When Gavin Wood appeared live-streamed from Portugal to close Sub0 Buenos Aires 2025, his message was unmistakable:

The first decade of Polkadot was about engineering core technology.
The next decade will be about infrastructure, platforms, and real products for real people.

For the first time in Polkadot’s history, the underlying tech is ready, and Parity is officially pivoting from protocol R&D toward building usable, everyday applications built on a foundation of cryptography, game theory, and a new model of digital identity.

This marks the start of what Wood calls the Polkadot Second Age, a shift from network to movement, from protocol to society.

A long-form analysis of the shift from protocol to product.

Gavin opened with a reminder: Polkadot didn’t appear overnight.

• The idea emerged in late 2016, from internal discussions at Parity around “what Ethereum 2 would look like if we designed it from scratch.”

• The vision paper, published the same year, introduced a WebAssembly-based, heterogeneous multi-chain system, radically different from Ethereum’s monolithic design.

• Sub0 itself started as a small gathering of ~100 engineers in the Berlin office, focused on Substrate and early Polkadot development.

Why did Polkadot need to exist?
Because the world lacked core blockchain technology capable of supporting real society-scale systems. Ethereum was a brilliant prototype, but not enough to host millions or billions of users meaningfully.

Polkadot’s first decade solved this.

Relay chain security, parachains, storage networks, message-passing, decentralized peer-to-peer layers — all the invisible but essential building blocks are now working.

In Gavin’s words:

“The point is the core technology is finally ready. For the first time, we can build serious products that can gain serious traction.”

This is where the next decade begins.

For Polkadot to reach millions, it needs a portal, a consumer-facing entry point that brings mainstream users into Web3:

• Mobile-first

• Fully on-chain interactions

• A unified experience bridging identity, messaging, payments, and access to apps

This portal is The Polkadot App.

Sub0 attendees received early access to two fully on-chain features:

• Chat

• 💸 On-chain payments

Both run entirely on Polkadot-native logic, no centralized servers, no intermediaries.

The app is the first stage of a broader Polkadot Portal framework, aiming to onboard intentional agents, individuals who want to own their identity, interact freely, and participate in a cryptographically secure digital society.

Gavin emphasized this repeatedly: Polkadot isn’t trying to replicate Web2.

It is trying to enable the daily life of the intentional, sovereign digital citizen.

One of the most important announcements was Project Individuality, Polkadot’s privacy-preserving Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) system.

Not identity.
Not biometrics.
Not KYC.
Not phone verification.

Instead:

• Cryptography

• Game theory

• Physics

• Zero intermediaries

• No centralized authorities

Individuality allows the system to recognize that you are a unique person — not who you are.

This distinction unlocks:

• Fair distribution of tokens and rewards

• Resistance to Sybil attacks

• Human-only voting or governance

• Incentive models that reward participation

Gavin was explicit:

“Any system requiring phone numbers, government IDs, passports, or retina scans is bad. Disregard them.”

Individuality will be integrated natively into the Polkadot App experience within months.

And it is central to the next era of Polkadot: the People Layer.

Polkadot’s protocol has already proven high throughput via parachain activity.
What comes next is scaling the user base, not the blockspace.

Today:

• Only a few hundred thousand people worldwide use self-custody wallets.

• Web3 products are not yet useful or delightful for most people.

Polkadot’s goal:

Move from hundreds of thousands → millions → tens of millions.

How?

1. A fully on-chain app experience

2. Proof-of-personhood to unlock fair incentives

3. Infrastructure built around real daily needs

4. A product stack that abstracts complexity

The mission is not to attract crypto users.
It is to attract everyone.

Parity’s internal shift is now official:

Phase 1 (2015–2025): Core tech and protocol
Phase 2 (2025–2035): Infra, platform, and consumer products

Parity will now focus on:

• Developer-ready infrastructure

• Polkadot’s app ecosystem

• User agents (browsers, mobile clients)

• Human-layer primitives (Individuality)

• New incentives and game-theory-secured systems

2026 is the target for the first wave of consumer-facing products.

Platform components will emerge earlier in the year; full products will roll out gradually after.

Gavin’s vision:

“The second 10 years is about infra and products. We go from network to movement, from protocol to society.”

Gavin’s talk wasn’t purely technical.
It was deeply social, political, and philosophical.

Key ideas:

Despite powerful technology, most digital systems remain:

• centralized

• opaque

• permissioned

• controlled by intermediaries (tech oligarchs, nation states)

Polkadot aims to enable a world where:

• identity is cryptographic, not bureaucratic

• commerce is peer-to-peer

• communities are sovereign

• individuals own their digital presence

• no one mediates your interactions

Gavin introduces “IIA”, a layered acronym:

• Information Age

• Intentional Agent

• Intended Agency

• Intelligent Agency

The platform is designed for people who act deliberately, individuals who want to shape their future through decentralized tools.

This philosophical foundation is not an accessory to Polkadot’s technology.
It is the point of the technology.

If Polkadot succeeds in building its Second Age, we may see:

• A digital identity layer that respects privacy and autonomy

• An app ecosystem where every interaction is cryptographically guaranteed

• Social, economic, and governance systems powered by real human participation

• Mass onboarding through simple, intuitive user agents

• A shift from speculative crypto economies to meaningful digital life infrastructure

• A computational network (JAM) capable of running global-scale, trustless applications

In short:

From blockchain platform → digital movement.
From protocol → products.
From users → intentional agents.

The Polkadot protocol has already proven itself.

Now begins the era of:

• tangible apps

• real users

• human-first infrastructure

• privacy-preserving identity

• global onboarding

• everyday Web3 experiences

The next 10 years of Polkadot will not be about blockspace, validators, or protocol upgrades.

They will be about people, and the products built for them.

The Second Age has begun.