Polkadot is concluding its last parachain auctions in March and some of the most anticipated projects already started. Among them Acala and Moonbeam who started on Polkadots mainnet in January. It was last week when the next big announcement hit the market.

What is to expect for Polkadots development in the month come? And how will the on-chain governance help the network to thrive in the near future?

The Pioneers Prize

Polkadot has the ambitious goal to become the backbone of Web3. The plan is to achieve this by connecting different blockchains on Polkadot with a unique design. Polkadots relay chain is securing the network and so-called parachains can serve one or more specific tasks allowing higher scalability than other blockchains.

While this concept is looking very promising, there is still a lot of work to do in order to achieve this goal. This is why Polkadot announced the “Pioneers Prize”, a competition where talents from all around the world can try to solve problems. There will be several different challenges and each will address a certain issue and competitors have to find a solution for it to win a prize.

The idea itself is very promising as several hackathons of Polkadots competitors have proven to be highly effective in the past. Among them Ignition and Riptide on Solana. With Ignition already concluded and Riptide just starting, Polkadot has to compete not only for ideas but also for attention.

On-chain governance in action

Polkadot has also a living governance system that represents all parties involved and puts the well-being of the network in the hands of the whole community. This includes also the funding of the development, new projects, or any other proposal you can think of. The Pioneers Prize is one of those projects that received the funds needed from such an on-chain proposal.

Participants can win up to 993.286,08 DOT which is worth 18,6 million Euros at the time of writing. With Polkadots treasury holding around 20 million DOT roughly 5 % of the treasury holdings are dedicated to the upcoming competition.

The first challenges and details will be announced in the coming months and it is expected that Polkadots development will be boosted by the Pioneers Prize. With more and more parachains starting and a sizeable amount of money on the table for prizes, there are good chances that this year will become remarkable in terms of network growth and its stability as well as improvements.