July is a month worth marking for the Polkadot community.
Inside Berlin's Funkhaus venue, the atmosphere was bustling with voices as Gavin Wood introduced PoP, JAM, and zkJAM.
At the same time, HIC has finalized first-round investment agreements with four 'treasure' ecological projects, injecting $1.2 million into early teams.
In Hong Kong, senior government officials repeatedly confirmed the details of the 'Polkadot × Hong Kong' strategic cooperation case with PolkaPort East—this is a key step to bring Polkadot into Asia's financial center.
On-chain, the liquidity of Bifrost's vDOT surged in just a week, with the product GigaDOT in collaboration with Hydration attracting more and more institutional players.
On the development side, the New JAMneration team is focused on building a cross-language runtime module to enable JAM to run on 'any language.'
In this issue of PolkaWorld's July roundtable, we will break down the source of this enthusiasm for you—whether it's technological upgrades, capital layout, governance reforms, or market opportunities, there's first-hand insight here that you want to know.
Continue reading to see more!
Kristen: Hello everyone, welcome to the PolkaWorld July roundtable. July is a very important month as the Web3 Summit was successfully held in Berlin. Gavin announced some significant news that could completely change our understanding and future direction of Web3. Today, we will delve into these topics one by one.
In today's discussion, we will explore how PoP changes the entire landscape, the new token economic model, its impact on the treasury, its influence on ecological projects, and a question that everyone is very concerned about: where will these released DOT tokens actually flow? Stay tuned; we have many topics worth discussing! First, let's meet today's guests; please briefly introduce yourselves and your backgrounds. Filippo, let's start with you.
Filippo: Thank you for the invitation; I am very happy to be here. I am Filippo, a technical educator at the Web3 Foundation. My main responsibilities include maintaining and updating documentation, public speaking, and engaging with the community to help everyone better understand the entire ecosystem. This year, I also participated in PBA studies and now support PBA courses as a lecturer. That's about it.
YC: Hello everyone, I am YC, the CTO of New JAMneration, mainly responsible for coding and development. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a message in the chat room, and we will get back to everyone as soon as possible.
Max: Hello everyone, I am very happy to be back in PolkaWorld's live broadcast room. I am always very happy to come here. I am now representing both Harbor Industrial Capital and PolkaPort East, and today I will also share some updates from these two organizations. Everything is progressing very well; please stay tuned for what I will share.
Tyrone: Hello everyone, I am Tyrone from Bifrost. Bifrost is a liquid staking parachain within Polkadot, and we are deploying using Coretime Nodes. I am glad to be here, thank you all!
HIC locks in Polkadot 'treasure projects,' revealing the first-round investment list.
Kristen: July has indeed been a month full of significant events for HIC. You participated in the Web3 Summit, and last week you submitted a proposal to promote a strategic cooperation between PCF (Polkadot Community Foundation) and Hong Kong's investment promotion office. Just today, you announced that the second fund of HIC has completed investments in four high-potential projects. I believe the audience is eager to hear the details; can you introduce these key developments one by one?
Max: Of course! I had to come today because we just officially released the first investment results of the second fund through news agencies, which have already been reported by CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, and several mainstream crypto media.
In this round, we invested in four projects, totaling $1.2 million, which are: Kylix, Mandala Chain, Hyperbridge, and Xcavate. Viewers who regularly watch PolkaWorld's live streams should be familiar with them, as they have almost all been guests, so they can be considered our 'old friends.'
From the perspective of Harbor Industrial Capital, our investment strategy has always focused on early-stage projects with high growth potential, and these four projects fully meet this standard. I won't elaborate on the details of each project today—I'll leave that to the project parties to showcase themselves. But I can assure everyone that this $1.2 million is a considerable amount for early projects, and their potential for growth is also very large. Although this is not investment advice, we indeed invest with the goal of securing returns for our LPs, which include the Web3 Foundation as well.
In fact, the discussions surrounding these four investments began over six months ago, involving a long negotiation process, including details such as valuation and investment amounts. It is significant for us to officially announce today, and more importantly, this is just the first batch of investment targets from the second fund. In the future, we will continue to invest in more quality projects deeply rooted in the Polkadot ecosystem.
I believe that the Polkadot ecosystem may gradually reduce its reliance on grants in the future and instead support project development more through venture capital. HIC also hopes to become a leader in this direction, continuously seeking truly valuable and promising teams and providing support during their critical development stages.
So, I also want to take this opportunity to say to all developers building on Polkadot and seeking funding: come talk to us. We are eager to learn about your projects. Today, these four cases represent our serious approach to investment. Of course, the specific investment scales still need to be evaluated based on the maturity and potential of the projects.
In short, we will continue to invest actively and are full of confidence in the future of the Polkadot ecosystem. I believe there are many undervalued 'treasure projects' in this ecosystem quietly doing remarkable things, just not receiving enough attention yet. Our goal is to discover them as early as possible and help them grow at critical moments! This is exactly our mission as a venture capital fund.
'Polkadot × Hong Kong' strategic cooperation is imminent, and key proposals are initiated!
Kristen: Alright, that sounds great. Would you like to talk about the proposal you just mentioned?
Max: Of course! But this time I need to switch identities! Earlier I spoke as a representative of Harbor Industrial Capital, and now I need to put on the 'hat' of PolkaPort East. I really should prepare a hat to switch on-site, haha.
This proposal is very important to us and excites me. As you all know, I have lived in Hong Kong for many years, and I have long regarded it as my second home. Together with Vincent and Thibault, we are advancing the PolkaPort East project, which focuses on Hong Kong and serves the ecological growth and investor relations (IR) of Polkadot.
Over the past year, our communication with the Hong Kong government has gone smoothly, and we are currently mainly connecting with OASES (Office for Attracting Strategic Enterprises), which is a high-level government agency directly under the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong. The position of Financial Secretary in Hong Kong is equivalent to that of a 'Minister of Finance.' OASES's responsibility is to attract global strategic enterprises to settle in Hong Kong, and our goal is for Polkadot to be seen as such a 'strategic enterprise' by the Hong Kong government, securing more opportunities for landing and development for the ecosystem.
Now, we have reached a very critical point—the Hong Kong government is ready to sign a cooperation agreement and has clearly expressed its willingness to collaborate with Polkadot. The problem is that 'Polkadot' itself is not a legal entity, and the government doesn't know who to sign the agreement with. We initially considered Parity Technologies, but it is essentially a technology development company and does not represent the entire Polkadot. Although the foundation has the qualifications, it is limited by its own positioning and articles of association, and this type of strategic cooperation is not usually within their realm.
So, we thought of solving this issue through PCF (Polkadot Community Foundation). PCF, as a legal entity capable of representing Polkadot DAO, has the legal qualifications to sign such agreements. This proposal initiated in OpenGov is to establish a local subsidiary of PCF in Hong Kong to meet the requirements of OASES. The government has clearly stated that it must be a locally registered company in Hong Kong; entities registered in places like the Cayman Islands do not meet their investment attraction conditions.
It is worth mentioning that this proposal does not involve operational expenses, and the budget only covers legal-related expenses—including registration fees and legal fees. Yes, hiring a lawyer is indeed not cheap, but these are the real costs, and we do not gain any economic benefits from it. Our motivation is simple: to promote the Polkadot ecosystem and seize this rare opportunity in Hong Kong. We sincerely hope the community will support this proposal.
Kristen: Awesome! If everyone supports or has any opinions, feel free to check and participate in the voting. As DV, PolkaWorld has already cast a vote in favor. https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/1681
If any projects want to communicate with HIC, feel free to message directly or relay through PolkaWorld—we are also one of the advisory committee members of HIC. It's really exciting to see HIC's many updates recently! Thank you, Max.
Max: Thank you for the support from PolkaWorld; I am truly grateful!
PoP and zkJAM debuted in Berlin: Polkadot upgrades need time to settle, but the future potential is immense.
Kristen: We know that both Max and Filippo attended this Web3 Summit, while PolkaWorld unfortunately couldn't be on-site in Berlin, so we are particularly eager to hear your insights. What was your overall impression of this summit? What topics were mainly discussed? What did you gain? Filippo, let's start with you.
Filippo: Alright. This is very special for me because it’s my first time attending the Web3 Summit. I couldn’t make it to previous editions. This time I am a judge for the hackathon, and the experience has been fantastic; the Subzero team organized it very well. The hackathon also set up a dedicated Kusama track focusing on zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), proof of personhood, and social platform directions, with overall project quality being very high.
The conference venue is located in Berlin's Funkhaus, which has a rich history and was the site of the first Web3 Summit. Back then, Gavin Wood released a brand new blockchain here with a newly purchased MacBook, and that was in 2018.
I participated in the speeches on the first day, especially Gavin's sharing, where there were almost no empty seats. He focused on JAM, zkJAM, and the potential development direction of Polkadot. Although these topics are still in the early stages and the specifics for the next 6-12 months have yet to be determined, it has already sparked widespread discussion in the community.
During the summit, the Web3 Foundation also announced some important personnel adjustments, such as the establishment of a new Vice President of Ecosystem position, held by Bill Laboon, which indicates that the foundation may see new changes in its ecological strategy, communication methods, and growth direction.
I want to remind everyone that Polkadot is the core project of the main chain, while JAM is an important technological upgrade. You can learn about its positioning and role in the updated official documentation and the JAM section of the Polkadot Wiki. While the upgrade requires time to settle, it is indeed exciting. In the short term, Polkadot has some upcoming upgrades that will be implemented, such as:
Elastic Scaling and Polkadot 2.0 allow parachains to rent more main chain compute and security resources as needed.
Polkadot Hub launches EVM smart contracts to attract Solidity developers into the ecosystem.
Overall, this conference maintained the Web3 Summit's consistent open atmosphere, attracting many industry leaders and technical experts from outside the ecosystem to share blockchain development trends. I am very satisfied with the overall experience and thank the Web3 Foundation and volunteers for their contributions.
HIC calls for the introduction of professional investment bounties for the Polkadot treasury.
Kristen: Thank you for sharing! PolkaWorld also attended the first Web3 Summit, which was indeed an exciting experience. So, Max, what are your thoughts?
Max: Of course there is! I specially wore a T-shirt from the Web3 Summit today, with a phrase printed on the back—'Less Trust, More Truth'; I think this is not only the core idea of Polkadot but also aligns very well with the spirit of the Web3 Summit.
These three days have been very tight, and we have been communicating, meeting people, and discussing almost from morning till night. Except for PolkaWorld, almost everyone from the entire ecosystem was present, haha, with friends from America, Asia, and Europe, creating a very lively atmosphere.
In terms of gains, besides Gavin's speech (we will discuss the inflation and DOT supply mechanism proposals separately later), another topic that impressed me was governance, especially the discussion on the 'bounty mechanism.' Many people now complain that there are too many OpenGov proposals and that the process is chaotic, with every proposal requiring public discussion, which backfires on efficiency. In this situation, it becomes crucial to let professionals handle professional matters.
For instance, the marketing bounty is a successful case—past proposals like 'sponsoring an event' required a vote from everyone, but now it's more efficient to leave it to a professional team for assessment. The same approach can be extended to:
Meetup Bounty: Global community meetups.
Events Bounty: Conferences, exhibitions, and other activities.
DeFi Onboarding Bounty: Connecting exchanges, liquidity providers, custodians, etc.
These bounty teams are led by curators with relevant experience who understand the current state of the industry and can professionally judge the feasibility of proposals. However, there is still a blank area, which is investments.
The question is: should the DAO represent ecological investments in projects built on Polkadot? If so, how should it be done? Should every investment be voted on by everyone, or should a similar 'investment bounty mechanism' be established for a professional team to filter proposals? Such questions were repeatedly mentioned during the conference.
The next day, we also attended a small discussion meeting called Note Space, where everyone sat in a circle brainstorming, many of whom were deep participants in governance. We talked a lot with people from the Web3 Foundation, Parity, and various vertical fields, gaining a lot. Although there is currently no conclusion on the investment governance mechanism, I believe this is one of the topics worth paying attention to aside from Gavin's speech.
Kristen: I completely agree. As PolkaWorld, as DV, we have reviewed hundreds of proposals over the past few months, and sometimes it takes us several hours to understand a technical proposal, and even with GPT assistance, it's no different. If we can involve professional teams in the review process in more areas in the future, the efficiency of proposal evaluation will significantly improve. We are also looking forward to the 'investment bounty mechanism' being implemented in the treasury as soon as possible.
Bifrost grew against the trend in July by 25%, partnering with Hydration to promote institutional participation in Polkadot DeFi.
Kristen: Okay, next let's talk about Bifrost. Bifrost is undoubtedly one of the star projects in the Polkadot ecosystem, and what is most admirable is that you have consistently maintained growth. Especially in July, Bifrost achieved over 25% growth, going against the trend and completely outperforming the market. Tyrone, can you share how you achieved this?
Tyrone: Thank you for the invitation! I am happy to share this interim achievement; honestly, this is the result of the joint efforts of multiple teams. First, I want to especially thank HIC (Harbor Industrial Capital) for helping us establish contact with Hydration from the very beginning, including Max and Thibault, who also played bridging roles, assisting us in connecting with many institutional clients and ecological partners.
At the same time, we have received considerable attention from DeFi projects outside the Polkadot ecosystem, such as partners from Ethereum, allowing us to further expand our product line. We are also exploring the liquid staking scenarios in Ethereum. Currently, we have been collaborating with Hydration for several months, even a year, on the core collaborative product—GigaDOT.
This product is a liquid staking token vDOT issued by us at Bifrost as collateral, representing a very significant collaboration within the entire DeFi ecosystem. If you count the active projects in Polkadot's DeFi space, besides us at Bifrost and Hydration, there aren't many active projects, so we need to solidify this 'flagship collaboration' to let both users and institutions see the potential of the Polkadot ecosystem in DeFi.
Recently, we have established connections with some institutional investors who are seriously considering how to use DOT assets more efficiently through GigaDOT to achieve better leverage and returns. This influx of institutional interest is a very positive signal for the entire Polkadot DeFi ecosystem.
Looking ahead, when Polkadot Hub goes live, we will welcome the precompile feature, which will stimulate developers' enthusiasm for developing protocol clients and further enhance on-chain liquidity, increasing user choice flexibility.
That's all I wanted to share; thank you all.
Kristen: Alright, thank you very much. There are also some incentive activities currently ongoing at Bifrost, so I suggest everyone keep an eye on Bifrost and seize these opportunities.
New JAMneration: Building 'cloud infrastructure' for Web3, allowing any language to run on JAM.
Kristen: Next, we enter a segment that many viewers are looking forward to—YC and her New JAMneration. Recently, JAM has been very popular in the Polkadot ecosystem, naturally sparking curiosity about related projects. YC, can you share with us the recent progress and interim results of New JAMneration?
YC: Of course! Our vision is to create a 'cloud infrastructure' for Web3 similar to Azure or AWS—only this time the infrastructure is decentralized. To achieve this, we are building a complete set of JAM protocol components, including PVM, STF, network modules, node implementations, and so on.
We have basically completed all implementations for version 0.7.1 of the gray paper (although fuzz testing is still at version 0.6.6), and the first milestone is nearing completion. Next, our focus will be on refining the development roadmap for JAM MVP and advancing a core functional module—recompile.
The role of this module is to translate machine code into bytecode, allowing JAM to support more programming languages. Whether it's Rust, Go, or any language that can compile into RISC-V architecture code, it will be able to run directly on JAM in the future. We can say that our current core work in PVM is to create this cross-language runtime capability for JAM.
Kristen: Wow, that's so cool! If everyone wants to learn more, please follow YC's Twitter; she will also be live streaming the development process on Twitch.
YC: Right, we will regularly stream live, and friends who are interested can check it out.
Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK4LMUS5Mb8
This article is the first part of the live stream organized by PolkaWorld for this issue, and the second part will be released tomorrow! Follow PolkaWorld to get the latest news about Polkadot at the first moment!
