Polkadot Decoded: See the Parity Talks now!

A little over two weeks ago, the fifth edition of Polkadot Decoded concluded in Brussels, Belgium. The event was managed for the first time by Decentered Studio, a collective staffed by former Parity employees with specialist events experience and funded by the Decentralized Futures initiative.

With all the 80 talks now available to watch on-demand via the Polkadot Events channel on YouTube, we're providing this handy page to help you find the keynotes you loved, the panels you missed, and the talks you wanted to see one more time.

Parity CEO Björn Wagner had the honor of opening the event. His talk delved into what Parity has been working on through the first half of 2024, before showcasing the new Polkadot app. This is positioned as an ideal platform for onboarding newbies to crypto that eliminates pain points like seed phrases and long wallet addresses, provides staking opportunities and makes payments easy to both personal contacts and retailers from a single self-custodial wallet.

The app, due to ship before the end of the year, is set to be named Polkadot Pay and will be a joint venture featuring three enterprises, Parity, Novasama Technologies, and Raise joining Parity. Watch Björn's talk now.

Parity and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood delivered the second keynote address, and focused on the value of creating a Web3 solution to confirm unique, real identities. Day one talks involving Parity team members concluded with Cisco Aguirre's presentation on XCMv5, explaining the value of the Asset Hub now supporting direct stablecoin transfers.

Pierre focuses on reliability

The first Main Stage slot on day two was taken by Pierre Aubert, Parity's Vice President of Engineering. He explained how the second half of 2024 is about building maximum reliability for the ecosystem to depend on - and there were assurances for parachains who remain "first-class citizens". They will continue to get support from Parity whenever JAM takes over from the Relay Chain.

Day two of Decoded included a variety of Parity-led panels that provided some powerful discussions. CLO and interim COO Chrissy Hill appeared on a regulatory panel that provided a strong counter-narrative to flawed allegations suggesting the Polkadot Treasury was evidence of a "common enterprise". The panel did this by providing evidence of discussions with the SEC supporting how DOT had successfully morphed and was no longer a security.

Chrissy was also in action later in the day, joined by Parity colleagues Kerstin Larsson and Alex Bird, plus ecosystem favorites Raul Romanutti and Ben McMahon. The quintet discussed a number of ways in which a stronger and more visible Polkadot community might be built; for example, there was plenty of discussion around potential improvements to OpenGov that might reduce pressure on Treasury spending.

Agile Coretime: Making life easier

Meanwhile, Parity product engineering technical lead Santi Balaguer appeared on a lively panel hosted by Joyce Siquiera: this considered potential improvements to Polkadot's developer experience, with Santi explaining how Agile Coretime can make building and interoperability easier if the right tooling is put in place.

Another Parity engineer, Maciej Zyszkiewicz, focused his talk on Agile Coretime, specifically considering how this vital technical upgrade provides "a more flexible method of allocating tasks to the underlying cores."

Inevitable, Agile Coretime was a very popular topic in Brussels. And Dónal Murray was on hand to hone in on the pricing implications and learnings from Kusama core sales. He said the next few weeks, with an increase in the number of cores for sale on Kusama, would provide vital intelligence for the initial pricing model for the Polkadot launch, still primed for August.

Ledger App, Real-time data, Security Hub

Santi was back on stage with the team from Zondax to showcase the arrival of the Polkadot Ledger app, and there was also an appearance from Karim Jedda, looking at how real-time data can support stability and reliability, with faster issue resolution, a reduction in "unknown" factors, and greater confidence when technical changes go live.

Finally, Patricio Calderón was on hand to provide all the details about the brand new Polkadot Security Hub, which you can also access directly here. Patricio explained how securing the ecosystem is a priority above all others, and that suitable tools are available to teams to incorporate into their workflows.

Of course, Decoded is really about the entire ecosystem, not just Parity. So we encourage you to head to the Polkadot Events channel for more talks from some of the great teams involved in growing the community and making use of the great tech on offer.