- Polkadot Q1 2023 report shows some incredible progress on the network.
- The total DOT staked saw a steady increase.
Polkadot has in its first quarter report disclosed interesting progress in its price and the ecosystem at large. According to the report, the native token, DOT, recorded a sharp rise earlier this year, then took a nosedive in February and March due to a series of macroeconomic events. These include the US banking crisis and the regulators‘ warning statement to banks on risk management of crypto asset fundings.
The report further discloses that Polkadot core daily active developers reached an all-time high in the period under review.
Of course, ecosystem-wide development activities were much more remarkable. The 2022 Developer Report by Electric Capital ranked Polkadot second in terms of full-time developer count and third in terms of total developer count as of December 15, 2022. A look at the number of new GitHub repositories every quarter from Q4 2015 to Q1 2023 shed light on the drastic year-over-year increase. Annual total new repos increased almost two-fold from 2019 to 2021.
The total staked DOT saw a steady increase going past 600M DOT in the first quarter. With this, 0.3 percent came from validators, and the rest came from nominators and nomination pools. Whale movement caused the staking ratio to experience two unusual increases. On January 24, the first increase of 2.44 percentage points was recorded. With this, 34M DOT was bonded in one single transaction. In the next era, 30.6M DOT was unbonded, causing the staking ratio to go back down.
In the other increase, 1.42 percentage points was recorded on February 28. About 10.85M DOT and 7M DOT were added by two whales. This took the total stake to more than 630M DOT and a staking ratio of more than 49 percent.
In the first quarter of this year, the total stake in the nomination pool was more than 3M DOT with 8K+ Pool Members.
More activities on Polkadot
Also, there were over 871 million total whale accounts in terms of the Polkadot holder distribution. The Kusama holder accounts had 9 million whale accounts.
According to data from Subscan, total holders went well above 1M for DOT and 280K for KSM in Q1 2023. Among holders, whales (defined as accounts that hold more than 0.1% of the total token supply) possessed 869M DOT and 9.65M KSM, of which 173.02M DOT and 848.14K KSM were kept in system accounts. Since system accounts are not operated by users but by the systems for specific purposes such as holding treasury, crowdloan funds, and nomination pool stake, their fund movements are expected and their impacts controlled.
The report mentions that the Total Value Locked of top DeFi parachains on Polkadot and Kusama was around $280M on February 21, and peaked at $329 million.
One interesting category is the borrowing and lending market. The prolonged bear market affected it massively as Acala’s lending TVL fell from $32.03M to $19.55M.
USDT on both Statemine and Statemint was fully functional as the USDT supply on Polkadot reached $7M. This was 2.36 times higher than in Kusama.
