Many people have asked me similar questions: How does Polkadot gradually shed its former halo?

Looking back at its development over the past few years, I think Polkadot has actually encountered a mismatch in the industry. The most straightforward way to put it is: while developers were still desperately in need of smart contracts, Polkadot had already rolled out a complete platform for self-built chains and infrastructure. Gavin Wood's vision was very forward-thinking—skipping the smart contract stage altogether and jumping straight to a chain-level architecture. But he may have overestimated the overall technical level of developers worldwide.

The result is quite interesting—Polkadot's architectural philosophy has always been ahead of the market. Many of the concepts it first proposed only gained industry recognition two or three years later and were reintroduced as new narratives. The advantage of being first often became a disadvantage of being overlooked.

For developers, there is a fundamental contradiction within the Polkadot ecosystem. On one hand, its design is undeniably advanced: multi-chain collaboration, shared security, XCM cross-chain interoperability, system chain asset standards... these are truly foundational infrastructure capabilities, and they are implemented very robustly. On the other hand, many developers directly ask, "I just want to build an application. Why do I have to learn how to set up a blockchain first?"

This seemingly simple question is actually fatal. It leads to one clear consequence: a large number of developers ultimately choose smarter contract ecosystems with lower barriers and easier entry points to build on, such as some leading EVM-compatible chains.

The emergence of Polkadot Hub is precisely to break this deadlock.

In my view, Hub is not just a packaging of a new concept, nor is it another round of marketing narrative. It is more like the missing piece that Polkadot ecosystem has finally filled—the bridge that closes the gap between "writing smart contracts to develop applications" and "building a complete blockchain from scratch," which are two entirely different levels of difficulty.

What does this mean? It means that more developers who don't want to build their own chains but only want to develop applications can now enter the Polkadot ecosystem with a lower technical threshold. They no longer have to face complex chain-level development from the start but can gradually deepen from a relatively familiar application layer.

This could be a key step for Polkadot to reconnect with the market.