Polkadot’s May Ecosystem Insights

Welcome to the latest edition of your go-to source for the latest tech updates, key metrics, and discussions happening across the Polkadot Ecosystem from the Parity Success Team. In this blog series, we cover a range of topics from sources such as Canny.io / GitHub / project teams and the Polkadot Forum.

Core Metrics

OpenGov Activity

This month, once again, the community and its DOT holders have shown their passion for OpenGov, the platform where anyone can contribute and have their say in Polkadot’s governance.

We’ve highlighted some of the most interesting metrics for everyone to see:

• In May we had a total of 1,595 ‘Unique’ voters, based on the number of account holders who voted at least once throughout the month 
• Looking at Referenda, we had a total of 91 referendums this month, with 56 approved, 22 rejected & 11 that were timed out.

GitHub Activity

Throughout May the devs powered on, with PRs, commits and total number of developer metrics showing considerable strength. We’ve put together a brief overview of the latest GitHub activity metrics.

• Total Repositories: The total number of repos within the Polkadot Network now boasts an incredible 27,783, highlighting the growth and range of projects within the ecosystem.
• Weekly Commits: Throughout the month we saw a growth in the number of commits per week. As it stands, we’re currently seeing over 5,700+ weekly commits a month, demonstrating the non-stop developer activity within the ecosystem.
• Weekly Developers: Approximately 900+ developers have been actively contributing and building on Polkadot per week throughout this month alone.

Forum Activity

The Polkadot Forum has shown once again that it is the go-to hub for ecosystem discussion. Being the home for many to voice their opinions, whether they be concerns or compliments, the forum’s purpose grows stronger alongside its thriving community each day. This May, the forum displayed some exceptional growth; we’ve highlighted some of the metrics below.

• We saw 244 new faces join the forum this month, 125 new topics and 995 new posts created! 

For an overview, we’ve included some further metrics for the month below,

Reigning Champs

With so many new topics, there are going to be some favorites in the ecosystem. Here’s the topics that are seeing the most engagement.

1. Coming in clutch, we’ve got “Decoded 2024 Sponsorship for active community members” By Dbpatty. Not only did they take last month’s second place, the discussion had a surge of engagement, taking this month’s first place.
2. Coming in a very close second, we’ve got the “Polkadot Generic Ledger App” by Ainhoa-a.
3. Finally, coming in at a very respectable third place, we’ve got “Polkadot 2.0 Definition” by Alice_und_bob!

Stack Exchange

Stack Exchange, a place every developer knows too well, is alive and well when it comes to Polkadot. Albeit experiencing a slightly slower month than April, we still saw more than 60% of questions answered. A total of 76 questions were asked, 47 answered & 26 left unanswered. 

Below we show the cumulative user growth throughout the month of May.

Coretime Metrics

We’re introducing a new metric to track, and hopefully a long-term feature throughout this insights blog series, coretime sales! Whilst still fairly new, the data will be too, but we wanted to give you a sneak peak of what's to come!

Total Purchases: 3

Minimum Price: 23.09

Average Price: 23.44

The first coretime sale on Kusama has sold out of cores, and very quickly in fact. All parachains that were up for renewal enjoyed a successful core renewal, and the first on-demand coretime was purchased! Since all the cores in the first sale got snapped up quickly, the second sale saw a steep rise in price, and none of these cores were sold.

“In situations like this, it is preferable for the price to drop below the price that was paid in the first sale so we don't need to have these empty months to correct the price downwards” - Donal Murray, Senior Parity engineer

Solving the problem

Broker mechanisms have been improved to allow for a better pricing model, iterating the previous version. The model gives a much wider range around the expected price, and it should also be closer to what we use on Polkadot. If successful, this mechanism should be live on Kusama before the next sale.

This change is included in the Kusama Upgrade v1.2.5 - For more information, check out the referenda here: https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/406↗ 

Polkadot Technical Summit

The Polkadot Technical Summit will be taking place on July 10th! After the success of the previous one, we’ve brought the summit to Brussels, one day before Polkadot Decoded.

The summit is an invite-only event tailored to the Polkadot parachains, a smaller gathering of parachains, ecosystem agents, Fellows and technical-focused builders in a space where they can freely discuss, brainstorm and contribute to solving current issues, all contributing to the success of Polkadot.

Sign up now!

With the summit now less than one month away, registrations are now open. We encourage any of the groups mentioned above to get in touch with a member of the Parity Success team or reach out to remy@parity.io for more information.