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Strategy

This page reflects our opinions on the strategic direction of Polkadot Governance. The thoughts represented here are curated through numerous conversations with ecosystem agents and members of the community.

Vision​

Polkadot is the best way to build Web3.

Objectives​

Objectives represent the convergence of stakeholder intentions in Polkadot Governance. They tell us where to direct our attention and resources and on which topics we should formulate initiatives and programs. Objectives tell us where we lack something or where we need to get stronger or can strategically grow. They allow us to derive measurable key results towards which we can work.

Primary Objectives​

The ultimate success of Polkadot can be measured by coretime demand aka how many transactions are settled on Polkadot. To get there, we need to ensure every step of the value chain is working without friction:

Marketing → Business Development → Software Development → Chains & Apps → Users & Liquidity → Coretime Demand

In other words: If Marketing and BD can attract lots of prospective developers, they will create lots of apps and chains. These apps serve users and create new possibilities to deploy liquidity, which will create coretime demand.

Thus we can define the following objectives (roughly ranked by how critically they are discussed):

  1. Improve the developer experience
  2. Improve user experience
  3. Improve the public perception of the Polkadot ecosystem
  4. Establish efficient BD infrastructure
  5. Build capital rails, increase liquidity
  6. Improve Accountability in OpenGov
  7. Increase the number of new chains & apps

Improve the Developer Experience​

To improve the developer experience, a lot of suggestions have been posted in this thread and span a range of topics, such as Substrate, XCM, ink!, APIs, tooling, explorers, etc… Activities that influence this goal are the availability of documentation, reduction of technical debt, generalized and simple APIs, accessibility of primitives in the ecosystem, onbaording etc…

See this Governance Initiative on Developer Experience for more details.

Improve the User Experience​

Requires concerted effort by developers and a strong focus on UX and product-market-fit, as well as products that make sense and are demanded by users. This goal is also worthwhile because every developer joining the ecosystem joins it initially as a user. Activities that influence this goal mostly lie in the hands of the teams that develop actual apps. Governance has only indirect influence over the realization of this goal. Activities that influence this goal are in the area of tooling and services, UX awareness, and funding user-facing projects.

See this Governance Initiative on User Experience for more details.

Improve the public perception of the Polkadot ecosystem​

Polkadot’s foundational tech stack is way better than the current public perception of the ecosystem. Harsh developer and user experience have created bad impressions in the past. We have learned that business development has to work hand in hand with all other components in the ecosystem.

In the current environment, our primary objective in the marketing department is to strengthen the public perception and allow a more positive narrative to emerge, while we improve other areas of the ecosystem.

The core challenge typically is said the be the narrative.

Establish Efficient BD Infrastructure​

This objective is about supporting founders and teams to be successful. This includes onboarding as well as continuous support while in the ecosystem.

Business development operations can be improved by having defined leaders in the ecosystem who can take over prospective leads and help them find the resources to build solutions in Polkadot. Subject Matter Experts and Solution Architects will be helpful in this context.

Build Capital Rails, Increase Liquidity​

Bridges and useful DeFi products create new rails to onboard users and capital. This objective is about building the infrastructure and leading initiatives to increase liquidity in the ecosystem.

Improve Accountability in OpenGov​

Stakeholders want to ensure that OpenGov is spending funds responsibly, effectively, and efficiently. It is about ensuring that OpenGov is aligning its proposals along with OpenGov’s preference for decentralization, open-source deliverables, transparency, and reasonable market-conform pricing. It is about ensuring that OpenGov is breaking up big projects into smaller milestones and allowing auditors to work efficiently and report budgetary spending as per the Treasury Reporting Standards.

Increase the Number of New Chains & Apps​

All previous objectives are in service of this one. The more chains and apps we have, the more users we can attract, the more liquidity we can onboard, and the more coretime demand we can generate.