Polkadot Deep Dive

Q3 2022

Introducing The First Interactive Polkadot & Kusama Ecosystem Map

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What is Polkadot? In Q3 2022, major media outlets, podcasts, and financial advice platforms were asking this same question. A layer-0 sharded protocol design with Nominated Proof-of-Stake consensus means that Polkadot and Kusama are able to solve the blockchain trilemma: the system is secure, scalable and highly decentralized, allowing a plethora of parachains (layer-1 blockchains) and decentralized apps (DApps) to run without a glitch.

With a view to providing a panoramic picture of the ever-expanding Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, SubWallet has built the first interactive Polkadot & Kusama Ecosystem Map that covers 500+ projects spanning 25 categories with the support of Parity Technologies. From DeFi, SocialFi, Identity, NFT Marketplaces, Metaverse, Gaming to Bridge, Infrastructure, Smart Contract, Tooling, Data and Privacy solutions, in Q3 2022, the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem was bustling with activities and brimming with promise.

Ecosystem Overview

Financial Status & Development Activity

The crypto winter continued well into Q3 2022, but DOT got off on the right foot. With an open price of $7.05 on July 1, DOT continued its majorly upward trend and peaked at $9.66 on August 13 with a market cap of $10.28B. However, a zoomed out year-to-date picture would show Q3’s weaker performance compared to the previous two quarters. On September 21, DOT took a dip to $6.00 at $6.89B market cap, a 75.60% loss compared to the beginning of the year.

Token Price vs. Development Activity

The surge to $10.51B market cap on August 10 pushed Polkadot above Dogecoin in the market cap ranking, but with this dive in the second half of Q3, Polkadot again lost its position to Dogecoin and now ranked 11th in terms of market cap.

KSM price reached its peak sooner than DOT’s on July 22 at $69.60, but took a steep slide and went as low as $37.77 on September 19 with a market cap of $339.65M. Again, KSM price and market cap’s pattern were relatively similar to DOT’s.

Development Activity Comparison

Top 10 Networks By 30-Day Development Activity

#	Project	Dev activity
1	Polkadot DOT	494.93
2	Kusama KSM	494.93
3	Cardano ADA	429.23
4	Etherum ETH	386.47
5	Status SNT	347.87
6	Filecoin FIL	314
7	IOTA MIOTA	301.33
8	Cosmos ATOM	300.5
9	Decentraland MANA	295.7
10	Vega Protocol VEGA	286.57

While token prices kept on decreasing, development activities in Polkadot skyrocketed. Santiment measures development activity by the number of building-related events that a project generates in its public Github repositories, such as pushing a commit, creating and merging pull requests, and releasing new versions. One can easily see how development activities in Polkadot were significantly and consistently higher in Q3 compared to Q2 and Q1, especially in September. Polkadot easily surpassed Ethereum, Solana, Near and Polygon and only came second to Cardano most of the time.

Even though Polkadot’s overall development activities were lower than Cardano’s, its pattern was more consistent. From September 01 to September 20, Polkadot took over Cardano’s reign. This is why throughout September, the 30-day Development Activity ranking in Santiment showed Polkadot and Kusama’s persistent lead.

Decentralization & Security

A report exploring the decentralization status of major networks published on July 25 by Ultimate Money revealed that Polkadot’s Nakamoto coefficient outranked the surveyed layer-1’s by a large margin, 3 times higher than Solana and Avalanche and almost 12 times higher than Cosmos, Near and BSC. Coined in 2017 by former Coinbase CTO Balaji S. Srinivasan and named after Bitcoin’s founder Satoshi Nakamoto, the Nakamoto coefficient combines Gini coefficient and Lorenz curve to measure the minimum threshold required to disrupt a network, with a higher number indicating higher level of decentralization.

Even though Polkadot only has 297 validators, 15.84% and 22.90% as many validators as Solana and Avalanche respectively, the sharded design along with the nominated proof-of-stake consensus mechanism allows better stake distribution, thus increasing decentralization level. Now that nomination pools are live on Westend and Kusama and will soon be deployed on Polkadot, the network will be even more decentralized as the minimum stake to earn rewards will be lowered and more token holders will then be able to participate. Interaction with the blockchain will likely be in a decentralized and trust-minimized manner thanks to light client integration via Substrate Connect.

Nakamoto Coefficient Of Major Networks

Previously, if a user chooses not to run a full node due to its technical challenges and resource consumption, chances are that they have to rely on a third-party-owned node to conveniently interact with the blockchain which presents a centralized single point of failure. Light client solves both of these problems: on the one hand, it consumes much less resource by downloading only the block headers not the whole chain; on the other hand, it verifies whether a response a full node provides matches the headers and so does not need to trust the node.

At the time of writing, top wallets in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem such as SubWallet, Polkadot {.js} and Nova Wallet have integrated light client to provide users with a smooth experience in the spirit of decentralization. SubWallet and Nova Wallet also extended support for cold wallet Ledger and QR signers Parity Signer and Stylo to add an extra layer of security for end-users following the August incidents. Despite serious challenges caused by the Nomad bridge hack on August 1 and Acala erroneous aUSD minting on August 14, the Polkadot sharded security stayed strong.

Electricity Consumption By Major Proof-of-Stake Networks

	Nodes [# total]	Transactions [Tx/year]	Total electricity consumption [kWh/year]	Electricity per node [kWh/year]	Electricity per transaction [Wh/Tx]	Total Carbon emissions [tCO₂e/year]
Cardano	3,002	11.9 mn	598,755	199.45	51.59	284.41
Polkadot	297	4.0 mn	70,237	236.49	17.42	33.36
Solana	1,015	11.8 bn	1,967,930	1,938.85	0.166	934.77
Tezos	375	2.5 mn	113,249	250.99	41.45	53.79
Avalanche	1,084	93.9 mn	489,311	451.39	4.76	232.42
Algorand	1,190	190.0 mn	512,671	430.82	2.70	245.52

One might think that the more decentralized a network is, the more electricity the network consumes, as in the case of proof-of-work chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum 1.0. Not necessarily in the case of proof-of-stake systems. According to CCRI energy efficiency report published in January 2022, Polkadot consumes the least amount of annual electricity and consequently releases the least amount of yearly carbon emissions. This result has nothing to do with total transactions; to get the total electricity consumption, the CCRI team first calculated the average energy consumption per node for each network based on hardware requirements before multiplying with the total node number. Among the six surveyed blockchains, Polkadot has the lowest number of nodes and the second-lowest electricity consumption per node, thus the greenest blockchain.

Token Holder & Investor

September 28 witnessed the total number of DOT holders surpassing the 1,000,000 milestone. The market downturn, however, still left its mark. In Q3 2022, there were 1,695 new holders per day on average, 20.61% lower compared to Q2 (2135) and 44.61% lower compared to Q1 (3060). On September 30, for the first time in the year, the daily holder increase was less than 1000 at 824 new holders. Similar to price and marketcap, the KSM holder pattern was also similar to DOT’s.

Polkadot & Kusama Account Overview

By October 5, the biggest DOT whale was holding 58.61M DOT, approximately $374.80M, in which 47.46% was staked. KSM whales were more modest, with the biggest one having only 492,990 KSM, around $21.12M.

VCs Investing in Polkadot and Kusama Ecosystem

As for investors, more than 400 venture capitals have invested in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, holding tokens from the relay chain, parachains and DApps. DFG and AU21 were evidently the most fervent believers in the ecosystem, with 53 and 40 projects in their portfolios respectively. NGC Ventures, Hypersphere, Illusionist Group and CMS Holdings all invested in more than 30 projects.

Parachain

Q3 2022 concluded with an auction win for OAK Network on September 30, making it the 28th parachain on Polkadot. As for Kusama, 54 auctions were successfully carried out in total to make way for 41 parachains. Since XCM, a messaging format that allows communication across consensus systems was launched on Kusama way before on Polkadot, 24 chains on Kusama had opened XCM channels with one another, twice as many as chains that had enabled XCM transfer on Polkadot.

XCM Transfers of Top Polkadot & Kusama Parachains in Q3 2022

In terms of XCM transfer value, the top six positions belonged to three pairs of sister networks: Moonbeam/Moonriver, Acala/Karura and Parallel/Heiko. Despite topping the chart with $1M worth of assets transferred in within one week of September, Parallel appeared to be trailing after other big six in the longer run. Among those, Moonbeam remained the most active in Q3, accumulating $56.88M in value transferred in with a total of 19,160 transactions and $39.68M in value transferred out with 10,319 transactions. The network also recorded 10M transactions on September 8 and surpassed 300,000 unique addresses just four days after.

Acala came second at $21.89M value transferred in and $27.05M value transferred out. Clearly, the August incidents that led to a one-month period of activity halting on the network did not have much impact throughout the course of three months. On October 5, Acala officially resumed their operations on all functionalities, promising a remarkable comeback in Q4.

Governance & Grant

Following the introduction of Governance 2.0 that was discussed in the Polkadot Deep Dive H1 2022 report, Gavin Wood published the first draft of the Polkadot Fellowship Manifesto on September 26, calling “core developers and protocol technical experts” to apply to be members. In Governance 2.0, the Polkadot Fellowship will replace the current Technical Committee with three main responsibilities: providing technical advisory to the governance system, maintaining and building core protocols, and promoting education on Polkadot technology and philosophy. To guarantee that the Fellowship exists to advance the political decentralization of the network, no decision-making authority against the will of the community is granted to this group of experts.

DOT Treasury Activity

In this quarter, the DOT treasury received 30 proposals in total, among which 24 were funded a total of 439,757.317 DOT, approximately $2.85M. The KSM treasury also spent a comparable amount of money for 22 awarded proposals, 48,038.944 KSM approximating $2.10M. Discussions on how to improve the process of treasury governance and spending are on-going in the Polkadot Forum, a newly introduced platform for constructive conversations around all things Polkadot.

Web3 Foundation Grants By Category

Beside DOT and KSM treasuries, project teams looking to build on Substrate can apply for the Web3 Foundation Grants Program. On July 28, the Web3 Foundation Team announced that they had reached yet another milestone, surpassing 400 projects with a total of 415 accepted applications among 1054 received. 41.5% of funded projects developed runtime modules and chains, making this the dominant category among recipients. UI development and development tools came next, accounting for 13.2% and 11.1% respectively.

The DeFi Economy

Short for decentralized finance, DeFi was undoubtedly the most buoyant segment with the highest number of projects in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. The market share in terms of parachains was largely divided among major networks, including Moonriver, Moonbeam, Acala, Parallel, Astar and Karura. The Moonbeam/Moonriver sister networks combined accounted for $126.25M in TVL, which was 44.7% total TVL, more than twice the total of Acala and Karura which was $62.25M, making up 22% of total TVL. Overall, the difference among chains was not significant, meaning that the orders in top 5 can subject to change any time.

Total Value Locked By Chain

In the last Polkadot Deep Dive report, we divided DeFi projects by layer and separated parachain from DApp. This time, we are doing things differently by delving into DeFi products regardless of layer for a more objective comparison. Four main product analyses are DEX (AMM), Lending & Borrowing (Money Market), Liquid Staking and Stablecoin. Note that due to the one-month activity hiatus, we are leaving Acala out of this section.

DEX (AMM)

In this section, we survey 13 decentralized exchanges (automated market makers) on Polkadot and Kusama, both native and multi-chain. For easy visualization purposes, we separate them into two groups: those whose average total value locked (TVL) in Q3 was higher than $10M, and those lower than $5M.

Interestingly, the top five DEX leaders in Q3 were all DApp’s products rather than parachain’s. ArthSwap continued to be the number one DEX on Astar Network, even with the competition from Zenlink, while Solarbeam was the only representative from Moonriver Network in the chart. Compared to Moonbeam Network’s native DEX StellaSwap and multi-chain DEX Curve Finance, these three projects did not experience much volatility in the surveyed period.

DEX with Average TVL Higher Than $10M

The impact of the Nomad bridge hack on StellaSwap could not be clearer: within one day from August 1 to August 2, its TVL was divided by three times, plummeting from $31.56M to $11.21M. From that point on, StellaSwap TVL hovered around $8.75M, reaching peak on August 12 at $13.46M and hitting bottom on September 6 at $6.60M. Apparently, the unfortunate incident had pulled StellaSwap far down from the previously unbeatable first to fifth position from mid-August onwards. As part of the rebuilding process, the team submitted a level-3 Moonbeam ecosystem grant proposal of 7,833,600 GLMR (about $3.89M) in total to incentivize strategic farms in the course of six months which was passed by community vote on October 9.

Though also running on Moonbeam as StellaSwap, Curve Finance was not affected by the Nomad bridge hack as it did not rely on wrapped assets as much as on Lido’s liquid staking asset pool (xcDOT/stDOT). In fact, the multi-chain DEX took the opportunity to quickly double its TVL from $4.78M to $9.24M in just the week of July 11 to 18. Curve Finance consistently led the TVL race from August 9, and by the end of Q3 its TVL had grown 499% compared to the quarter’s beginning.

DEX with Average TVL Lower Than $5M

In the lower TVL ranking, Beamswap did not manage to hold its leading position for too long: the steep slide in its TVL meant that Beamswap had to yield to Karura and Beefy on Moonbeam after the first half of July. After announcing the $1M worth of staked GLINT, Beamswap’s DEX TVL nearly doubled in a day, from $3.59M to $6.51M on July 31 before diving back to $4.08M just three days later.

Similar to Beamswap, Beefy on Moonbeam’s TVL also went through a dramatic dip of 35.59% from $3.99M on August 1 to $2.57M on August 2, likely due to the panic withdrawal after the Nomad incident. While the sister Beefy on Moonriver did not see much fluctuation in TVL in Q3, Beefy on Moonbeam’s TVL shot up 258.13% within the span of 8 days, from $2.03M on August 29 to $5.24M on September 6 and remained relatively stable on top of the chart in the remaining period.

If Beamswap and Beefy on Moonbeam dominated the first and last third of Q3, then Avault Finance was the star of the middle third. Launched on July 8 with a modest starting TVL of $1.10M, Avault gradually worked its way up before securing an impressive increase of almost two times in two days from $3.07M on August 9 to $6.10M on August 11. It would be interesting to see how the competition among these three DEXes unfold when 2022 comes to an end, as their TVL nearly collided by the end of this quarter.

Lending & Borrowing (Money Market)

Unsurprisingly, Moonwell Artemis suffered the same way StellaSwap did: in three days, its TVL crashed 78.45% from $103.04M on August 1 to $22.20M on August 4, pushing it down from the first to the third position in a four-project ranking. To rebuild the protocol, Moonwell Artemis proposed a Moonbeam Foundation Grant valuing at 4,166,400 GLMR (approximately $2.08M) and was approved on October 9.

Because of this incident, Parallel rose up to lead the lending race in the last two-third of Q3, surpassing $75M in TVL at its peak on August 6. At the bottom of the chart, Starlay had lost 47.79% of its TVL since the quarter started at $13.18M.

TVL of Lending & Borrowing Protocols

Liquid Staking

It is apparent that Parallel’s main products were lending and borrowing (money market) and liquid staking rather than DEX. Throughout Q3, its liquid staking TVL was relatively stable around $15M except for two dips, one down to $13.35M on August 9 and another to $12.15M on September 18. After the second decline, Parallel’s TVL hovered around $12M and converged with Lido on Moonbeam’s.

Bifrost doubled down on liquid staking incentivization campaigns this quarter, running Rainbow Boost 2.0 from June 29 to July 13 and Rainbow Boost 3.0 from August 8 to August 23, but that was not enough to compete with Lido on Moonbeam in the second half of Q3. In spite of a late start to the race, Lido on Moonbeam concluded Q3 with a 216.68% rise in TVL compared to $5.69M on launch date. Interestingly, the sharpest rise in Bifrost’s liquid staking TVL occurred outside the campaign timeframe, from $5.76M on July 21 to $9.51M on July 23.

TVL of Liquid Staking Protocols

Stablecoin

Probably the most terrific news on stablecoin this quarter is Tether’s launch on Polkadot with an initial supply of 3M USDT after quietly increasing its supply on Kusama to 3.5M USDT. Right after the launch, Astar Network was the very first parachain to open XCM transfers of USDT, and Moonbeam Network quickly followed suit by making Polkadot-native USDT available for use on its DApp.

Stablecoin Total Issuance

Regardless of the incident with Acala, aUSD issuance on Karura did not fluctuate outside the $3.77M – $4.81M range. The circulation of AstridDAO’s stablecoin BAI, on the contrary, was more volatile. Starting the quarter on July 6 at $5.75M, which was 1.5 times higher than aUSD issuance on Karura, BAI circulation gradually declined and officially fell below its competitor on July 26. In the course of three months, BAI lost almost half of its market cap. As Acala went back to operation and USDC announced its plan to launch on Polkadot, the native stablecoin competition is expected to be harsher than ever by the end of 2022.

Non-fungible token (NFT)

NFT Marketplace

The NFT segment was vibrant this quarter, with activities spanning across NFT marketplaces, GameFi and Metaverse projects. Within one month of launching, the Moonbeam-based NFT marketplace Raresama had broken the record by surpassing 2,000,000 GLMR in volume, approximately $927K. Apart from Raresama, other representatives in the Moonbeam/Moonriver ecosystem including tofuNFT and Moonbeans also reported remarkable sales volume.

NFT Marketplace Daily Volume

One can easily see how tofuNFT’s sales volume on Moonbeam Network most frequently topped the daily ranking: out of 93 days in Q3, tofuNFT on Moonbeam recorded the highest volume on 58 days, accounting for 63.37%. In total, there was $86,078 worth of NFT sold on tofuNFT on Moonbeam, more than twice the amount sold on Moonbeans on Moonriver ($41,166) and almost four times higher than Singular’s volume ($22,115).

GameFi

The first NFT collection ever sold-out on Moonbeam Network GlimmerApes ranked first in sales volume and overtook the second runner-up GLMR Jungle by a large margin of 35K GLMR, approximately $14.8K. However, both collections were created by the GLMR Apes DAO, with the latter being part of The Great Escape, the first Play-to-Earn Game on Moonbeam Network. Within the first month of launching, the GameFi project had achieved impressive milestones: about 14,500 games had been played by 210 unique players, and 8,800 GLMB collected by the Jungle Bank while 5,600 GLMB had been burned. Two Moonbeam versions of the classic CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) came third and fourth respectively.

MoonFit Beast and Beauty, a collection by the fitness and lifestyle GameFi app MoonFit ranked fifth after only a few months of launching. 500 NFTs were sold out in the first sale round in under 30 minutes at 39,500 GLMR valuation, and 1500 NFTs in the second sale round at 178,500 GLMR valuation, totalling 218,000 GLMR in primary market sales volume from both rounds. MoonFit Mint Pass, a whitelist free-mint collection also recorded remarkable sales volume of 11,478.18 GLMR in the secondary market.

Top 10 NFT Collection On Moonbeam Network By All-time Volume

#	Collection	Volume
1	GlimmerApes 111 Owners / 1,001 Items	128,353.37
2	GLMR Jungle 520 Owners / 3,333 Items	93,229.1
3	Moonbeam Punks 1149 Owners / 4,200 Items	62,531.03
4	Moonbeam BAYC 111 Owners / 1,001 Items	49,189.45
5	MoonFit Beast & Beauty 632 Owners / 2,000 Items	41,398.08
6	Ultimate Harvest Moon 9,504 Owners / 41,552 Items	35,049.84
7	MOONPETS 622 Owners / 5,000 Items	30,269.17
8	Moonbeam Ape Yatch Club 111 Owners / 1,001 Items	16,948
9	Bunch of Bananas 97 Owners / 125 Items	13,077
10	MoonFit Mint Pass 1,889 Owners / 2,998 Items	11,478.18

Metaverse

Beside GameFi, another NFT-powered section that showed much promise in Q3 is Metaverse. On July 22, Polkadot’s Metaverse parachain Efinity announced that they would partner with Square Enix to release NFTs for the all-time favorite video game series Final Fantasy. The NFTs will not be purely digital, but will be linked to physical action figures and trading cards based on Final Fantasy VII.

In another move, Bit.Country launched their Alpha Testnet on June 30 and attracted almost 3,000 metaverse projects and 2M staked AlphaNEER within the first two weeks. On September 13, Bit.Country Pioneer App went live after Bit.Country Pioneer won a self-funded auction for the 52th parachain slot on Kusama one day earlier.

Bit.Country Pioneer App Performance

Category Day after Launch	1 day	2 days	3 days	4 days	5 days	7 days	Totals to date
Metaverse Projects	29	45	66	89	117	136	210
NFT Collections	80	117	164	218	282	322	503
NFTs Minted	920	933	1,050	-	1,598	1,848	2,801
NEER Staked	3,005,944.98	2,340,936.68	3,591,736.88	3,561,266.38	3,532,112.38	3,603,074.88	4,364,764.61
BIT Burned	-	-	74,499.40	96,102.75	101,123.79	102,812.79	204,608.14

The success of the Alpha Testnet campaign constituted a snowball effect for the Pioneer App: within 9 hours of launching, 1M NEER had been staked, and this number increased to over 3M when the first day ended. By the end of the first week, 136 metaverse projects and 322 NFT collections had been created, with 1,848 minted NFTs, over 3.6M NEER staked and over 100K BIT burned. The team continued with the Raw Land Block Sale event, with auctions amounting up to 5,150 NEER (approximately $2,060).

The more senior metaverse project Skybreach by RMRK also reached a monumental milestone. On October 19, Skybreach reported 14,905 plots in cumulative land sales with a volume of more than 1M xcRMRK.

DAO

Emerging out of the blockchain’s turning away from any kind of central authority, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are entity structures whose decision-making process is governed by collectively voting token holders and whose activities are entirely publicized on a blockchain. As to any other ecosystems, DAOs are indispensable to Polkadot and Kusama.

ChaosDAO

One of the earliest and most impactful DAOs in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, ChaosDAO, celebrated their one-year anniversary on July 13. ChaosDAO has always grown 100% organically with “Quality over Quantity” as its founding principle, and with one goal in mind: bring together and connect the most knowledgeable individuals in the space. The DAO features the NFT collection Chaos-DAO Apes for membership access and governance. By October 24, the collection had recorded close to 4K KSM in trading volume with a floor price of 109 KSM and a top sale of 179 KSM. 23 DAOists, the caretakers of the server, are currently running ChaosDAO, including members from notable projects in the ecosystem.

Astar Degens

As implied by its name, Astar Degens is a community-based VC DAO that puts focus on the Astar ecosystem. Managed by 10 members in the DAO council, by the end of September 2022, Astar Degens had received more than 1M ASTR in their dApp Staking rewards and over 200K ASTR as NFT royalties on tofuNFT. To gain voting rights in the DAO, one needs to own at least one out of 10,000 Astar Degen Apes NFTs. The collection had a cumulative trading volume of 9.6M ASTR and a floor price of 1,800 ASTR on October 24.

GLMR Apes

Coincidentally, all three DAOs discussed so far use the ape imagery for their governing NFTs. As mentioned above in the GameFi section, GLMR Apes NFT collection containing 1001 items is the first ever sold out on Moonbeam Network, and is still topping the chart in the secondary market. The governing Jungle Council consists of 10 members with half in the core team and half classified as Wise Apes.

Take Flight Alpha

Founded in January 2022, the 30-member TFA DAO focuses on running a collator node for Moonbeam Network and building a community of over 600 participants. They are currently retaining approximately 4.5M GLMR in staked value for their collator node which returns a 29% APY to delegators. In May 2022, TFA DAO introduced the MooonPets NFT collection made up of 5000 items in order to gamify participation. In Q3, the reported retention rate of MoonPets holders was about 60%.

Web3

Wallet

The Web3 discussion will be insufficient without non-custodial wallets. Similar to Google or Facebook sign-in to Web2 apps, the Web3 wallet is effectively the gateway and the first touchpoint for users to step into the Web3 world via DApps. In the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, wallets can be divided into three types: legacy wallets, multi-chain wallets and native wallets.

Types	Legacy Wallets	Multi-chain Wallets	Native Wallets
Examples	Polkadot {.js}, Fearless Wallet, Polkawallet	Enkrypt, Math Wallet, Rabby	SubWallet, Nova Wallet, Talisman
Substrate compatibility
EVM compatibility
User-friendly UX/UI
Substrate-specific features

The comparison table clearly shows how native wallets are outperforming both legacy and multi-chain wallets, especially in terms of user-friendly UX/UI and Substrate-specific features such as crowdloan view, staking, XCM transfers and light clients. The wallet competition in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, therefore, has largely fallen into the hands of SubWallet, Nova Wallet and Talisman. While Nova Wallet operates as a mobile application and Talisman runs a browser extension, SubWallet is the first to launch both browser extension and mobile application.

SocialFi

The only decentralized social media platform Subsocial continued to develop in Q3, with a total of 1,474 posts and 395 spaces created in the course of three months. By October 25, there had been cumulatively almost 25K posts and more than 10K spaces created on Subsocial app. To further incentivize users and expand utilities in the Subsocial ecosystem, the team launched Spacers, an NFT collection with 10,000 equippable robots on RMRK. These NFTs act as VIP tickets that will enable premium features on Subsocial, such as free energy on Subsocial, free .spacer Dotsama Domain and increased post visibility.

Subsocial Daily Activities in Q3 2022

Q3 2022 also witnessed the emergence of another video-focused SocialFi platform: Joystream. Seemingly the Web3 version of Youtube where each video is an NFT, Joystream recorded slight growth in Q3; the total number of videos increased 7.70% while total users only grew 9.20% compared to the start of the quarter. Projects in the SocialFi segment in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem need to boost activities more aggressively or else they will trail behind competitors in other ecosystems.

Joystream Cumulative Activities Q3 2022

Bridge

The rapid expansion of the Web3 universe has led to a booming demand in bridges that allow communication and asset transfer among different blockchains. In the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, the XCMP protocol enables seamless interactions among layer-1 chains via XCM format, but a bridge is still needed at the moment if a Polkadot or Kusama parachain wants to reach out to other ecosystems. Below are the list of prominent bridges that have been actively operating in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. Note that all bridges are two-way.

Nomad Celer cBridge Multichain Axelar Wormhole Interlay Kintsugi Snowfork Helix Bridge

For main wrapped assets such as USDT/USDC/DAI/WBTC/WETH/BUSD/BNB only. Other tokens are transferable between Moonbeam, Moonriver, Shiden and all other chains that Multichain supports

Closing Thoughts

On October 22, Polkadot and Parity co-founder Gavin Wood announced his stepping down from the CEO position of Parity Technologies to take on the title of Chief Architect. In place of him, Parity co-founder and previously Chief Commercial Officer Björn Wagner has become the new CEO.

This move signaled a positive and promising change of growth direction for Polkadot, as more attention will be paid to ecosystem development and growth expansion that targets end users. In the next months, more events like DOTinVietnam, the first official Polkadot meetup in Vietnam co-organized by SubWallet and other leading projects in the ecosystem that attracted more than 200 developers and investors, will happen across the globe and on a much larger scale. Polkadot’s explosion, therefore, is only a matter of time.

Get Started With Polkadot

SubWallet is a user-friendly Web3 Multiverse Gateway for the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. Available both as a mobile app and a browser extension, SubWallet allows you to easily send & receive assets, manage your portfolio, handle NFT assets, track crowdloan activities and manage staking rewards. Using SubWallet means that you have the simplest and most secure way to connect to a wide range of blockchain-based applications in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, be it Substrate or EVM-compatible DApps. You can use SubWallet with cold wallets and QR-signers and keep your assets safe.

Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. Following Moonriver’s tremendous success on Kusama as the most active deployment destination for over 80 DApps, Moonbeam benefits from the shared security of the Polkadot relay chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot.

Bit.Country is a decentralized application that gives users the tools to create a Metaverse project in 12 seconds. Any person, project, brand, business, influencer, or community can easily use Bit.Country to experience or build interactive immersive digital worlds where users are consistently rewarded with tokens or NFTs in marketing campaigns. Digital worlds are built on virtual land that can be subdivided to co-build with a community by placing voxels, 3D assets/NFTs and props. Bit.Country is built on substrate based Metaverse.Network blockchain which is a parachain to Kusama (Polkadot ecosystem). The universal network currency is $NEER while the in-game currency is $BIT.

Stay tuned for more project features in the next reports!

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dotinsights is a research-focused initiative by SubWallet, the leading non-custodial Polkadot and Kusama wallet. By providing the most comprehensive and up-to-date Polkadot & Kusama Ecosystem Map along with data-driven Polkadot Deep Dive reports on a quarterly basis, our vision at dotinsights is to become the official and trusted research hub and data platform of Polkadot.