Per insights from programming repository GitHub, Polkadot recognized over 500 contributions daily in September – a record-breaking high for the multichain protocol. 

Specifically, in a simultaneous manner, insights from Polkadot’s cross-consensus interoperability standard XCM reportedly revealed that a record 26,258 messages were sent between its parachains. 

Overall, 14,930 developers’ contributions were recorded on Polkadot’s GitHub in the month of August.

As revealed by developers of the initiative, 66 blockchains are now live on Polkadot and its parachain startup network Kusama. Since the inception, more than 140,000 messages have been exchanged between chains via 135 messaging channels. 

In combination, the Polkadot and Kusama Treasuries have cumulatively paid out 9.6 million DOT and 346,700 KSM ($72.8 million total) to financially support spending proposals in the ecosystem.

Parachains reportedly function as individual layer-1 blockchains that operate in parallel on Polkadot and are initially trialed on Kusama. Auctions for parachain slots are held in the form of crowdloans, with the position going to the highest bidding initiative. 

The first of its kind happened in November 2021. 

In the future, Polkadot founder Rob Habermeier has recently published a roadmap regarding the possible improvements for Polkadot and Kusama’s scalability. 

Noteworthy points include asynchronous backing, or the decoupling of the extension of parachains from the extension of the relay-chain, as a potential mechanism for cutting parachain blocktime by 50% while increasing block space give to 10 fold. 

The upgrade, should it go live, is also estimated to increase network speed to between 100,000 to 1 million transactions per minute.