Polkadot Reportedly Lays Off 300 Employees: What’s The Way Forward?

Parity Technologies, the developer of Polkadot, a platform at the forefront of blockchain interoperability, has reportedly laid off more than 300 employees. According to an X post shared by “chainyoda,” a core contributor, on October 12, the number retrenched is more than that of developers working on dapps deployed on the blockchain.

Parity Technology Game Plan: To Be More Decentralized

There has been no confirmation from Parity on the exact number of employees whose contracts have been terminated. However, as of October 11, the company updated its community on what it plans to do in the coming months.

On social media platform X, Parity said they advocate for decentralization and don’t want to be a “bottleneck, slowing down the growth of Polkadot.” As part of this, they will look to continue enhancing Polkadot’s technology, improve developer experience, and foster a strong community of developers. 

Accordingly, this meant a change of strategy. Parity said it would be “sunsetting its go-to-market functions to make room for the emergence of new ecosystem leaders” to spearhead Polkadot’s development. 

As part of this transition, Parity Technologies pointed to a new program launched by Web3 Foundation, which it believed would help build and mold the next cohort of leaders to take Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems to the next level.

The Web3 Foundation announced the Kickstarter program on October 10. It aims to deploy “20M CHF and 5M DOT throughout 2024” to catalyze development within the two ecosystems.

Mixed Reactions: What Happens To DOT?

The reception of this news has been mixed. Some strongly believe the collapse of several centralized finance (CeFi) platforms in 2022, mostly FTX and Terraform Labs, forced capital away from the industry. Responding to Chiyoda’s tweet on X, one user said the industry is suffering from “trust” issues, which accelerated the withdrawal of liquidity. The only event that can reset the industry and attract users is a “black swan event.” 

Others are confident that the new approach might spark activity and increase the number of on-chain users. Like the broader crypto scene, DOT prices have been under intense selling pressure in the past few months, recoiling from record highs of the last bull run in 2021.

It is not clear when DOT prices will recover. However, Polkadot developers plan to increase the number of parachains from 100 to 1,000 in the coming months. The upgrade will allow the network to process over 1 million transactions every second. 

The limit increase will be done through a series of software updates. One of them, Asynchronous backing, aims to slash block time by half, subsequently enhancing throughput.