Just last week (July 18) at the Web3 Summit in Berlin, Germany, Gavin Wood attended the event as a special guest and shared his powerful insights on the development of the Polkadot ecosystem. Currently, the Polkadot ecosystem is undergoing some positive changes. It is no longer simply pursuing scale expansion, but reshaping users' views on security, identity, and economic efficiency, in order to create a more streamlined and resilient ecosystem, and to be fully prepared to build a real Web3 world.

Let's review Gavin Wood's wonderful views and explore the new direction of the future development of the Polkadot ecosystem.

JAM 0.7.1 technical upgrade, expected to complete the 0.7 series in August

The current JAM chain 0.7.1 technical upgrade version is in progress, and it is expected that the 0.7 series will complete all technical improvement plans in August. The stable upgrade of the JAM protocol has also allowed more users to regain confidence in the long-term development of the Polkadot ecosystem. The ecosystem pays more attention to function optimization and the construction of the Gas fee model, and related auditing business is also expected to start this year.

SDK is developing rapidly, and CoreVM has built-in EVM actor support

During this process, Gavin Wood introduced that the development of the basic SDK and CoreVM has progressed rapidly, and more technical upgrades will focus on improving release documents. What is worth looking forward to is the standard process of cross-chain message services. The core virtual machine release will be included in the SDK, and CoreVM can support data I/O, transaction processing and cross-service communication, and CoreVM now has built-in EVM actor support.

In addition, JAM governance optimization is also mentioned in the latest gray book. Capable and visionary outstanding players will join the gray book editorial committee, because in the process of implementing JAM governance, in-depth and excellent technical vision is always needed. Gavin Wood pointed out that while he himself remains the editor-in-chief, other editors also have the right to help propose, review and optimize the protocol, and meet regularly to discuss broad protocol directions and priorities. After the release of version 1.0, Gavin Wood plans to place the gray paper under an open license environment, and may also adopt some licensing orders such as patent protection clauses. When talking about the relationship between JAM governance and Polkadot governance, Gavin Wood believes that Polkadot governance can determine the JAM version of its basic protocol, and also expects other protocols using JAM to make corresponding contributions.

Keep up with the advanced modular system and deeply develop the zkJAM framework

"Zk technology provides unlimited security, and it may be a product that can achieve continuous premium in the future." Partners who pay attention to ZK technology may understand the high cost of its large-scale application, but Polkadot does not intend to wait for the corresponding technical costs. Before launching the technical upgrade, the team conducted an empirical investigation on the feasibility of zkJAM. The current zk cost is at least 10-100 times higher than Elves, and it is also necessary to consider the missing fixed points, storage, finalization and other issues. "Our plan is to develop a zkJAM service framework based on STARK (avoiding the Groth16 SNARK stage), making use of the efficient computing advantages of PVM to focus more on the application of storage proofs." Entering the mid-term development, the technical project will collaborate, support and develop optimized proof generation tools, with special attention to technical modules such as PVM execution proof and decentralized proof generation to keep up with the most advanced modular open systems. In the long run, in order to develop into zkPOPJAM, JAM needs to be developed into a multi-module, high-security, marginal cost-minimized, hierarchical security and recursive proof. Let us continue to wait and see.

Reduce security expenses from $500 million to $90 million

Before Gavin Wood proposed a new view, the Polkadot ecosystem was paying up to $500 million in security costs every year! This expense mainly comes from staking rewards, that is, the DOT issued by inflation every year is used to reward validators and nominators. Under the current rules, this fee almost reaches 85% of Polkadot's annual inflation. Most of this 85% of fees are directly cashed out by validators and nominators, flowing out of the ecosystem, and are not really converted into "network use" or "ecological activity". For this reason, Gavin Wood bluntly stated at the conference that this is an "unsustainable" financial structure because it is a plan that is far higher than the core resources, the "security budget" of most chains, and the marginal benefits of this mechanism. In this context, Gavin Wood reduced $500 million to $90 million, equivalent to cutting 80% of security expenses, and proposed a short-, medium- and long-term development plan.

Introducing a new fund pool to optimize economic decisions

In the short term, on the one hand, security expenses will be reduced to $90 million, and on the other hand, a new fund pool will be introduced - inflation funds will no longer be directly sent to validators, but will enter the intermediate fund pool, and governance will decide whether to allocate them. The use of this "new fund pool" is determined by governance, and its essence is to turn the "automatic money distribution mechanism" into a "governance decision-making mechanism."

- The current network does need more security investment → allocated to validators

- There is a more urgent need for ecological funding → allocated to developers, projects, activities, etc.

- The current network is already over-incentivized → stay in the pool as a future reserve

- It can even be used to offset future inflation, repurchase DOT or support stablecoins

Gavin Wood also responded to the vision of zero-cost blocks on the spot, "This is a process of technological evolution. To achieve a state close to zero cost, we first need to become practical. Polkadot currently has only about 40 cores being effectively used, and the core utilization rate of many chains is even less than 20%, so instead of just talking about each transaction approaching zero cost, it is better to build real demand first and then welcome the day when marginal cost decreases. ”

Explore new security mechanism, native stablecoin payment structure

In the medium term, Gavin Wood believes that it is possible to explore new security structures based on PoP and Individuality, and transfer the security originally determined by "money" to "people". This anti-sybil-like security mechanism attempts to build a fairer and more sustainable governance structure through decentralized digital identity. Speaking of this, Gavin Wood mentioned the JAM protocol again. JAM Core Disabling can directly close an invalid core block space, so that useless security will no longer continue to be paid; in addition, the native stablecoin payment structure was proposed, which will shift treasury expenditures from DOT/USDC to Polkadot native stablecoins, improve the efficiency of capital internal circulation, and avoid frequent selling of DOT, increase the secondary use rate of funds in the ecosystem, and make fund settlement more stable and in line with expectations.

Building a compatible privacy identity system

Talking about the direction of personal security and privacy protection, Gavin Wood shared his ideas on how to build a compatible privacy protection system. At present, many jurisdictions around the world have clearly given safeguards for user privacy protection, and designed and developed personal privacy management tools to help record and restrict. In fact, the successful emergence of Web3 digital identity proof is enough to become a sharp sword in the industry. Ideally, there is no key manager, ZK technology-driven privacy protection, and other privacy confirmation states that do not rely on any authority are what everyone expects. Strong Sybil resistance can provide a state that significantly increases user participation and reduces capital requirements/costs, and in the future, it can even change the operating rules of staking, stablecoins, marketing, oracles, governance, etc.

Facing the future vision of Web3, highly decentralized and rational democracy

This future-oriented identity authentication system will be released on the chain soon, and DIM1 (PoI) and DIM2 (PoVI) are expected to be launched in Q4. At the end of the sharing, Gavin Wood also proposed that the development of Web3 oracles also needs the personalized drive of DIM1, and initially needs to be used to confirm the credentials and Open Gov KYC of the Web2 world.

I believe that the future Web3 world is a rule-based, collaborative, high-tech work/living space, and the expansion between the on-chain world and physical enterprises, art, culture, artificial intelligence, and privacy continues to deepen. "We can also always believe that Polkadot can lead us to further reach the future Web3 environment that is decentralized, full of rational voices, efficient and inclusive, and we are working hard to implement this goal vision."