The co-founder and renowned computer scientist Gavin Wood has just published his annual writeup on Polkadot’s achievements over the past year, as well as the challenges that lie ahead in 2022. It’s an impressive read for anyone who believes in the future of what is easily one of the crypto world’s most ambitious projects.

The project’s vision is to create a highly scalable platform that’s interoperable with other blockchains. It’s solving one of the biggest problems in crypto, where there are multiple blockchains designed for different purposes, all running independently and having no way to communicate with one another. Polkadot aims to fix this through the concept of individual “parachains”, which are networks that run in parallel to the main Polkadot blockchain. Polkadot’s parachains can be used to create an interoperable blockhin network and allow the transfer any asset, data or tokens between them.

The new year is fast approaching and what seemed far away seems to be becoming a reality. After the May 2020 launch of its first Substrate-based Mainnet, Polkadot saw 2021 as a crucial year.

With the December launch of five of its parachains, Polkadot reached one of its greatest goals. Wood stated that the parachains of Polkadot as well Kusama (the preproduction environment) now have over 3 million users accounts and 6,000 validators. Additionally, there have been 540 upgrades forkless to these parachains, most of which were performed through decentralized governance processes.

In the process of launching those first five parachains, Polkadot held an auction that enabled the winning projects – Acala, Astar, Clover, Moonbeam and Parallel Finance – to lease those slots for two years. The total amount it secured for those two years was 106 million DOT (9% of total supply).

“With the extensive testing done on our Rococo testnet, all five parachains on both Polkadot and Kusama hit the ground running, producing blocks the moment that their slot went live,”
Wood stated.

While Polkadot has been impressive by hitting all of the targets on its roadmap, its progression to become the world’s first globally decentralized system, wth governance fully determined by the community, also stands out. In 2021 it saw more than 200,000 DOT holders voting on various proposals for the project’s future direction.

That success is not so surprising when we take into account Polkadot’s enormous community expansion over the past year. As Wood noted, Polkadot’s online growth was “raging” throughout the year, with more than two million page views (up four-times from the previous year) on its official website, of which 75% were unique visitors. Wood also noted that the company now boasts more than 1,000,000 followers on Twitter (NYSE;), up 10x, and close to 50,000 WeChat customers, an increase of three times. Kusama is a popular choice, its following on Twitter growing from just 30,000 in 2017 to over 200,000 by 2021.

Another social indicator is the 70,000 Polkadot members and their official Discord channel, which has 20,000 subscribers. There are also 40,000 users on their YouTube channel.

Polkadot attracted lots of developers’ interest too. More than 1000 people attended one of the ten Substrate Courses and 70% graduated. In the past year, Polkadot hosted four hackathons where 50 teams created projects that would benefit the ecosystem. Ten of those who participated in the hackathons won spots on Acala or Astar relay chains, and are bidding for Crowdloan slots.

Wood looked ahead to 2022 and promised that the new chapter in Polkadot’s story will begin this year. As more parachains become available, there is the potential for scaled hyperconnectivity, all under one security umbrella.

There’s plenty on the agenda for this year, Wood said. Polkadot will spend a lot of time refactoring, optimizing its code, and adding new technology to reduce latency and costs associated with sending messages between parachains. According to him, the target for parachains is to reach a rate of 1,000 transactions per second (per shard). Developers will also focus on building Polkadot’s anticipated parathread feature that ensures teams who do not win a parachain slot can still benefit from Polkadot’s security guarantees.

“With more than 150 chains serving a variety of purposes under development, many of which already with test-nets, there is much to anticipate,”
Wood promised.

“We also have the launch of decentralized bridges to look forward to, initially Parity’s bridge which will connect Polkadot to Kusama, and later Snowfork’s which will connect Polkadot to Ethereum.”

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