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From Near-Collapse to Top 15: How Polkadot Survived Its Darkest Hour

Polkadot’s origin story reads like a crypto thriller. When Parity Technologies launched DOT’s ICO in 2017—just one year after the whitepaper dropped—it was a massive success: $145M raised through a Dutch auction on Ethereum. But here’s the plot twist: one month later, a contract exploit froze 66% of the funds. Most projects would’ve died right there.

Not Polkadot. The team pushed forward with two more token sales in 2019-2020, finally shipping mainnet in 2020. The real inflection point came in December 2021 when the first parachain connected to the Relay Chain. That’s when the dominoes started falling.

The Parachain Moment

Moonbeam (GLMR) was the marquee tenant, mirroring the success of Moonriver (MOVR) on Kusama. The market ate it up. By November 2021, DOT exploded 74% as parachain auctions kicked off—hitting an ATH of $55 per coin. The narrative was simple: Polkadot actually delivered on sharding at scale.

Fast forward to today: DOT sits in the top 15 by market cap, with DOT functioning as the backbone—used for transaction fees, staking, and network governance. From $145M saved by a miracle to a multi-billion dollar ecosystem. That’s resilience.

The lesson? In crypto, execution beats everything. Polkadot proved it.

DOT1.17%
GLMR15.01%
MOVR-0.11%
KSM0.71%
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