Hello, I am a builder at Base and have been following the Polkadot ecosystem for the past few months. From what I’ve observed, most of the projects are heavily focused on infrastructure, but there are very few products that everyday users can actually use.
Here are some of my concerns:
I notice some wallets being funded for the 8th or 9th time. Why not seek venture capital, or set aside and stake some funding instead of repeatedly relying on grants? If larger players keep receiving the majority of funding, how can smaller teams with limited capital survive?
The marketing bounty spent $1M on an esports campaign, yet there isn’t even a single video explaining how to buy coretime, integrate a library into a wallet or dApp, or understand Polkadot 2.0. The hype has been there for over a year, but onboarding resources for developers and general users are still lacking.
The Kaito campaign ran for six months, but now there isn’t a single post about Polkadot or its ecosystem.
In the past six to seven months, there have been around 10 hackathons, but how many teams have actually stayed and continued building within the Polkadot ecosystem?
In his last blog post, Gavin Wood mentioned wanting to see more products, but it feels like the grants and community are still not aligned with that vision. How much longer will we keep focusing only on DeFi? Polkadot’s infrastructure could be used to build essential, everyday tools, things like collaborative docs or video software.
This is not meant as criticism, but just my two cents as a builder coming from another ecosystem. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing your perspective, I agree with much of what you’ve raised.
On the marketing bounty specifically: those questions/concerns are best directed to Crane, the bounty administrator. He is heavily compensated to oversee this program, yet has not been publicly weighing in when concerns like these are raised (example: Bounty Compliance Audit September 2025 - #3 by flez)
If we want accountability and alignment with Gavin’s vision for more usable products, then those overseeing multi-million dollar bounties should be willing to engage openly on these points.
Wallets - strong products get healthy funding. Not much more needed to discuss here.
Esports X Core Tech - unsure how these are at all related. The Marketing Bounty is a group of curators who applied to obtain a portion of funds to work with various creators / projects / groups within the Polkadot Ecosystem while exploring new partnerships and verticals. The mandate for messaging, branding and core product marketing is handled by an agency who is not under our control and neither is the team at Parity (engineering firm behind Polkadot).
Kaito - has managed to work with many industry players. if you aren’t seeing polkadot content, you can follow @Polkadot socials and sign up for the newsletter to follow.
Agree there are hackathon farmers being an issue, however, without participation, we aren’t part of the possibility in development.
”Polkadot’s infrastructure could be used to build essential, everyday tools, things like collaborative docs or video software.” - literally no one is stopping anyone from doing this and there are plenty of funding options available to create, collaborate and integrate - Opengov, Bounties, W3F Grants. When these tools are created and the teams behind them need support / guidance - they are free to approach us to see how we can plug them in to a growing network of marketing support lines.
As many of these ‘concerns’ are not directly in our zone of responsibility, cannot / will not speak too much on others’ reasonings, however, hope this explanation has shed a little more light into what was brought up.
Polkadot is a development hub, it’s not focused on building its own ecosystem. Thankfully, there is an option for developers to receive grants because frankly there isn’t much like this out there?
As to why there isn’t much of a variation between projects? Well. Look towards the many sub-DAOs on OpenGov that reject every proposal that comes in for a grant (with their multi-million dollar votes via delegates), but approve everything that benefits validators like themselves. That’s part of the problem.
I think the Polkadot community currently has several major flaws:
Over-focusing on technology while neglecting market and user feedback. Valuing technology isn’t inherently bad, but failing to keep up with the times and lacking compelling narratives for the public chain itself means staying stuck in an ivory tower. To use an imperfect analogy: Polkadot is living in the electrical age but still tinkering with improving its steam engine - clearly destined to be left behind by the market and the times.
Polkadot’s funding expenditure has always been massive, but project results are minimal. In terms of brand visibility, aside from official self-promotion, there’s virtually no meaningful external buzz. Yet the team continues spending heavily on football club sponsorships that bring no real value to the project - it feels more like catering to community leaders’ personal interests.
Polkadot’s ecosystem has always been barren. From 2020 to now in 2025 - 5 years - Solana managed to climb from the bottom and become the second-largest public chain after ETH. Isn’t that because of its rich ecosystem and breakout projects? With such a clear success story, why doesn’t Polkadot learn from it? Polkadot seems as stubborn as a miser.
As an early investor who’s been with Polkadot for 6 years, watching it fall from top 10 market cap to a widely criticized project fills me with sadness. I hope Polkadot can reclaim its glory. But if it continues ignoring the market and users, only death awaits - it’s just a matter of time.