The Week in Polkadot: Monthly Active Accounts reached an all-time high

Welcome to Polkadot Decrypt Week Spotted The environment.

Monthly active accounts on Polkadot hit a peak in April, the highest since early 2022 when the ecosystem's main token, Parachain, first launched.

Meanwhile, before the community voted on the Polkadot JAM update, several parachains, including the smart contract platform Moonbeam, reached record highs in active users.

You can find the full list of statistics here.

Transactions on Polkadot increased 48 percent last quarter, according to an analysis by blockchain research firm Messari. XCM messages – which Polkadot uses to communicate with blockchains that use other consensus mechanisms – are up 94% quarter-over-quarter and 314% over the past 6 months.

Asynchronous support comes to Relay Chain

Asynchronous support, a new approach to how parachain blocks are verified via a relay chain, has been enabled on Polkadot.

The Web3 Foundation says the new update will make blocks faster, increase the available block space, and allow more use of parachain blocks. This can help use case applications in gaming and DeFi.

Compared to traditional ‘synchronous support', the new system can reduce the risk of discarding potentially helpful information.

With asynchronous support, multiple unicast parablocks can exist simultaneously on a relay chain pipeline.

Parablocks are blocks of transaction data sent from different parachains to the relay chain for validation.

In traditional synchronous systems, a block is often discarded if it is not added immediately, which can unnecessarily waste the network's computing power.

StellaSwap gets a new analytics dashboard.

StellaSwap, one of the most popular DEXs for Polkadot-based tokens, is now available on Dune Analytics.

The new public dashboard allows StellaSwap users to access key metrics about the peer-to-peer marketplace on Dune. These include daily volumes, pool breakdowns, volume swaps, active accounts, and special accounts.