Polkadot lays off a large number of employees! Despite the market recovery and the launch of 2.0, there is still no sign of a rise in token prices.

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Parity Technologies Layoffs Controversy

However, recent reports indicate that Parity Technologies, the team behind Polkadot, has announced the dismissal of over 300 employees due to financial constraints. While the core engineering, developer relations, ecosystem operations, and Asian teams remain unaffected, internal cash depletion and criticism from grassroots employees towards management may have been the main reasons for the layoffs. Interestingly, the news of the layoffs surfaced as employees were preparing to attend a company celebration event in Spain, which was originally planned as a week of speeches, workshops, and parties.

The company's CFO, Fahmi Syed, had resigned the day before the layoff announcement, and because the company's founder, Gavin Wood, did not attend the event, many employees directed their frustrations towards him. However, as of the time of writing, both Parity and Wood have not issued any formal responses.

The Future Outlook of Polkadot 2.0

Polkadot aims to be the foundational infrastructure for the new era of blockchains, offering security innovation, cross-chain bridging capabilities, and supporting multiple blockchains. Recently, Polkadot announced the launch of version 2.0, scheduled to go live on the Rococo testnet by the end of the year, the Kusama canary network in the first quarter of next year, and the mainnet in the second quarter. This means that projects will be able to directly access Polkadot relay chain services without the need for lengthy lease of parachain slots.

Polkadot 2.0 will introduce a new network scaling solution - Asynchronous Backing, expected to begin testing in the coming weeks. If successful, it will halve the block time of parachains to 6 seconds, increase the block space per block by 5-10 times, and support up to 1000 parallel chains and one million TPS. Polkadot aims to have 1000 validators by the end of 2024 after the upgrade.

Polkadot's Path to Innovation

Over the past year, Polkadot has been actively seeking change to address ecosystem liquidity issues and prevent project attrition. To this end, they have launched an ecosystem fund to incentivize the development of decentralized applications (DApps) and introduced the decentralized and open governance platform Polkadot OpenGov, allowing the community to directly participate in governance. Additionally, Polkadot plans to collaborate with Zodia Custody to provide custody services for the ecosystem and hopes to introduce 1,000 parallel chains in the future through these enhancements.

Challenges of the OpenGov Community Governance Model

However, Polkadot 2.0 also brings some challenges. The introduction of the OpenGov community governance model allows the community to vote on all decisions and abolishes the council and technical committee, resulting in many proposals involving treasury reserves being rejected. For example, PolkaWorld, a media outlet friendly to Polkadot, temporarily ceased operations due to a lack of funding. Whether this design will be beneficial for Polkadot's long-term development remains to be seen.

Poor Performance of $DOT Price

According to data from Stakingreward, the real staking rewards rate of $DOT surpasses $ETH, but its price performance has been poor. The price of $DOT reached a high of $55 in November 2021 but has since dropped to $4.65.