# 2023 Highlights - Parachain Summit: staying close to the ecosystem. - Right before Polkadot Decoded, we held the Parachain Summit with the aim of being close and discussing key topics with the most important teams in the ecosystem, from Parachains to Infrastructure teams and also dApp developers. - As an example, the Metadata Project was born as a key discussion within the Summit. this project aims to build a resilient and future-proof mechanism for offline signers to connect to the Polkadot-SDK Runtimes. It allows for an evergreen app usable across all teams that prevents blind signing, a key feature in light of recent events. - Parachain renewals: Managing the needs of new and old teams. - Managing the capacity of Polkadot Auctions was key to ensure that productive teams and new emerging teams had a way of connecting to Polkadot. This required deep understanding of the ecosystem paired with the ability to schedule the needed auctions on-chain. Even with it's hurdles, every team managed to have a space on Polkadot! - HydraDX DCA: Polkadot as a complete system, not as a collection of chains. - With the new Polkadot Fellowship emerging, Polkadot needed a way of paying for the salaries of these people. At the same time, HydraDX -an innovatve DEX of Polkadot- released it's DCA tool: a way for non-speculative trading. This allowed the Polkadot Treasury to place an order to sell DOT for USDT to pay for the salaries, showing how Polkadot as a system can interact in an extremely productive manner. - Stablecoins on Polkdaot: Primitives to unlock DeFi. - After the successful launch of USDT on Polkadot on 2022, 2023 continued to be a year to delve deeper into the world of Stablecoins. In May 2023, Binance added support for Native USDT on Polkadot, allowing users to use this token from Binance directly. And later in September 2023, Circle launched USDC on Polkadot as a native token, thus completing the two most sought-after stablecoins in the market. - Asset Conversion on AssetHub: A Polkadot UX Enabler - - OZ developing runtimes for Polkadot - First beta release expected for EOY -