Original text: https://polkadot.com/blog/consensus-2025-recap/
By Joey Prebys
Compiled by: OneBlock+
On May 16, 2025, the Consensus Conference came to a successful conclusion in Toronto, Canada. The overall atmosphere of this conference placed more emphasis on "Real World Adoption", focusing on the application of blockchain technology in actual scenarios and the results that can be achieved.
Compared to ETHDenver, which is mainly for builders, Consensus brings together more users from enterprises, investment institutions, universities and those seeking specific solutions, becoming an important bridge for communication and cooperation between project parties and diverse groups of people.
This time, Polkadot returned to the Consensus Conference, with "live demonstration + novice guidance + in-depth communication" as the core, bringing a focused and pragmatic exhibition experience. The team is not only committed to brand exposure, but also hopes to reach new audiences through visual results and on-site interaction, and provide a platform for ecological projects to display and obtain feedback.
This article will take you through a comprehensive review of Polkadot’s highlights at Consensus 2025, including booth highlights, ecosystem team participation, important speeches, on-site photos, and Polkadot’s next course of action.
🔮 Booth design focusing on real use cases
This booth revolves around two themes: enterprise-level solutions and DAO innovation, helping visitors to experience live demonstrations, interactive activities and practical application projects in an organized manner.
To ensure an orderly process and that each project gets enough attention, Polkadot adopted a scheduling system, with two demonstration tables taking turns to present. This mechanism facilitated higher-quality exchanges and allowed each project to clearly express its value proposition.
The teams presenting at the event include:
Apillon, Atmos, Aventus, Distractive, Feooh, Hyperbridge, Hydration, Kylix Finance, Magenta, Mythical Games, OriginTrail, Parity Technologies, Polkadot Ambassador Fellowship, Polkadot Blockchain Academy, Scytale, StellaSwap, The Kusamarian, TVINN, Velocity Labs, Web3 Foundation, WebZero.
One of the team representatives commented on the experience:
“I think Consensus is a very suitable conference for reaching cooperation. There are many traditional financial institutions, asset managers and institutional investors present, which creates great convenience for high-quality meetings.”
—Jonathan Boyd, Velocity Labs
The booth also has a customized claw machine, which attracted a large number of visitors to stop and experience it. This device was designed by Braille and AirLyft. Visitors can receive DOT rewards by scanning QR codes, minting NFTs and completing tasks. The whole process is both interesting and practical, providing an intuitive entry for new users to understand Polkadot, and has good replicability, which can be expanded to more activity scenarios in the future.
"Our booth is really different from the others... the claw machines are so popular that almost everyone is queuing up."
—Charlie Riedel, Mythos Foundation
This set of onboarding processes also provides a sample template for other teams in the ecosystem. Some users completed all the tasks on site and experienced firsthand how applications built on Polkadot actually work.
🎙️ Featured Speaker: Dave Sedacca
Dave Sedacca, Head of Finance and Funding at Parity Technologies, was invited to deliver a keynote speech at the Protocol Village at Consensus 2025: "Polkadot Cuts Through the Noise: Real Builders, Visible Applications, and Exceptional Network Efficiency."
In his speech he elaborated:
Why Polkadot is a network built for internet-scale infrastructure;
The transition from Polkadot 1.0 to 2.0, including faster validation mechanisms and a more flexible block space model;
Comparison with other networks on key performance indicators such as decentralization, speed, and cost;
Actual adoption in verticals such as gaming, DePIN, and data;
JAM as the future direction of decentralized computing.
“Everyone is talking about Web3, but most of it is still theoretical. Polkadot is making it a reality.”
——Dave Sedacca
Polkadot’s appearance at Consensus not only has vision, but also visible results.
Social Media Highlights:
@WomenInPolkadot: “The atmosphere at the Polkadot booth was just amazing! Real conversations and real connections.”
@Polkadot: “Consensus2025 Day 2 is in full swing! Builders, demos, DOTs, everything.”
@joinwebzero: "429 guests came to Queen St. W last night, it was so exciting."
@easya_app: "EasyA Consensus 2025 hackathon saw record developer participation!"
For more exciting content, please follow @Polkadot.
🗺️ Next stop: Continue to expand influence
Consensus 2025 showed everyone what works: booth design, narrative strategy, and onboarding process all successfully attracted a wider audience and successfully showcased real projects in the ecosystem.
Next, Polkadot will continue to advance on this basis, support more ecosystem teams to participate in global activities, and expand its influence by optimizing the guidance process, improving the on-site interactive experience, and continuing to focus on real application scenarios.
Whether it’s games, infrastructure, or DAOs, Polkadot is always focused on one thing: real builders solving real problems.
