Polkadot 2025: Crossing the Threshold into the Second Age

At this pivotal moment in 2025, Polkadot is crossing the defining threshold of its first decade, shifting from “building foundational infrastructure” to entering an age where it can truly support applications.

For the past ten years, Polkadot focused its energy on a hard rock layer: cross-chain architecture, shared security model, parallel execution, and the Substrate/SDK engineering system. This is what Gavin Wood described as “the first ten years were about core tech.”

With Polkadot 2.0’s core capabilities now crystallized, upgrades such as Agile Coretime, Elastic Scaling, and Async Backing, which rolled out gradually from 2024 to 2025, have been unified under the 2.0 architecture in SDK 2509. These changes push Polkadot’s throughput, confirmation speed, and blockspace capacity into a new tier. Performance, at last, has a solid answer.

The November 2025 migration consolidated assets, governance, and staking logic into the new Asset Hub, upgrading it from a “system parachain” into the ecosystem’s super-entrypoint. Both REVM and PVM will run here in the future.

REVM is expected to go live at the beginning of 2026, allowing Solidity developers to deploy contracts directly on the Hub, just like on Ethereum. This is Polkadot’s strong answer to years of critique about developer friction: full EVM compatibility finally provides real soil for ecosystem growth. Meanwhile, JAM has entered the engineering implementation stage, and Polkadot’s architectural blueprint for the next decade is already clear.

The technical groundwork of the “second age” is in place, but the more important shift is happening inside Parity itself.

For ten years, Parity saw itself as an infrastructure company, “we build infrastructure, not applications.” Now that Polkadot can finally support large-scale applications, a natural question arises: Who will build the first real user-facing products?

This, I believe, is the real turning point of the second age, not just a technological shift, but a strategic evolution where Parity transitions from “laying the foundations” to “leading by example with ecosystem products.”

Why Building Products Matters in the Second Age

As Polkadot’s official review states, the past decade was about “building the foundations.” The technology is impeccable, yet this left Polkadot in a “strong base, weak entrypoint” state, where users lacked a single access path into the ecosystem, and developers didn’t know where their applications should live. Differences among parachains made the experience even more fragmented.

Concretely, old-era Polkadot lacked a unified entry point, and ecosystem growth was structurally constrained as a result:

Core logic spread across multiple system chains
Applications required XCM for further composition
User journeys were fragmented
Rollups (parachains) remained siloed, preventing network effects

Against this backdrop, not building products would leave the ecosystem in a state of being “excellent but fragmented,” unable to form true network effects. It becomes clear, then, why Polkadot must offer a unified entrypoint for users and provide fertile ground where applications can actually grow.

Why This Is the Golden Moment to Build on Polkadot?

Polkadot’s technical foundation is finally mature enough to support real user scale and application complexity:

Agile Coretime, Elastic Scaling, and Async Backing form the core of Polkadot 2.0
Core logic migrated to the Hub, forming a unified execution and user anchor
REVM and PolkaVM provide both full EVM compatibility and high-performance execution
Developers can deploy directly to the Hub with a clearer workflow than ever

The wind is at your back; this is the beginning of Polkadot’s application (product-focused) era.

Key Products Parity Is Building

Polkadot Mobile: A New Mobile Entry Point

Parity is rebuilding the official app and positioning it as the main mobile entry point, not just a wallet. It will integrate asset management, governance, staking, and identity, enabling a real “download one app to enter Polkadot” experience.

People Chain / Individuality: The Native Identity Layer

Gavin describes PoP (Proof-of-Personhood) as Polkadot’s next big bet, distinguishing real humans from bots. It will integrate with Polkadot Mobile as foundational infrastructure for governance, sybil resistance, incentives, and growth.

Productizing the Hub: The Portal for Assets & Applications

The Hub is no longer merely a system chain; instead, it is intentionally being productized as the portal for users and applications:

Users will manage assets, interact with contracts, swap, stake, and govern.
Developers gain a default deployment target with visibility and distribution.

JAM-Based Service Layer (Mid-Long Term)

JAM will support multiple on-chain services, not just a VM, but allowing identity, DA, and high-performance execution services to run as network-managed products.

In the future, ecosystem-level products such as identity services, data-availability services, and high-performance execution environments could be hosted directly on JAM. These services would be scheduled and metered by the network itself, providing a cloud-like foundational layer for applications across the ecosystem. That said, this area is still under active engineering development and in various stages of testing.

Where Developer Opportunities Truly Lie

The defining shift of the Second Age is the consolidation of previously scattered entrypoints, execution environments, and scaling paths into a coherent system capable of supporting large-scale applications. More specifically, it brings together the ecosystem’s formerly fragmented components into five clear anchors:

The Hub becomes the unified access and deployment point
REVM and PVM establish a unified execution layer
Polkadot Mobile consolidates the user journey
Individuality unlocks human-based incentives and governance
Coretime provides true elastic scaling

We highlight several clear opportunity areas in the emerging Polkadot ecosystem:

Wallets, Accounts, and User Experience Products. Polkadot still has open space for its own “MetaMask” or “Phantom.” AA wallets, hybrid account systems, abstracted asset-layer UIs, social login, relationship graphs. These domains are virtually untouched and represent a wide-open blue ocean.
Next-Generation DeFi: A Rebirth Enabled by Hub + REVM. With liquidity converging on the Hub, native EVM compatibility, and native cross-chain composability, Polkadot creates the conditions for a new wave of DeFi protocols. A “mainnet-grade DEX” is still an unclaimed position in the ecosystem.
AI Agents and High-Performance Applications: A New Track Powered by PVM. On-chain inference, AI agents, game logic, complex synchronization systems. These are use cases that Ethereum cannot natively support at scale, but Polkadot can. PVM opens an entirely new application class defined by high computational intensity and real-time interaction.
Cross-Chain Aggregated User Experience. Cross-chain routers, aggregated trading, unified interfaces, multi-chain asset operations. The Hub will make “cross-chain” something users no longer need to think about, enabling seamless interoperability behind the scenes.
Developer Tooling and Infrastructure. Indexing, verification, automation, monitoring, SDKs, GraphQL endpoints. These are large engineering domains that the ecosystem urgently needs. They won’t be built by the core team; they must be built by developers and companies in the ecosystem.

Closing Thoughts

With Polkadot 2.0’s core capabilities finalized, the Hub migration completed, and REVM and PVM nearing launch, Polkadot’s infrastructure has entered a phase where it can reliably support long-term application growth. The focus of the Second Age is no longer on validating the underlying architecture, it is on turning these capabilities into real value at the product and ecosystem layers.

In other words, the priority now shifts from “infrastructure building” to “effective supply at the ecosystem level.” The new stack: Hub, Mobile, Individuality, and REVM/PVM. These provide a unified landing zone and growth path for applications. The real upside will depend on whether builders can leverage these capabilities to create services and products that reach much broader audiences.