With Cosmos in the past and OP Stack in the future, should Polkadot adjust its market positioning and narrative in the face of strong competitors?
Given the competition from Cosmos and the upcoming OP Stack, should Polkadot modify its market positioning and narrative?
Author: PolkaWorld
Dan Reecer shared his insights on Polkadot forum after leaving Polkadot for several months, and proposed some ideas on the positioning and narrative of Polkadot in the market. His observations and analysis provide us with a new perspective, giving us the opportunity to re-examine the value and potential of Polkadot.
Dan believes that Polkadot’s positioning as an “interoperability solution” does not accurately grasp the main advantages that Polkadot brings to top-level blockchain development teams. This is because Polkadot only provides interoperability within Polkadot itself, while protocols like Axelar, LayerZero, and Wormhole have already captured the majority of transaction volume in achieving comprehensive encrypted interoperability. The interoperability within the Polkadot world can only play to its advantage when there is significant user activity and transaction volume on multiple parachains in Polkadot.
He listed some examples of teams that recently chose chain development platforms:
- BNB Chain has just announced opBNB as an L2 chain on the OP Stack. Why did they do this? Because Optimism has incentives, users, liquidity, and is easy to build on.
- Frax has just announced Frax Chain as an ETH L2. Why? They want to gain liquidity from the ETH mainnet. They did not launch on Polkadot because Polkadot does not have liquidity or users, and they do not need interoperability from Polkadot, as they only need it when other chains on Polkadot are valuable for interaction.
- dYdX will launch a chain in the Cosmos ecosystem. They chose to do this because Cosmos SDK provides them with flexibility, there are a certain number of powerful chains in the Cosmos ecosystem, Cosmos has incentives, and there is a certain amount of liquidity in Cosmos.
These chains chose their chain development stack not for the benefits of interoperability, but for the convenience/speed of development, as well as liquidity/user base. Polkadot can offer all these technological advantages and even surpass these competitors, but it really needs to address the liquidity/user issue. Therefore, he believes that Polkadot’s narrative and market positioning need to be adjusted to better attract and meet the needs of chain development teams.
- Why is Coinbase considered the biggest winner in the wave of Bitcoi...
- Binance Derivatives Market Research Report 6 Derivative DEX Worth P...
- Endless fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market, where are we hea...
Firstly, he believes that one of the main values that Polkadot can offer is its modularity and customizability. This is an advantage brought by the Substrate technology, which allows development teams to adjust and modify according to their own use cases flexibly. This flexibility can not only simplify the development process, but also enable teams to better adapt to market needs and changes, thereby improving their competitiveness.
Secondly, Polkadot’s EVM compatibility is also an important advantage. Through this compatibility, any chain can be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), thereby leveraging Ethereum’s rich application ecosystem and extensive user base. This compatibility can not only bring more possibilities to development teams, but also help them gain market recognition faster.
In addition, one of the important values provided by Polkadot for its parallel chains is high security. The development teams using Polkadot do not need to set up their own validator sets, which reduces their burden and can also improve the security and stability of their chains.
Furthermore, from the perspective of regulatory compliance, the DOT token of Polkadot can also bring some advantages. Using DOT tokens as the operating tokens of the chains can help development teams better comply with relevant regulations and reduce legal risks they face.
Finally, as a pioneer in blockchain governance, the advantages of Polkadot in on-chain governance cannot be ignored. This advantage can not only improve the transparency and fairness of the platform but also help development teams better manage and coordinate their projects.
To better illustrate these points, Dan shared an example of Polygon Supernets. The website of Polygon Supernets clearly lists their advantages: “Polygon Supernets allows you to create high-performance, customizable application chains quickly and seamlessly, with compliance implementation options.” This sentence accurately captures the needs of developers and effectively conveys their advantages.
Returning to Polkadot, we can see that although its technology has been widely recognized, it still needs to make changes in market positioning and narrative. First of all, Polkadot needs to clarify and emphasize its main values that it can provide, including modularity, security, regulatory compliance, and on-chain governance, among others. At the same time, Polkadot also needs to find its own uniqueness to differentiate itself from other chain development platforms. This uniqueness may stem from its technological advantages or from its deep understanding of developer needs.
In summary, Dan’s analysis and suggestions provide us with a new perspective to help us better understand the value and potential of Polkadot. By re-examining and adjusting its market positioning and narrative, the community hopes that Polkadot can stand out in the competitive blockchain market and win more support from developers and users.
In fact, any technological product needs a clear and accurate market positioning to guide its development direction and meet user needs. For Polkadot, its positioning not only needs to accurately reflect its technological advantages but also needs to fully consider the needs of developers and users. This is a complex and ongoing process, and it is also an important direction for the future development of Polkadot.
In this process, Polkadot not only needs to accurately identify and address the needs of developers and users but also needs to maintain sensitivity to market trends in order to timely adjust its market positioning and narrative. At the same time, Polkadot also needs to continue to optimize and enhance its technology to ensure that its technological advantages can be combined with market demands, thereby creating greater value. We look forward to Polkadot winning more support and achieving greater success with a new image!
