The Web3 Summit in Berlin closed with more than the usual post-conference energy: Polkadot’s ecosystem surfaced a sequence of technical milestones, ambitious economic proposals and tangible product news that together sketch a clear strategic pivot — from “token-first” narratives toward an operational, revenue- and usage-driven Polkadot. The summit produced two kinds of headlines: practical infrastructure updates that move Polkadot 2.0 closer to production (elastic scaling, faster block mechanics, one‑click rollup deployment), and provocative governance/economic ideas proposed by ecosystem leaders — most notably conversation around drastically reducing staking incentives and even hard‑capping DOT supply — that, if acted upon, would reshape Polkadot’s security model, treasury economics and on‑chain liquidity. Mixed into that technical and macro debate were concrete adoption signals: major dApp launches and integrations, cross‑chain liquidity flows, and projects that show real user traction outside purely speculative markets. This article maps the developments, explains the technical and economic trade‑offs, and assesses the risks and opportunities for developers, stakers and institutional adopters.
Polkadot has been rapidly transitioning from a research‑and‑proof platform into a production stack delivering two distinct, but related, capabilities: modular, on‑chain primitives (coretime, async backing, elastic scaling) that enable rollups and application chains to lease compute directly from the relay layer; and an increasingly vibrant application layer driven by cross‑chain liquidity, stablecoin rails and playable Web3 titles. The community’s focus this year has shifted from speculative narratives (airdrops, token pumps) to utility — lowering barriers for developers, encouraging real transactional flows, and making DOT an economic input to on‑chain services rather than merely a speculative asset. That shift is visible in both the technical roadmap and the governance experiments unveiled or discussed at the summit. Polkadot 2.0 — a shorthand for the combined feature set including Agile Coretime, Async Backing and Elastic Scaling — is the technical substrate that makes the new user‑and‑service‑centric economy possible. These innovations change how parachains and rollups consume compute and bandwidth on Polkadot, enabling studios, finance apps and consumer dapps to rent capacity in a predictable way and scale up when needed. The net effect is a movement away from one‑off parachain auctions and toward a more fungible, on‑demand market for chain-level compute.
Those debates are healthy and necessary; they reflect a network moving past slogans into real trade‑offs. The immediate winner is clarity: Polkadot’s leaders and community are prioritizing usefulness — payments, games, cross‑chain liquidity and developer experience — as the primary vector for growth. The path forward will be contested and incremental. Conservative modeling, staged governance, and careful treasury planning will be required to convert the summit’s high‑level plans into durable protocol changes that scale safely.
For builders and operators, the near‑term playbook is straightforward: deploy on PDP, design to leverage elastic scaling, and build products that lock in revenue and user retention rather than speculative token flows. For governance actors, the challenge is fiscal discipline: prioritize funding that produces measurable adoption and revenue, and prepare contingency plans if protocol economics tighten. If Polkadot can manage that transition — trimming speculative incentives while boosting on‑chain utility — it will have executed one of the more interesting ecosystem turns in Web3: from financial‑first to product‑first, with the technical stack to back it up.
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Source: Bitget Polkadot Weekly Report | Web3 Summit successfully concluded in Berlin! Pudgy Party is expected to launch on Polkadot on August 29! | Bitget News
Background / Overview
Polkadot has been rapidly transitioning from a research‑and‑proof platform into a production stack delivering two distinct, but related, capabilities: modular, on‑chain primitives (coretime, async backing, elastic scaling) that enable rollups and application chains to lease compute directly from the relay layer; and an increasingly vibrant application layer driven by cross‑chain liquidity, stablecoin rails and playable Web3 titles. The community’s focus this year has shifted from speculative narratives (airdrops, token pumps) to utility — lowering barriers for developers, encouraging real transactional flows, and making DOT an economic input to on‑chain services rather than merely a speculative asset. That shift is visible in both the technical roadmap and the governance experiments unveiled or discussed at the summit. Polkadot 2.0 — a shorthand for the combined feature set including Agile Coretime, Async Backing and Elastic Scaling — is the technical substrate that makes the new user‑and‑service‑centric economy possible. These innovations change how parachains and rollups consume compute and bandwidth on Polkadot, enabling studios, finance apps and consumer dapps to rent capacity in a predictable way and scale up when needed. The net effect is a movement away from one‑off parachain auctions and toward a more fungible, on‑demand market for chain-level compute. What happened at the Web3 Summit: highlights and headlines
Gavin Wood’s big ideas — radical supply and staking talk (reported)
At Berlin’s Web3 Summit, Gavin Wood again framed Polkadot’s long‑term vision and dropped several high‑impact ideas that immediately grabbed community attention. Reported summaries (originally published by ecosystem commentary outlets) highlight three interlinked proposals:- A short‑term economic maneuver to sharply reduce staking incentives — with the stated aim of cutting the relay chain’s annual security cost dramatically (report figures suggested a hypothetical reduction from roughly $500 million to around $90 million per year). The rationale: lower the security subsidy so staking becomes less attractive and redeploy a significant share of staked DOT back into productive on‑chain activity.
- A proposed hard cap for DOT supply expressed in a memorable (and deliberately symbolic) form: fixing total DOT supply at π × 10⁹ (about 3.14 billion DOT) and embedding that value into the JAM genesis parameters and governance framework. That proposal — framed as part of a broader plan to make monetary policy more predictable — would also include automatic halving rules (a suggested “halve every two years”) and a gradual disinflation schedule. Reporting indicates this was presented more as a constitutional‑style option for the JAM bootstrap than as an immediate on‑chain vote.
- A mid‑term security re‑architecture: introduce identity primitives like Proof of Personhood (PoP) plus an individuality layer to enable an “identity‑driven” security model. The goal of this shift is to move away from capital‑intensive staking as the primary security instrument toward identities that can participate in consensus and economic security in a different way. The concept is ambitious and would be a fundamental architectural change if adopted.
Why those proposals matter
Cutting staking incentives and hard‑capping supply are not cosmetic changes. They affect:- Security economics — lower staking rewards reduce the nominal cost of economic security but also lower the on‑chain revenue flowing into validator operators and, indirectly, the treasury through inflation‑funded channels.
- On‑chain liquidity — if a large fraction of previously staked DOT becomes liquid, it can rapidly increase DeFi TVL, lower borrowing costs and facilitate bootstrapping of DEXes, lending pools and stable‑asset markets.
- Treasury income — Polkadot’s treasury currently benefits from inflationary flows and protocol fees; reducing the security budget can shrink annual treasury inflows and force a leaner proposals funding model.
- Narrative and adoption — moving DOT from “staking store” into “economic fuel” supports the ecosystem narrative Gavin and others advocate: Polkadot should be used for services that generate revenue, not simply to attract speculators.
Technical progress: production features that matter now
Elastic Scaling and the Polkadot 2.0 stack
Elastic Scaling — the feature that allows rollups and parachains to dynamically lease extra cores and bandwidth on the relay — is now in late‑stage rollout planning. The result: projects can increase parallelism and throughput on demand, enabling low‑latency experiences and higher compute per block. The Polkadot forum and fellowship updates spell out the trade‑offs (compute vs latency) and show a clear roadmap for enabling 6s/500ms block targets in different configurations. For builders and game studios in particular, this unlocks scalable, paid coretime without the heavy operational overhead of single‑purpose L1 design. Why it matters in practice:- Elastic Scaling multiplies throughput for rollups and parachains, lowering per‑transaction latency and increasing the possible compute budget available to a single application.
- It enables new business models: games and compute‑heavy dapps can pay for bursty capacity rather than pre‑funding permanent parachains.
- The feature tightly integrates with Agile Coretime and Async Backing to create a fungible market for chain compute.
PDP: one‑click rollup deployment and Coretime automation
The Polkadot Deployment Portal (PDP) — a one‑click deployment platform — has matured to a point where teams can configure and launch rollups with templates, choose Coretime options (interlaced or full core), and use auto‑renewal features to prevent downtime. The PDP’s progress notes from June and July show that beta testing produced successful deployments and that the team has integrated features like ParaRegistration proxies, runtime diffing, and Kubernetes orchestration to shorten time‑to‑production for rollups. This is critical developer‑facing infrastructure: lowering friction to deploy a rollup directly correlates with faster adoption. Practical benefits for teams:- Faster deployment cycles (minutes to hours vs weeks).
- Built‑in Coretime lifecycle management (auto‑renewal prevents accidental downtime).
- Templates that reduce onboarding friction for Solidity/EVM developers or ink! teams.
Performance engineering: NOMT, BastiBlocks and PoV tuning
The Technical Fellowship updates covered performance experiments and consensus improvements: a proposed consensus engine upgrade (NOMT) that could increase throughput, experiments on 500ms block production via the “BastiBlocks” model that decouple block production speed from the number of cores, and plans to stress test TPS to extreme values (the Fellowship discussed very high target stress tests focused on low latency and finality). These engineering efforts are concrete signals that Polkadot’s architecture is being optimized for real, latency‑sensitive use cases (gaming, high‑frequency DeFi), not just theoretical throughput.Adoption signals: real products, rails and user growth
Pudgy Party — Polkadot‑based mobile game launches Aug 29 and shows mainstream engagement
Pudgy Penguins’ mobile title Pudgy Party launched globally on August 29, 2025 (soft launch and mainnet activity reported), built in partnership with Mythical Games and integrating Mythos chain (a Polkadot‑based network). Coverage across industry outlets shows the game combines easy onboarding (automatic wallet creation for players) with tradable cosmetic NFTs and seasonal events. Early numbers and rankings reported after launch — including top chart placements and rapid download growth — suggest Polkadot can be the substrate for mainstream mobile Web3 games that prioritize UX while preserving optional on‑chain ownership layers. Why this matters for Polkadot:- Games are UX‑intensive and user‑volume driven; successful mobile launches validate the stack’s ability to support soft onboarding and high concurrency.
- Game economies generate on‑chain item flows and user retention metrics that go beyond TVL and token price narratives.
- If the Mythos chain + PDP + Elastic Scaling combination proves reliable in production, it sets a repeatable template for other gaming studios.
Coins.ph integrates Polkadot Asset Hub — stablecoins meet real payments rails
Coins.ph, a leading payments and crypto platform in the Philippines, integrated Polkadot’s Asset Hub to enable faster, lower‑cost stablecoin transfers (USDT, USDC) for domestic users and remittance flows. The integration is a practical proof point for Polkadot’s ambitions in real‑world payments and compliant remittances: exchanges and on‑ramps using Asset Hub reduce friction for fiat‑adjacent flows and create opportunities for regulated businesses to reuse stablecoin rails with predictable, low fees. Practical implications:- Faster remittances, lower fees improve user economics for cross‑border transfers.
- Institutional and regulated counterparties gain access to programmable rails in a way that can be wrapped into compliance processes.
- Asset Hub-centered flows can materially increase on‑chain stablecoin throughput on Polkadot.
Bifrost: cross‑chain vDOT and XCM liquidity expansion
Bifrost’s runtime upgrades (Runtime 20000) enabled vDOT cross‑chain transfers between Asset Hub and Bifrost, delegated voting for vToken governance, and improved vToken mechanics — elements that are central to multi‑chain liquid staking and omnichain DeFi strategies. Over a recent 30‑day window, Bifrost processed tens of millions of dollars in XCM flows and claimed a sizable share of Polkadot ecosystem cross‑chain volume, underlining that liquid staking derivatives are already a substantive on‑chain liquidity source. Why vDOT matters:- vDOT unlocks DOT liquidity for DeFi without the user losing staking exposure.
- Cross‑chain vDOT bridges inject DOT into Ethereum‑native DEXes and amortize liquidity across chains.
- Delegated voting models (DVT) provide ways to retain governance participation while sharing decision rights — a practical experiment in governance participation at scale.
Moonbeam adjustments: fee burn and treasury flows
Moonbeam’s updates to GLMR economics — including directing 100% of certain transaction fees to burn and routing a portion of slot collateral inflation into the treasury — illustrate how parachains are tuning tokenomics to balance network incentives, treasury sustainability and value accrual. Moonbeam documentation and transparency commitments show concrete parameter changes (e.g., fee burn percentage updates enacted through referenda) that stabilize treasury income while maintaining target staking APY ranges for collators and delegators. These parachain-level experiments are relevant for Polkadot because they demonstrate how chains within the ecosystem can pursue divergent value‑capture strategies while interoperating through XCM.Analysis: strengths, likely impacts and the risks
Strengths — what Polkadot is doing well right now
- Engineering progress is tangible and developer‑focused. The PDP, Elastic Scaling, PoV size increases and PVM/EVM dual contract architecture (planned) move the platform from research milestones to deployable primitives that developers can actually use. These are developer experience wins.
- Real adoption signals. Partnerships like Coins.ph and consumer product launches like Pudgy Party convert abstract promises into user flows and revenue experiments. These are the types of signals that attract liquidity providers and institutional integrations.
- Cross‑chain liquidity is ramping. Bifrost’s vDOT flows and XCM activity show that DOT liquidity can be operationalized across EVM chains and L2s, which materially changes how DOT participates in the broader DeFi ecosystem.
Risks and trade‑offs
- Security vs capital efficiency. Reducing staking incentives to free up DOT for DeFi will shrink the on‑chain economic security budget. While that may lower nominal “security costs,” it raises questions about the attack surface economics (how much economic cost is needed to mount a meaningful attack) and operational robustness of validator infrastructure. Any move here would require conservative modeling and staged governance. Reports indicate this is still an open debate rather than a settled path.
- Treasury and public goods under pressure. If inflation and staking flows fall sharply, on‑chain treasury income will decline. The ecosystem proposals to prioritize only essential public goods and cap per‑hour salaries in grant programs are a direct response to that fiscal tightening — sensible as austerity tactics, but politically and operationally contentious. A “low‑budget era” could slow infrastructure funding and grants unless new revenue streams (e.g., native stablecoin payments) appear.
- Governance friction and coordination risk. Radical constitutional changes — e.g., encoding a hard DOT cap in JAM genesis — would require broad consensus, careful legal/technical framing and robust transition paths. The speed of network change must respect guardrails against governance capture and unintended regressions.
- Concentration risk for user onboarding. Relying on a few “killer apps” (games, stablecoin rails) to bootstrap real‑world adoption can backfire if those apps underperform or if UX for on‑chain value transfer remains complex in practice. Projects like Pudgy Party show promise, but mainstream adoption demands sustained retention and an economy that rewards non‑speculative activity.
Practical recommendations for stakeholders
- For builders and studios:
- Prioritize PDP + Coretime models: prototype on PDP to reduce operational overhead, and design for elastic scaling where possible to handle burst traffic without paying for permanent capacity.
- Use vToken primitives (vDOT) prudently: liquidity is powerful, but bridging mechanisms, oracle integrity and slashing risk from underlying chains must be managed.
- For stakers and validators:
- Monitor governance referenda closely — proposed economic shifts could change reward profiles materially.
- Prepare for liquidity flows: if a policy reduces staking incentives, validators will need to diversify business models (e.g., services, subservices, infrastructure contracts) to remain viable.
- For governance participants (treasury proposers / DAOs):
- Embrace outcome‑oriented proposals and data‑driven budgets. The community’s move toward prioritizing indispensable public goods and retroactive funding for SDKs/tooling reflects a pragmatic budget reality. Proposals that can show concrete adoption metrics will have higher passage prospects.
What to watch next (short checklist)
- Formal referenda and on‑chain proposals that translate the summit’s thought experiments into actionable protocol changes — especially anything touching staking parameters or supply policy. These should be examined line‑by‑line.
- Production Elastic Scaling timelines and the first multi‑core rollup deployments — success here materially de‑risks many gaming and consumer apps.
- Asset Hub migration telemetry and Coins.ph transaction volumes — real‑world payments metrics will validate the stablecoin rail thesis.
- Bifrost vDOT cross‑chain liquidity growth and DVT (delegated voting track) rollouts — a barometer for how much DOT flows into DeFi without sacrificing governance participation.
- Uptake metrics for PDP: time to deploy, uptime, and the first high‑concurrency dapps (games, social) going live on Polkadot.
Conclusion
The Polkadot ecosystem left Berlin with a powerful combination of technical progress and bold economic thinking. The engineering work — Elastic Scaling, Coretime markets, the PDP one‑click flows, and cross‑chain vToken mechanics — supplies an operational path for developers and businesses to build usable, scalable Web3 services. At the same time, the economic proposals aired publicly (notably the dramatic staking‑incentive reductions and supply‑cap concepts) foreground a harder debate: how to convert DOT from a passive staking asset into the fuel for an on‑chain economy without undermining the network’s security or starving the treasury.Those debates are healthy and necessary; they reflect a network moving past slogans into real trade‑offs. The immediate winner is clarity: Polkadot’s leaders and community are prioritizing usefulness — payments, games, cross‑chain liquidity and developer experience — as the primary vector for growth. The path forward will be contested and incremental. Conservative modeling, staged governance, and careful treasury planning will be required to convert the summit’s high‑level plans into durable protocol changes that scale safely.
For builders and operators, the near‑term playbook is straightforward: deploy on PDP, design to leverage elastic scaling, and build products that lock in revenue and user retention rather than speculative token flows. For governance actors, the challenge is fiscal discipline: prioritize funding that produces measurable adoption and revenue, and prepare contingency plans if protocol economics tighten. If Polkadot can manage that transition — trimming speculative incentives while boosting on‑chain utility — it will have executed one of the more interesting ecosystem turns in Web3: from financial‑first to product‑first, with the technical stack to back it up.
(End of report.
Source: Bitget Polkadot Weekly Report | Web3 Summit successfully concluded in Berlin! Pudgy Party is expected to launch on Polkadot on August 29! | Bitget News
