Polkadot officially announces entering the "Second Era" — transitioning from the protocol era to the product era

Gavin Wood publicly stated at the Sub0 conference that Polkadot has completed the full development of its technical infrastructure, and the entire ecosystem is about to shift from pure protocol development to product deployment and large-scale user acquisition. This marks a turning point in the development history of Parity and Polkadot.

Why Polkadot Will Inevitable Become the Next-Generation Blockchain Infrastructure

Over the past decade, the blockchain industry has gradually explored a feasible technical roadmap in the contest with the traditional internet. However, existing blockchain systems still have a significant gap from the goal of “truly supporting hundreds of millions, or even billions, of users.”

As one of Ethereum’s most important clients, Parity has a deep understanding of the limitations of current public chains. It is this understanding that led Gavin Wood and Parity’s early team to initiate the Polkadot project in the fall of 2016. Their core question was: if redesigning a blockchain technology to support future societal-level applications, where should they start?

Compared to the EVM-centric architecture, Polkadot adopts a WebAssembly-based heterogeneous multi-chain design—allowing different parachains to operate in their own ways while maintaining overall security through a unified validation mechanism. This “universal and flexible” design philosophy is the fundamental difference between Polkadot and other public chains.

Technical Maturity Has Reached a Critical Threshold

When discussing productization, a often overlooked question is: is the underlying technology truly mature?

According to Gavin Wood, the first-generation core technology of Polkadot has been verified. Through throughput testing of parachains and real-world application scenarios, it has been proven that this architecture can support truly large-scale users. Meanwhile, Parity has completed the infrastructure development of storage systems, messaging, peer-to-peer networks, and more over the past few years—though these advancements have not been widely publicized.

More importantly, JAM (the next-generation Polkadot protocol) is under development and is expected to be launched around next year. JAM inherits Polkadot’s fundamental principles while further optimizing the system architecture to better support real product ecosystems.

The True Demand for Infrastructure in the “Intentional Agent” Era

Polkadot is not simply aiming to replace Web2 but to serve a brand-new user group: those willing to take control of their digital future—“Intentional Agents” (IA).

The concept of IA has multiple meanings:

• Subjects of the Information Age: individuals capable of making independent judgments amid vast amounts of information
• Intentional Actors: individuals with clear goals who can responsibly act toward them
• Intelligent Subjects: people who can use their reasoning to judge social development directions and put them into practice

What do these users need? Not another centralized application ecosystem, but infrastructure that truly allows them to build genuine connections with family, friends, and communities, participate in economic systems, and possess autonomous digital identities.

Current blockchain products have yet to achieve this goal. Only hundreds of thousands of users are able to use self-custody wallets, far from the “millions or billions of users” vision. The reason is simple: the technology is insufficient to support it, and the products lack enough appeal to ordinary people.

From Protocol Design to Platform Design: Parity’s Strategic Shift

Parity has shifted from focusing on protocol layer development to platformization and productization. What does this mean?

First is the improvement of infrastructure:

• Name Service: allowing users to no longer rely on complex addresses
• Decentralized Identity System: identifying real users without relying on third parties
• User Agents (Clients): friendly entry points like browsers and mobile apps

Second is building product access points. Gavin Wood revealed that Parity has started prototyping, and soon users will be able to see downloadable applications, online access portals, and Polkadot product demos that can be experienced directly on mobile devices.

This system is collectively called the “Polkadot Portal”—a next-generation Web3 gateway designed specifically for “Intentional Agents.”

Project Individuality: Enabling Systems to Recognize “Humans” Instead of “Machines”

To truly onboard users at scale, Polkadot needs to solve a fundamental problem: how to distinguish “real individuals” from “fake behaviors” without infringing on privacy?

Parity has launched the Polkadot People Initiative, centered around Project Individuality—a privacy-friendly proof of personhood system.

This is not traditional identity verification. It does not require:

• Identity documents (which are surveillance systems)
• Phone numbers (which offer no real security)
• Biometric data (like iris scans that invade privacy)
• Web2 login methods (which relegate users back to tech giants)

Instead, Project Individuality relies on game theory, cryptography, and the physical properties of humans and spacetime. The system only needs to ensure that “the same individual does not profit repeatedly in different scenarios,” thereby preventing large-scale collusion attacks.

The value of this design lies in:

• Supporting secure economic incentives
• Encouraging non-collusive user behavior
• Assisting in human selection verification
• Collecting real-world data (oracle)
• Providing “rationality guarantees” for decentralized systems

Taking Polkadot’s current PoS annual reward rate (about 15%) as an example, the system requires significant annual costs to maintain security. Proof of Personhood offers an alternative security paradigm: by ensuring decision-makers are not strongly correlated, large-scale collusion becomes extremely difficult—costs far lower than purely economic models.

Product Launch Plans Around 2026

Based on current progress, Gavin Wood expects:

• First half of 2026: Official release of the Polkadot Portal platform
• Throughout 2026: Various product applications, some of which will be unveiled early

This means Polkadot is about to enter a new phase—no longer just “protocol stacking,” but “ecosystem services.” Parity will first build the foundational platform, then invite third-party developers to build applications on top, because Parity understands that no single team can be more creative than the entire ecosystem. Ultimately, the growth of the platform will be driven by third-party applications from the ecosystem.

From “Ten Years of Technology” to “Ten Years of Products”

What is the essence of this transformation?

Over the past ten years, Polkadot and Parity have focused on refining the network protocol itself—ensuring the technical architecture is solid enough. The next ten years will shift focus to the realization of “societal-level movement protocols”—bringing technology into people’s daily lives.

This is not only a technological evolution but also a cultural transformation. It involves how to enable “individuals of the Information Age” to live in a manner fitting the times—possessing truly own digital identities, able to autonomously choose how to participate in society, and gaining corresponding economic rights.

From the release of the Polkadot white paper in 2016, to the stable launch of parachains in 2022, and to the large-scale product releases around 2026, Polkadot has completed the full cycle from “protocol vision” to “usable product.”

As Gavin Wood repeatedly emphasized in his speech: technology itself is not the end goal; making technology truly useful for people is. The “second era” of Polkadot is the beginning of turning this ideal into reality.