Continuing from the previous text, in the past two weeks, Sister Cathy has conducted research on Polkadot in the Asia-Pacific region's chain game ecosystem, and after asking a lot, she only found two somewhat influential projects:
MNet in New Zealand and Astar Network in Japan.
Among them, MNet has migrated to Solana this year, and Astar Network is built on Polkadot, but the Astar team has built the game chain Soneium for Sony on OP Stack.
✅ Polkadot's presence in the Asia-Pacific region is still somewhat low.
The research mentioned above may not be comprehensive. I asked on Twitter about PolkaWorld, stating that Polkadot's chain game ecosystem mainly revolves around the American Mythical Games' game chain, Mythos Chain. However, I haven't seen Mythical's game promoted within the Chinese community, and I will study Mythos Chain a bit later.
All public chains, Layer 1 and Layer 2, and even some Layer 3, have seen vigorous development in the Asia-Pacific region over the past two years. Solana, Arbitrum, and Polygon all have their own BD teams in the Asia-Pacific, frequently hosting offline events. Sister Cathy hosted a visit from the Base chain BD team in Seoul in 2023; she is a Korean-American girl living in the US, and at that time, the Base chain had just launched its mainnet.
Vitalik even moved to Southeast Asia for a long stay.
✅ The super high user penetration rate and fdv of Web3 in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in Southeast Asia and the Chinese community, determine that any public chain development cannot ignore this area.
So, what has Polkadot actually done in the last two years?
As mentioned in the previous section, the product line of Polkadot's business 'parachains + slot auctions' has not seen a slot auction for 10 months, whether on the main Polkadot network or Kusama chain.
By searching for Polkadot's official Twitter, we can list some major events from 2024-2025 regarding Polkadot, from foundational technology architecture, developer tools, user applications to ecosystem services:
🔴 Core Infrastructure: Polkadot 2.0 direction
1. Asynchronous Backing
Has been deployed in the Polkadot 2.0 infrastructure to enhance parallel processing and network throughput.
2. JAM Protocol (Join-Accumulate Machine)
The next-generation consensus framework proposed by Gavin Wood leads the evolution of network architecture and constitutes the core of Polkadot 2.0.
3. Agile Coretime
Replacing traditional slot auctions, providing a mechanism for flexible on-demand resource purchasing, has become an integral part of Polkadot 2.0 to enhance network resource utilization.
✅ Polkadot 2.0 launch (overall infrastructure upgrade) includes the core modules mentioned above, planned for full delivery starting from late August to September 2025.
✅ Change: The previously used slot auction has been paused for 10 months and is gradually evolving into Polkadot 2.0 elastic scaling, allowing more flexible resource usage instead of long-term locking of DOT.
🔴 Service Aggregation Platform
Mainly Polkadot Hub / Polkadot Cloud platform
1. Polkadot Hub: Integrating core functions such as staking, governance, smart contracts, and cross-chain bridging; has been deployed to the testnet (Paseo) and is planned to launch on the mainnet from mid-September to October 2025.
2. Polkadot Cloud: A cloud service platform similar to the Web3 ecosystem, providing identity systems, games and content, real-world assets (RWA), DeFi, data storage, etc., as a foundation for future service ecosystems.
✅ Polkadot Cloud will start internal testing on July 22, 2025, using AWS cloud resources, while Avalanche's cloud service uses Ali Cloud.
✅ Competition among public chains is fierce, making it difficult to earn money, and public chains selling cloud services has become an interesting narrative this year.
✅ Change: Polkadot finally has an entry point for B2B users, aligning with SaaS; 'Polkadot as a Service' will be a significant advance!
🔴 Products aimed at individual users and enterprises
1. Polkadot Pay (launched in 2025)
Launched in the US market, can be used for payments at over a million merchants, and users can receive up to 20% DOT back on their spending. This is a milestone product for Polkadot moving from infrastructure to real payment scenarios.
✅ Change: Polkadot has finally launched a dapp aimed at C-end users!
2. Asset Hub (formerly Statemint, Asset Center)
Provides issuance and management of assets such as DOT, stablecoins, and NFTs.
Supports cross-chain deployment of mainstream stablecoins such as USDT and USDC.
Used for managing alliances and organizations of the Polkadot protocol, supporting decentralized collaboration and funding pools.
🔴 Developer Tools and Ecosystem Support
Including RPC providers, indexing tools, storage solutions, Web3 development kits, etc. – partners like Ankr, Aleph Cloud, OnFinality, Chainsafe have formed the underlying support of Polkadot's developer ecosystem.
🔴 Ecological application direction and typical projects
Diverse parachain projects are active, such as Moonbeam, Acala, Parallel Finance, KILT, Centrifuge, HydraDX, etc., covering DeFi, privacy, data assets, AI, identity, and other fields.
✅ In terms of ecosystem applications, there hasn't been a globally popular product emerging from the Polkadot ecosystem this year.
🔴 The next steps for Polkadot's roadmap
1. Smart contract functionality: The Solidity smart contract feature is expected to go live in Q3 2025.
Polkadot's native smart contract language is ink, and after Q3, Polkadot will be compatible with Solidity for writing smart contracts, which is indeed a wise move.
How many developers have been blocked by Ton chain's native smart contract language Tolk? Last year, Cardano held a free training course for Asian builders in Singapore, offering rewards, but very few builders signed up, leading to cancellation, because Cardano's native smart contract language Plutos blocked most developers. The time cost of learning a new smart contract language and the high learning threshold make it difficult to quickly develop public chain ecosystem projects. It is essential to be compatible with programming languages that Web3 programmers are already using!
2. Jam appears in the latest roadmap of Polkadot's official site.
Gavin Wood came to Asia in the first half of this year and held a Jam Asia Tour, conducting offline presentations in four cities in mainland China to introduce Polkadot’s JAM to college developers and traditional Chinese enterprises.
✅ Although there are strict regulations on issuing tokens for Web3 projects in mainland China, there are indeed too many Web3 developers and entrepreneurial projects. The JAM Asia Tour 2025 is very sincere!
🔴 Conclusion:
Looking at the above information and data, we can conclude:
1. It is obvious: Polkadot hasn't been idle.
2. Not only has it not been idle, but it has also made many significant adjustments to its infrastructure in the past two years.
3. In the past, the technology was only deployed for B2B, targeting developers. Now Polkadot is also expanding its business towards B2C, launching dapps like Polkadot Pay and credit cards for Web3 individual users.
4. Polkadot needs to promote the new foundational technology architecture into ecological construction and find more public chain project parties and dapps to deploy products on Polkadot. Competing directly with many other public chains is the most challenging part.
Therefore, future market promotion, business development, and operations will need to increase investment and expand scope to let more project parties and dapps wanting to develop their own public chains understand Polkadot's technological advantages.
🔴 With Gavin Wood announcing his return to Parity Technologies to take over as CEO on August 14, we look forward to seeing more resources that benefit Web3 developers in the Asia-Pacific region and the Chinese community.
I will continue to follow up.
