Cryptocurrencies have been volatile lately.

• Value carrier Bitcoin (BTC 2.05%) rose 76% from September to December before falling back 21% from that peak.
• Smart contracts enabler Ethereum (ETH -0.73%) gained 72% in the same upswing but also dropped back even faster, sitting at a 52% discount from the mid-December peak.
• And then there's the Dogecoin (DOGE 1.74%) jokester, always less stable than its peers. The coin soared 361% higher in the fall but then ran into a brick wall. As of March 18, Dogecoin has lost 63% of its market value since December.

That's the unpredictable backdrop to any serious analysis of cryptocurrencies in March 2025. The election drove many coins sky-high, as investors hoped for dramatically more crypto-friendly policies under the Trump administration. But the new team hasn't actually offered much support to crypto owners so far, which explains the swooning price charts in recent weeks.

On that note, let's talk about Polkadot (DOT -2.35%). The official cryptocurrency of the Web3 Foundation saw impressive gains in November and early December, but lost nearly all of it since hitting that multi-year summit. Today, it's trading at $4.40 per coin and has gained a meager 5% in six months.

Polkadot Price data by YCharts

In a broader view, Polkadot has underperformed the S&P 500 (^GSPC 1.08%) stock market index in the past five years. That's a unique result among the cryptos mentioned above. Is the Web3 coin sliding into irrelevance, or should you buy Polkadot hand over fist while it's priced below $5?

What can you do with the new Polkadot platform?

Polkadot is going through dramatic changes to its technical platform. Formerly billed as a cross-chain specialist that could help app developers build programs with the best features from many different blockchains, Polkadot is emerging as a heavy-duty computing system in 2025.

I'm not kidding. Polkadot founder (and Ethereum co-founder) Gavin Wood has grand ambitions for the revamped virtual machine at the heart of Polkadot's smart contract execution system. The so-called JAM protocol (short for Join Accumulate Machine) will soon become Polkadot's main blockchain network. Wood calls it "the first real Web3 supercomputer" in the long run.

Most smart contract platforms provide a limited set of computing tools. In theory, Polkadot can run any code that will compile for a RISC-V processor. This hardware architecture is an open-source alternative to popular solutions like Intel's (INTC -6.89%) x86 processor base or the ARM (ARM -1.46%) designs found in everything from smartwatches to data center monster systems nowadays.

The fully functional high-performance version of Wood's JAM vision isn't here quite yet, but the backing group has provided some tantalizing live demos. Speaking at Shanghai's Fudan University in February, Gavin Wood ran the classic first-person shooter game Doom in the form of a compiled smart contract on the Polkadot blockchain. The game didn't require any special code tweaks and looked as antiquely smooth as ever. Then he explained that Doom wasn't much of a strain on the Polkadot execution system, and each one of its roughly 300 validation nodes could probably run 20 of these demonstrations at full speed.

So maybe it's not that impressive to show a game written for 1993-era Pentium processors, but this was just an early demonstration of what's to come. A few years from now, a more robust Polkadot JAM system could indeed shoulder the type of heavy-duty cloud computing you normally see Amazon (AMZN 1.26%) Web Services and Microsoft (MSFT 0.98%) Azure handle in 2025.

Polkadot's bold ambitions may turn into big wins

Polkadot's backers have big dreams and are taking concrete steps to achieve them. Smart contract veterans like Ethereum and Solana (SOL 2.48%) are also stepping up their contract execution speeds and general usability, but I don't see them exploring fully functional virtual machines like the JAM protocol.

So Polkadot continues to lead the Web3 revolution from the front lines, and I can't wait to see what happens to the underlying cryptocurrency when the first real killer app emerges. Early contenders include the Brave web browser, Mythical Game group's NFL and soccer games, or the Neuroweb information-sharing platform. More likely, it's something I haven't even heard of yet.

The bottom line on Polkadot's potential

Long story short, Polkadot remains one of my favorite cryptocurrencies, despite its stalled price chart. On the upside, the low coin price could set early investors up for greater long-term returns, if and when the Web3 sea change comes in. And I don't know about you, but I think many parts of the online experience are ripe for disruption. Polkadot's Web3 supremacy looks nearly unstoppable.