Polkadot, the open-source sharded multichain protocol for specialized blockchains, recently announced significant network developments and partnerships. The protocol’s latest developments could potentially lead to a considerable hike in the price of its native token DOT. DOT’s on-chain metrics also suggested confidence among crypto traders. 

Polkadot took to X (formerly Twitter) recently to highlight a key milestone for DOT staking:

On September 27, Polkadot announced that its nomination pools had reached a new milestone with over 15,000 pool members. The DOT staked in pools had reportedly exceeded 7,000,000, marking a whopping 724% increase since the beginning of the year. Nomination pools allow Polkadot users to pool their DOT and nominate collectively. 

In other news, Polkadot influencer Polkadot Insider revealed recently that the newly launched Euphrates liquidity DApp would provide enhanced liquid staking for the protocol. The DApp would also allow initial single-side LCDOT staking with LDOT and Taiga Protocol’s tDOT pools. 

Polkadot also entered into a strategic partnership with airdrop.com on September 23, in an effort to gather investors’ interest in the protocol. The partnership included an incentivization strategy, as well as marketing strategies in order to make Polkadot visible to the right audience. Polkadot Insider stated that the partnership would enable user support, KYC, airdrops, etc. 

The latest network developments and partnerships of Polkadot are expected to trigger a rally for DOT. Data from CoinMarketCap showed that DOT was trading at $4.04 at the time of writing. The token had lost more than 6% since the beginning of the month. DOT’s market capitalization had also decreased by over $300 million. 

According to the on-chain analytics platform Coinglass, long liquidations for DOT derivatives over the past 24 hours totaled $136,000, against short liquidations of $10,000. The disparity indicated considerable confidence among crypto traders for DOT.