Wood gave an impromptu keynote address providing insights into how the various upgrades already flagged for the network would play out in 2023. In particular, he focused on XCM, the network’s cross-channel and cross-consensus messaging protocol, and OpenGov, the new agile, more decentralized governance process for the network.
A rapt capacity audience — around half of whom were new to the ecosystem and had declared an interest in building on Polkadot — were engrossed by Wood’s surprise address.
Parity’s newly appointed CEO Bjorn Wagner had earlier kicked off the two-day meeting at Lisbon’s LX Factory with an introductory talk before a busy agenda featuring breakout sessions, Q&As and developer workshops wound into gear. Many of the agenda items demonstrated the breadth of use cases being explored by Polkadot developers via XCM as they continue to be among the busiest in Web3. Data from Santiment shows over 14,000 developer contributions on the Polkadot network for every month between August and November 2022.
While some of the talks were explicitly targeted at developers with strong experience of Polkadot, its software development kit Substrate and the Rust programming language, there was also plenty of explanatory material for those still learning about the network.
Some of the event’s highlights include:
- Focusing on the ambition for Polkadot to be a best-in-class offering for a strong user experience, Jakub Panik of Galactic Council spoke of the importance of respecting end users and keeping their requirements front of mind.
- Hector Bulgarini of Parity Technologies provided a case study demonstrating how real-world assets can serve as collateral in the world of DeFi through XCM.
- Sabine Proll of Supercomputing Systems AG explained how blockchain builds efficiencies when managing interlocking railway systems.
- Seun Lanlege of Composable Finance explained some of the cryptographic and game-theoretical components of trustless bridges, and delivered an overview of cross-consensus trustless bridges.
- Alberto Viera of Moonbeam provided details of useful scripts and monitoring tools to consider when exploring XCM for token transfers and remote executions.
- In a talk followed by questions, Bill Laboon of Web3 Foundation explained what differentiates Web3 from Web2 in a philosophical and technical way.
- Jonathan Dunne of Talisman discussed his experience of creating user-centric products with Substrate, including demystifying extrinsics with metadata and creating unstoppable connections with Light Clients.