Polkadot Development Activity Peaks in Q3: Report

Latest data also suggest that nearly 14,930 developer contributions were recorded on Polkadot’s GitHub for August, establishing a new monthly ATH by a wide margin.

Polkadot surpassed the margin yet again but for the first time in September, concluding the month with 15,433 contributions, the highest recorded on any network, including Ethereum.

New Records For Polkadot

The launch of new parachains continued on a regular basis taking the number of active ones to 40 on the experimental “canary” network, Kusama, and 26 on the main network itself. Many of these leverage Polkadot’s cross-consensus interoperability standard XCM.

Data from Polkadot Subscan revealed that September broke previous records to fetch an ATH number of 26,258 messages sent between its parachains. Overall, more than 140,000 messages have been exchanged between chains with the help of 135 channels.

The Polkadot and Kusama Treasuries have cumulatively deployed 9.6 million DOT and 346,700 KSM (approximately $72.8 million total) to fund spending proposals in the ecosystem.

Going forward, scalability on Polkadot and Kusama will take the center stage. As such, founder Rob Habermeier published a roadmap highlighting an upgrade called “Asynchronous Backing,” which aims to increase the block space five to 10-fold while slashing the block time for parachains from 12 seconds to six.

Without affecting security, the upgrade is also expected to notch up the transactions-per-second (TPS) capacity of the network to between 100k and one million. The asynchronous backing upgrade is scheduled for deployment on Kusama by the year-end, followed by Polkadot.

Paraheads is yet another vertical that is expected to be ready for launch early next year. These “pay-as-you-go” parachains are designed to ease the process of building on the Polkadot ecosystem.

Polkadot Decentralization

Additionally, Messari’s data suggests that Polkadot is the most decentralized network among its peers. The blockchain intelligence platform stated that it has a high Nakamoto Coefficient indicating a high number of nodes that must be compromised to affect the blockchain and prevent it from proper functioning.

The report stated:

“The relatively even validator stake distribution strengthens Polkadot’s level of decentralization. Polkadot’s Nakamoto Coefficient averages 99, giving it the highest level compared to base-layer peers.”

Trailing behind were Solana at a Nakamoto Coefficient of 31, followed by Avalanche at 30, NEAR at 9, Binance chain at 8, Cosmos at 7, and Polygon at 4.

It is worth noting that Polkadot recorded consistent network usage and developer activity in Q2 as well, despite a 66% drop in valuation.