As the (northern hemisphere) nights have drawn in and soma.fm’s Christmas Lounge finds its rightful place on my household radio, we once again find ourselves at the time of the year where I write my annual diary entry on behalf of Polkadot. With Covid now largely consigned to the collective memory of a generation, we see a global return to normalcy and resurgence of (in-person) events with it. Conflict and AI present some of the most prominent themes of the news cycle this year with some of the more inquisitive wondering how, along with blockchain, the world might be changed with them. This year it is also a special anniversary for me; as I write this, exactly 10 years ago I wrote the first lines of crypto-economic code in my life. So, what did 2023 bring?

Polkadot founder Gavin Wood outlined the technology development blueprint for 2024 in his annual review. Wood pointed out that the new year will be very busy for Polkadot, with four important infrastructure projects expected, including Agile Coretime, On-Demand Parachains, Ethereum Snowbridge, and Kusama bridging. In addition, Elastic Scaling technology is expected to emerge in 2024 as the fifth major technological breakthrough.

On December 24th, according to market data, Polkadot's ecosystem tokens experienced a general rise, including:<br>MOVR rose by 124.32% in 24 hours, with a current price of $20.8;&nbsp;<br>ACA rose by 38.56% in 24 hours, with a current price of $0.113;<br>KSM rose by 20.74% in 24 hours, with a current price of $40.22;<br>GLMR rose by 38.29% in 24 hours, with a current price of $0.512;<br>DOT rose by 9.04% in 24 hours, with a current price of $8.56.

On December 22nd, Polkadot officially reviewed its development status in 2023 and plans to implement asynchronous support, flexible Coretime, and minimum Relay in 2024. In the first quarter of next year, Polkadot will deploy the cross-chain bridge Snowbridge between Polkadot and Ethereum.

The market shows that DOT has broken through $8 and is now trading at $8.01, with an intraday increase of 7.09%. The market is fluctuating greatly, so please be prepared for risk control.

The market shows that DOT has broken through $7 and is currently trading at $7.01, with a daily increase of 1.01%. The market is volatile, so please manage your risks.

Fabian Gompf, the new CEO of Polkadot development agency Web3 Foundation, said in an interview that Polkadot is about to undergo a major transformation. Polkadot will abandon the slot auction for parallel chains and instead adopt a new mechanism that allows application developers to rent block space as needed.

According to PolkaWorld, the Polkadot OpenGov Proposal #231 proposes to use the HydraDX decentralized exchange in the Polkadot ecosystem to regularly convert a portion of the treasury's DOT holdings into USDT, accumulating USDT to be used for paying Technical Fellowship members.

Acala Network, a DeFi protocol within the Polkadot ecosystem, has released an updated Exodus roadmap. As of now, the ACA token staking rate has reached 13.55%, and the LDOT protocol DOT staking amount has exceeded 5 million. The DOT staked through the liquidity incentive platform Euphrates is about to exceed 5.1 million. In addition, the next ACA token burn will take place in 16 days, and it is expected that over 142,000 ACA tokens will be burned.

Acala, the DeFi protocol of Polkadot's ecosystem, has announced progress updates on Acala 2.0 roadmap, as follows: 1. ACA staking function has been launched; 2. 222,280 ACA tokens have been burned, and the next token burn will take place in 26 days; 3. ACA-USDC pool has been launched; 4. Unilateral DOT and LCDOT staking has been launched on the liquidity incentive platform Euphrates; 5. Currently, 4.2 million DOT have been staked through the Euphrates platform.