Polkadot

Devs, your time has come. The Polkadot Products Devnet is live now. No longer permissioned only for the Web3 Summit - the new Devnet now opens this experience to developers globally, anywhere, anytime. A mental model for building on the Polkadot Products Devnet. ⚫ Polkadot apps: Mobile, desktop, and web browser ⚫ Your dApp: A web app published with a .dot domain ⚫ SDK + CLIs: Tools to build, publish, name, and publish smart contracts ⚫ Platform services: DotNS naming, CDM contract registry, identity Start here: https://lnkd.in/efiHYFf6 

Nobody wants technology. People want to send money, speak privately, and prove that they are human without giving up their identity. Technology is the machinery in the background. Products are the switches on the wall. You flick it, and the light turns on, taking the technology and infrastructure behind it for granted. Polkadot spent a decade building the machinery. Now it is building the switch. Four talks from Web3 Summit showcase the new Polkadot direction and what is being built right now: Alex Birdo & Anton Khvorov: ‘Web3 Summit Apps Built on Polkadot’ https://lnkd.in/eb3EpCtt Karim Jedda: ‘People Don't Use Technology. They Use Products’ https://lnkd.in/ecah8WK4 Gavin Wood: ‘Polkadot, Human Web3’ https://lnkd.in/en7b5iKf Torsten Stüber & Adrian-Costin Catangiu: ‘Polkadot App: Under the Hood’ https://lnkd.in/eCVPCbVC Whoever builds the switch controls the light. Watch the talks. 💡

The most private place in your life is behind closed doors. It's where you say what you actually mean, buy the slightly embarrassing thing, ask the question you would never ask out loud. Privacy isn't a hoodie in a dark room. It's simply the part of life that stays yours. Something is coming soon to bring real privacy closer to you: the Polkadot Products Devnet. Think about how messaging usually works. Your chats live on a company's server. That company can read them, hand them to anyone, or leak them through a hack. You believed those messages were private. Well they were private right up until they left your phone and were uploaded to external servers. Polkadot Chat does not rely on faith. Messages, photos, voice and video calls are encrypted end-to-end, with no upload to central servers. Nobody can read your chat. Mathematical proofs make sure of it. Polkadot Chat is not collecting any of your private data. No phone number, no email and no record of who you talk to or when. You find people by a username instead of handing over your address book. Polkadot products are private by default. And none of this is something you have to take on faith. The apps and the network they run on are open source, so anyone can verify exactly how the privacy works. Proof you can inspect, not a promise you have to trust. Proofs of concept of Polkadot Products were open-sourced by Parity Technologies, deployed by the Polkadot Community Foundation and tested by ~900 people at Web3 Summit 2026. The next step is the Polkadot Products Devnet, a dedicated environment where anyone can build and test privacy-first Polkadot apps. More updates are coming soon. Go private. Go Polkadot.

Friction remains one of the most persistent barriers to developer adoption in Web3. Local environment setup. Faucets. Token acquisition. Unfamiliar tooling. For most developers evaluating a new stack, the cost of getting started outweighs the perceived benefit of trying. At Web3 Summit 2026, we tested a different premise. Start from working open-source code. Modify it with AI-assisted tooling. Publish to a decentralized stack in under 30 minutes. No local setup. No faucets. No token acquisition. 190 people deployed a decentralized app over two days. Most had never built on Polkadot before. Between them they published 272 .dot domains, earned 22,820 XP, gave each other 469 stars, and forked 49 apps from one another's code. That happened at a conference where most attendees did not come to build. The infrastructure underneath - Bulletin, Statement Store, the Product SDK - quietly handled the complexity. Developers only focused on the application layer as they should. This is what the infrastructure looks like when it works. Lower the barrier enough and builders show up.

Devs, are you ready for your first mover advantage? The opportunity to build on everyday apps, which are fully private, secure, and decentralised. More updates are coming soon.

Polkadot in June. W3S, Polkadot app POC tested and staking updates.

Recent internet restrictions in several countries are a reminder that digital infrastructure exists in layers. Governments can restrict access to networks. They can block services, disrupt connectivity, and determine which applications remain available. That's why the protocols beneath those applications matter. Decentralization doesn't prevent a network-layer shutdown. It doesn't keep mobile towers online or guarantee connectivity. What it changes is where control resides. An open protocol cannot be switched off by a single operator. Its rules cannot be rewritten overnight, access cannot be granted selectively, and participation doesn't depend on one institution remaining willing to provide it. When connectivity returns, the protocol remains available to everyone. As more countries explore greater control over digital infrastructure, the question isn't only whether people can get online. It's whether the systems they depend on remain open, neutral, and accessible once they do. That's one of the core ideas behind decentralized protocols: not replacing the internet, but ensuring its foundations remain public rather than permissioned.

Web3 Summit was more than panels, art installations and debates about the future of the internet. It was first and foremost a live product lab for Polkadot, with several proof-of-concept apps open-sourced by Parity Technologies, deployed by Polkadot Community Foundation and tested by attendees over two days. The experience was built around the Polkadot super app, which comprised: • Chat • Pocket (a decentralised wallet) • Polkadot Prizes • Browse First: Chat. Upon arrival, attendees would get checked-in and be gifted tokens by interacting with the Web3 Summit Chat Bot, as a welcome gift. A simple onboarding flow and a first direct interaction with the decentralized testnet running underneath. Next: Pocket, the wallet created for the occasion. The 30 tokens appeared there and could be used during the Summit. Just enough for lunch and a few beers over the two days of the conference. Pocket also made the infrastructure tangible. Attendees could use it to pay for food and drinks at the venue but also with two external vendors, Zola and Milchbar, integrating directly with these restaurants’ existing point-of-sale systems. Then, Polkadot Prizes: a live gesture game allowing attendees to prove their humanhood. This app will play an important role in future Web3 environments, helping prevent bots and fake profiles from rigging the game. Last but not least: Browse. This substrate of the Polkadot App allowed attendees to connect to other mini apps, including the Web3 Summit event app and Playground . dot. The Web3 Summit event app gave attendees an overview of the full two-day programme and allowed them to build their own schedule. Attendees could also create their own session and invite other attendees to it, making it a truly collaborative conference. Playground . dot was also a hit: A prototype collaborative build environment where developers could deploy, modify and remix decentralized application prototypes during the event. Not “come listen to builders.” More like: come build, break, improve, repeat. With some happy winners selected from the live leaderboard. All in all, the Web3 Summit was successful proof that Web3 is no longer just theory. It showed what it means to deploy decentralized, user-friendly applications that could soon offer viable, privacy-friendly alternatives to the Web2 apps we use every day.

The Web3 Summit 2026 in Berlin just concluded, with around 900 attendees coming together to participate in creation of future tech; Technology in which privacy is the default for practical tools that people will be able to use in everyday life. Attendees used multiple proofs of concept open-sourced by Parity Technologies, published by the Polkadot Community Foundation (PCF) and stress-tested during the W3S. Read the full W3S wrap-up by PCF on the Polkadot Forum👇