From conversations with agents in Parity, W3F, and other orgs I have come to the conclusion that we don’t yet have a clearly defined campaign to make sure the Hub launch will be meeting expectations and considered a success.

Currently it feels to me like the core tech is covered, and the ecosystem has to figure out the rest. But “the” ecosystem has not yet developed this awareness.

To me, this represents a risk, since the expectation of many people will be that there will be a rush of activity on Hub. If we experience a slow uncoordinated start and there is an impression we did not bother to organize around this launch, it will be a bad signal. So our ambition should be to pull together all our expertise and skill and show what the ecosystem is capable of!

What we know

Currently, the following roles have been assigned:

• Parity/@pierreaubert: deliver Ethereum-compatible stack on top of the AssetHub system chain
• Velocity Labs/@nico_a: Onboard financial integrations (DeFi, Ramps, Custodians…) → BD for finance products
• PaperMoon/@albertov19: Provide documentation
• W3F/@radha: coordinate with other ecosystem agents to provide tangential support, especially DevRel

The current stated goal is to lay out the foundation of an Ethereum-compatible chain with a focus on financial applications on which then can be built.

Missing Clarity

What I am currently missing is clarity on our approach to:

• Outreach efforts, such as Marketing, Events, Conference Attendance
  • developer specific outreach efforts like hackathons, developer community building/activation
• Non-finance BD (NFTs, Games, other interesting stuff)
• Investors Relations, Acceleration, Success
• clarity on what secondary tooling is currently in the works/needed that will be relevant for devs
• onboarding parachains to expose their functionality properly to Hub via XCM

This thread

• This thread aims to coordinate to make sure we have a launch campaign for the Hub in place.
• I have created a small page on what public information I have found: Polkadot Hub
• If you are part of a team that works on an aspect to Hub, please make it known so we can get a more complete picture
• If you have unanswered questions on the Hub, please drop them here and I will collect them and get them answered on the - I have created a small page on what public information I have found: Polkadot Hub info page I created
• Once we have collected the basic information and know what bases are covered and which not, we can start developing a campaign from there.

Hi Tommi,

Thanks for creating this topic, we also found it’s extremely important to take a portion of ecosystem effort for the Polkadot Hub’s success, at least (in-this-year), like 80% our efforts because:

1. Polkadot Hub is simple for EVM-compatible engineers to quickly switch to Polkadot - deploy existing projects or build a new projects.
2. Solidity Developers dominates the market in terms of web3 developers. (based on Electric Capital 2024 - report)
3. Be able to focus on consumer layer.

Then, it’s important to coordinate and prepare for successful launch - short term: testnet commercial launch and mainnet launch definitely.

Our plan is to focus on Polkadot Hub this year, because OpenGuild’s mandate is in Asia and Asia is dominating the amount of Solidity developers in the globe.

How we see OpenGuild team fits in this full pictures:

1. Builders full-stack support (from Ecosystem Resources Guiding to developers relation) by multiple types of activities (mandate mainly SEA and support broader Asia)
2. Outreach efforts - organizing developer-focused activation, organizing cultural activities and build relationship between builders in the ecosystem.
3. We aims to organize an acceleration program (follow-up program) in Q3 which gathers a reasonable amount of quality teams (10-15 teams in Asia), to build consumer apps which provide relevant/popular usecases around DeFi, PayFi, NFTs (based on their current MVPs), providing community building support, building presence in Asia and social media, guide to ecosystem resources to make sure the growth would be assured.

Happy to contribute to the general picture that ecosystem key agents are establishing.

Hey @alice_und_bob , the BD group just posted an update which I believe might address a few points mentioned in your post: A Polkadot Hub launch update from Business Development group: April, 2025

Thank you for flagging this!

Hey AuB, Nate from Distractive here. Thanks for kicking this off, and I hope this input helps.

Here is the setup of the product launch of Hub:

On the Distractive side, we’re supporting a number of workflows (synchronous and asynchronous) to support product development, product messaging, and business development with Parity, W3F, Magenta Labs, Velocity Labs, DotPlay, and Papermoon to make this a successful launch.

To align with some of the buckets you’ve outlined, here is where we’re seeing the workstreams/focuses broken out:

1. Strategy & Product: Parity & Web3F
2. Non-finance BD/Outreach: Velocity Labs, Magenta Labs, DotPlay
3. Marketing: Distractive & Parity
4. DevRel: Papermoon, OpenGuild
5. Developer outreach: W3F, with Encode and EasyA
6. Investor Relations, Acceleration, Success teams: Web3 Foundation

As with other prior product launches, Distractive will deploy its full-spectrum marketing capabilities across all departments (Marcomms, Digital, Programs, Creative & Product Marketing) to drive Hub adoption and awareness.

As Parity works to refine Hub’s feature set, value props and target audience, we’re working alongside them to develop a phased launch approach, which begins with the launch of smart contracts on Kusama and includes:

• Strategic content deployment via Polkadot blog, ecosystem newsletters, and developer communications,
• Coordinated social media campaigns across Polkadot and Kusama channels,
• Dedicated Hub landing page on the Polkadot website

Going forward, future pre-launch and launch initiatives will involve:

• Collaborative promotions with integrations and deployments committed to Polkadot to help drive broader awareness in EVM circles as well as across broader industry
• Targeted press release aligned with the Polkadot Hub launch timeline
• Educational content focusing on smart contract capabilities & what Hub unlocks for devs and users
• Consistent messaging integration across industry events, including specialized hackathons emphasizing smart contract awareness and usability.

This coordinated approach aims to ensure maximum visibility, developer adoption, and ecosystem growth throughout the Hub launch cycle. I hope this helps to get a better understanding of our aligned strategy as we continue to actively plan and refine it. Please let me know if you have any open questions.

-Distractive Crew (via Nate)

Heya Tommi, thanks for the post, and apologies that I missed it previously. For those that don’t know me, I am a project manager in Parity’s Product Engineering team.

General responsibility for launches

At Parity, we aim to coordinate product launch-related activities as part of our product work. While this doesn’t mean we “do” everything ourselves of course, we do take on responsibility to ensure that key launch activities happen, information is shared, and things are not “missed” in this decentralised environment.

FYI, this is a very high-level summary of a template for managing successful product launches in Polkadot (worked on last year with Distractive and Parity stakeholders). It is obviously an evolving process and involves many other teams as well as those listed here.

image1920×906 198 KB

Polkadot Hub launch

I’d like to echo what Nate (and some others) have said here, especially the breakdown and of tasks and responsibilities and the steps to date.

We were managing the smart contracts release according to this template process described in the screenshot above, and with the Polkadot Hub narrative subsuming this, we’ve pivoted to this product and messaging.

In terms of the actual activities that are happening:

Events:

• Parity is sending speakers to key events in the Web3 / tech calendar to speak about the various features of Polkadot Hub, especially smart contracts.
• The Events Bounty has highlighted a number of events for sponsorship. We (Parity) are providing many speakers, who are tasked with fitting mentions of the Hub into their talks.
• We have also identified a number of other events where we are submitting speaker applications, independent of sponsorship. Obviously this is dependent on speakers being accepted.
• If others in the ecosystem would also like to go and speak about Polkadot Hub (or any technical topic) at events, we’re also very happy to give any technical feedback or support needed to give a great talk.

DevRel:

• As you noted, Papermoon is working on documentation and resources to support new smart contracts users.
• W3F (Radha) is coordinating teams across the ecosystem like OpenGuild, Papermoon, Web0, EasyA, Pala, etc. to ensure developer outreach efforts and messaging are aligned.
• Radha and I are coordinating teams putting on Hackathons for Polkadot (including some nudging to get these off the ground) to ensure we’re highlighting smart contracts at these events, providing good resources for testing and getting user feedback.
• So far there’s been two hackathons with smart contract tracks, we have two more underway (one this month and one in May), and there are more are in the pipeline / planning stages for the rest of the year, including tracks at ETH conferences.
• As a general rule, hackathons are being funded by the Events Bounty.
• We know we can always do more in the DevRel area and this is just a start. There are a number of initiatives both in Parity and across the wider ecosystem being kicked off to focus more on developer experience and relations underway, so we hope these will help plug some of these gaps.

Tooling

• The engineering team at Parity is doing a lot of work around Ethereum tooling compatibility (Remix, HardHat, etc). When the first Kusama release is available, @Jan-Jan (Smart Contracts TPM) will share details of what’s already available and the roadmap for the remaining tools here on the forum.
• There is an OpenZeppelin partnership underway.
• R0GUE is working on Ink! (and Rust) compatibility for smart contracts to bundle into the Polkadot Hub launch.
• The BD Hub launch working group (Aleks at W3F (posted the link to his update above)) is also doing work on partnerships with tools like oracles and block explorers to ensure these are ready in time.

Comms and Marketing:

• Marketing is being managed by Distractive, with some product messaging / input from Parity.
• Comms efforts will follow the staggered launch, with blogs, socials, newsletter updates, a Hub website landing page, etc. around the first and second stages of the Kusama smart contracts launch.
• There will be wider marketing activities for the Polkadot smart contracts launch, and which will use the Polkadot Hub narrative.

I hope this is interesting and helpful.

Appreciate there are still some questions from your first post that aren’t addressed by this; after the first release on Kusama (imminent!) and associated comms we can see what still needs to be answered and get back to you.

cc @Cyr06130 Product Engineering TPM

I was working some time ago on a airdrop type pallet to launch with the asset hub to allow evm devs to be able to get some tokens so they could deploy on the asset hub but unfortunately i hit some readblocks along the way. If thats something you think could still be usefull for the success of the hub i might dive into it again and maybe seek dome help from other devs also.