Polkadot has seen a very large increase in developer activity, as the network acknowledged more than 500 contributions for every day of September, according to data presented by GitHub, a record-breaking performance.
At the same time, data from Polkadot’s XCM interoperability standard shows that 26,258 messages were sent between parachains, which is also a record. For comparison purposes, a total of 14,930 contributions from developers were recorded on GitHub in August.
As Polkadot developers said, 66 blockchains are live on Polkadot and its start-up network for parachains, Kusama.
Since its launch, over 140,000 messages have been exchanged between chains through 135 messaging channels. Together, the Polkadot and Kusama funds have paid out DOT 9.6 million and KSM 346,700 ($72.8 million in total) to fund proposals in the ecosystem.
The Parachains
Parachains are individual Level 1 Blockchains running in parallel at Polkadot and being tested for the first time at Kusama. Auctions for positions on the parachain are conducted in the form of crowd loans, with each position going to the project with the highest bid. The first of its kind was held about a year ago last November.
Speeding up
Polkadot founder Rob Habermeier recently published a navigation map to enhance the scalability of Polkadot and Kusama. The goal is to increase the speed of the network to around 100,000 and 1 million transactions per minute.
The asynchronous support upgrade is scheduled for deployment to Kusama by the end of the year and then to Polkadot.
Another network upgrade, which will introduce “pay-as-you-go” parachains, will theoretically combine the launch of a blockchain at Kusama with the simultaneous launch of smart contracts. The move will shorten the development process for building in Polkadot.
