With 2021 less than 24 hours away, Polkadot creator Gavin Wood says the project has built a steam head for the New Year. In a 2020 recap published Wednesday, Wood highlighted Polkadot’s rise to number crypto for staking based on the volume of tokens staked.
According to Stakingrewards.com, over 63% of the 1.02 billion DOT token offering is locked in stake folders. That percentage comes to about $ 5.2 billion in staked DOT coins based on the current token price.
In fact, Polkadot is one of the top 10 performing top 10 altcoins in December. Since the beginning of the month, the DOT token price has risen by over 56% and is now the sixth-placed cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. Wood also highlighted the project’s achievements in the area of full decentralization, adding:
“With 274 validators operated by around 200 independent operators and supported by over 7,000 individual nomination accounts, Polkadot is arguably the most decentralized, high-quality (and therefore secure) network there is.”
As a multichain interoperability protocol, bridging and connectivity remain an important measure of the success of the project. According to Wood, projects like Acala and Moonbeam emerged in 2020 aimed at enabling compatibility with Ethereum.
Acala is Polkadot’s foray into decentralized finance (DeFi), while Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible toolkit for smart contract delivery.
Polkadot’s blockchain framework, Substrate, demonstrated integration capabilities at the protocol level as early as 2020. Substrate 2.0 was launched in August with features such as “off-chain workers” that allow developers to access information from outside the blockchain without the need for external oracles.
According to Wood, Polkadot’s development has grown significantly in 2020 as the community has 100 teams and projects working on different use cases. “In China alone there are over 30 teams building systems, projects and components for the Polkadot ecosystem,” Wood added in the 2020 summary.
Back in November, China’s blockchain service network added Polkadot to its list of supported public blockchains.
Regarding the plans for the new year, Wood identified the ongoing work on cross-chain interoperability as the main focus for 2021. According to the Polkadot founder, Substrate 3.0, which will bring compatibility with Ethereum, could be before the end of the first half of next year be introduced.
