0 Blockchain

Layer Gav’s Description
Layer 3 An application or platform which is hosted by an L2.
Layer 2 An application or platform which is hosted by an L1.
Layer 1 A basic blockchain which administers a native token and hosts one or more applications.
Layer 0 A secure consensus-provider. A pure L0 has no ability to host applications. An impure L0 may be able to host limited fixed-function applications (e.g. token hosting), but is primarily used to host other blockchains.

So really we need to look at the parachains in aggregate and their activity when trying to make comparisons to basically any other blockchain. We must also take into account the lifetime of parachains compared to other ecosystems. Yes, Polkadot has existed for 2 years now, but the first Parachains were onboarded only on December 18th, and most don’t actually become fully usable until a while after that.

Anyway, these are just things to consider when comparisons are made.

To your question:

I think our strategy has been the following:

  1. Build a truly unstoppable and scalable application platform for Web3 developers.
  2. Build a framework for easily developing modular and extensible application-specific blockchains.
  3. Educating and nurturing teams to build successful and high quality projects on this framework.
  4. Empower and support teams to build out their communities and users, and bring them into the overall Polkadot Ecosystem.
    • ??

As you can see, I think we are on phase 3 of this mission, and you can see that there has been A LOT of output trying to specifically support teams and individual developers building in our space. Just in the last 6 months or so, academy, stackexchange, forum, and improvements to the developer hub all came to be.

I do not believe we are there yet in building enough successful teams, with enough quality and knowledgeable engineers to provide great applications to end users. I think if you asked any parachain team, they would easily ask for double the amount of resources, and Parity might answer the same about that too.

This is why, the only real metrics that I focus on at this moment are the number of developers building in the Polkadot ecosystem and GitHub activity. If we can be successful and continuing to build this out, I think naturally we will build up the end users that you state is lacking.

That all being said, I struggled to think of a concrete set of ideas or plans around how we could best accomplish phase 4. I think it starts with identifying and supporting specific kinds of applications which we think have a good intersection of being needed by the world and being particularly well supported by the Polkadot protocol.

What does that look like to the parachain teams which exist today?

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