New Trends in Polkadot Ecosystem Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Solidity Developers

Last month, a three-month course on "Solidity Development on Polkadot" successfully concluded, attracting 219 developers to participate in the learning. This course provided a practical platform for developers who want to understand the Polkadot ecosystem and enter Web3.

On July 11th, an event themed "The Growth Stories of Polkadot Solidity Learners" was held, inviting several guests to share their experiences and insights from the course. The event also specially invited the co-founder of a certain project to share project progress and recruitment information, providing students with more ecological opportunities.

Course Experience from a Developer's Perspective

The course covers multiple modules, ranging from basic grammar to commonly used contract libraries, as well as the migration to Uniswap V2 and on-chain security. Participants generally believe that the course content is well-organized, with a moderate level of difficulty, making it very beginner-friendly.

A student expressed: "The course has given me a more comprehensive understanding of Web3. As long as you are willing to invest time, you can gain a lot." Another student mentioned: "I really like the practical competition part at the end, where I can apply the knowledge learned in the course to a complete development process."

However, there are also some challenges in the learning process. For example, the virtual machine environment of Polkadot is quite different from Ethereum's EVM, especially in terms of compilation and debugging. Some students mentioned: "Some contracts run normally on Ethereum's Remix, but they encounter errors when deployed to Polkadot because there are differences in the EVM implementations on both sides."

New Thoughts on Career Transition in Web3

Participants in the course have gained new insights into their future career directions. One participant stated: "Polkadot SDK is a very practical tool that supports custom chains and local debugging, which is not common in other ecosystems. This provides me with a great entry point."

Another student expressed a desire to develop in the direction of Web3 security: "Many projects are currently conducting code security audits, and as the business logic becomes more complex, the potential security issues increase. Only by truly understanding the business logic and implementation details behind the code can these vulnerabilities be identified."

Project Progress and Recruitment Share

The co-founder of a certain project shared the latest progress of the project at the event. The project has accumulated rich experience in infrastructure construction and has refined a set of reusable technical components. Developers can quickly integrate cross-chain Liquid Staking protocols through the Solidity SDK provided by the project, achieving multi-chain deployment and collaborative operations across multiple mainstream chains.

The project is currently opening 3 non-technical positions, supporting remote work. Although development positions are not yet open, outstanding students are welcome to submit their resumes and will be included in the talent pool as priority candidates. It is worth mentioning that about 40% of the core developers in the project team come from a certain community.

Selected Community Q&A Questions

During the Q&A session, the guests answered questions regarding the experiences of novice developers, future course arrangements, and course difficulty.

For complete beginners with zero programming background, the guest suggests: If the goal is to create a simple application, there is about a 50% chance of success. You need to spend around 30 days familiarizing yourself with an introductory language and tools, and then use AI and examples to understand contract logic. If you only wish to understand the basic concepts of smart contracts or enhance your competitiveness in interviews, this course is fully capable.

Regarding the course difficulty, several guests rated it between 3 to 6 points (out of a total of 10), believing that the overall difficulty is moderate and can be mastered as long as one is willing to invest time.

Conclusion

The Polkadot ecosystem is expected to complete a comprehensive upgrade to Polkadot 2.0 in August this year, and PolkaVM is also scheduled to launch on the mainnet in Q3 2025, achieving native support for EVM/Solidity. Now is the golden opportunity to join the Polkadot ecosystem for building.