2026: Polkadot's turning point from infrastructure to explosion

Three Major Upgrades Completed, Infrastructure Ready

Over the past two years, Polkadot’s main focus has been on optimizing the underlying architecture and improving performance. With the successive implementation of three core features—Async Backing, Agile Coretime, and Elastic Scaling—the infrastructure framework of Polkadot 2.0 has been essentially completed.

These three upgrades address different efficiency bottlenecks: Async Backing breaks the serial dependency between parachains and relay chains, enabling parallel block production; Agile Coretime reforms the resource leasing model, allowing projects to purchase time slots flexibly without long-term reservation; Elastic Scaling permits applications to temporarily expand computing resources during traffic peaks.

Based on previous test data on Kusama, the combined effect of these mechanisms is significant—TPS( transactions per second) can reach approximately 500,000. While ordinary users may not notice obvious changes in the short term, these improvements lay a solid foundation for explosive growth at the application layer of the entire network.

A New Stage in Ecosystem Building: Tools, Standard Libraries, and Virtual Machines

With infrastructure in place, Polkadot’s development focus is shifting to the upper layers of the ecosystem. This includes developing toolchains, SDK libraries, integrating smart contract virtual machines, and refining primitive functions such as zero-knowledge proof support.

The Papermoon team is currently advancing testing and deployment of REVM(Rust EVM). Unlike PVM, which uses the RISC-V instruction set architecture, REVM is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) standard, allowing applications from the Ethereum ecosystem to migrate to Polkadot without code modifications—significantly reducing developers’ migration costs.

The team has validated mainstream projects like Uniswap V2/V3, OpenZeppelin, MultiSig, and others, with encouraging results. REVM is expected to launch on Kusama early next month, followed by deployment on the Polkadot mainnet. This shift stems from practical testing—some projects relying on older Solidity versions faced compatibility issues when migrating to PVM, requiring extensive code rewrites, which REVM avoids.

Additionally, Parity has released customized versions of Hardhat, Foundry, and Remix, with development support from teams like Papermoon. Relevant documentation and reference materials are now complete. This means developers no longer face the dilemma of “lacking tools.”

Parity’s Strategic Shift: From Waiting to Proactive Building

Key signals come from Gavin, Parity’s Chief Officer, who recently spoke at an internal event. Parity is undergoing a strategic adjustment, moving toward actively developing multiple core products rather than relying entirely on external developers.

This decision involves three key directions:

Proof of Personhood (PoP) Verification System—This is not just about the verification layer itself but also about the application ecosystem derived from identity authentication, which has broad commercial potential.

Official Polkadot Applications—Long-term official apps are about to be launched, expected to meet users soon.

Native Stablecoins—Tentatively named PUSD or USDOT, possibly backed by DOT, but Gavin is cautious about introducing cross-chain assets to avoid security risks. An interesting idea is that in the future, rewards for Polkadot validators could be paid directly in stablecoins, serving as both a market promotion entry point and an optimization of cost accounting.

Such changes would have been hard to imagine a year ago, but now Parity is actively recruiting top engineers. This indicates that Polkadot is no longer a “network being built” but an ecosystem led by a core team.

Polkadot Hub: The Catalyst for Ecosystem Revival

Not all developers want to build their own parachains—costly, resource-intensive, and complex to maintain. Most developers just want to quickly launch applications, profit, and attract community. Polkadot Hub was created for this purpose—a smart contract environment optimized specifically for developers.

Once DeFi and dApps are officially launched on the Hub, they will attract user communities to Polkadot, bringing interaction, trading, and gas revenue, creating a positive feedback loop. Teams like OpenGuild, PolkaWorld, PaperMoon, Harbour Industrial Capital are actively promoting developer onboarding worldwide to accelerate application deployment.

Industry expectations suggest that this “revival wave” will truly emerge between Q1 and Q2 of 2026—when the first batch of DeFi and dApps are officially deployed on the Hub.

2026: From Quiet Construction to Full Explosion

Over the past two years, the outside world has perceived Polkadot as “lacking progress,” but this is essentially a gap in information awareness. Parity has been working behind the scenes on fundamental architecture restructuring, which is invisible and intangible to ordinary developers. But the situation has now changed—three major upgrades are complete, REVM is about to go live, the Hub is ready, and official product reserves are ample.

2026 will be the year for Polkadot developers to rediscover the network. In addition to the upgrade of the smart contract environment, Polkadot now possesses several unique capabilities:

• More efficient block production mechanism
• Complete cross-chain messaging system(XCM)
• Official Ethereum bridge
• Robust development tool ecosystem

When these primitive functions(primitivas) and infrastructure are fully ready, large-scale application development will no longer be a technical issue but a matter of time.

It can be said that Polkadot has completed the most difficult foundational groundwork phase. The next step is to verify whether this foundation can truly support a rich array of application scenarios—likely to be revealed in 2026.