Polkadot: 239,153 DOT on the relay chain, 1.71 billion on the Asset Hub: the JAM rebuild has no date

The record shows this: the Polkadot relay chain, for years the heart of the network, still carries 239,153.83 DOT on Friday afternoon. On the Asset Hub, the neighbouring blockchain, 1,708,713,905 DOT sit at the same minute. That is 99.986 percent of all tokens. We queried both figures ourselves at the public nodes of the two blockchains rather than taking them from a report. Our assessment follows further down: the technical rebuild towards JAM is already considerably further along than the official roadmap makes it look from outside.

If you hold DOT, this is no footnote from the developer corner. Where your DOT sit determines which address you need in your wallet, whether your staking still pays rewards, and which functions an exchange will offer you at all. The current price provides the frame: Polkadot trades at $1.13 on October 23, 0.87 percent above the previous day, with a daily range of $1.10 to $1.20 (source: CoinGecko). Market capitalisation stands at $1.93 billion.

What is still on the relay chain: 239,153 DOT, measured on October 23

The relay chain is Polkadot's original main blockchain. Block production, balances, staking and the security of the attached parachains all came together there. The storage value Balances.TotalIssuance states how many tokens a Substrate blockchain carries in total. We read it through the public endpoint rpc.polkadot.io and decoded the result: 2,391,538,321,974,268 Planck, the smallest unit. Divided by ten billion, that gives 239,153.83 DOT.

For comparison: the same query on the Asset Hub returns 17,087,139,051,623,268 Planck, or 1,708,713,905 DOT. The relay chain therefore carries 0.014 percent of the total supply. At a price of $1.13 that corresponds to about $270,000 on a blockchain that stood at block 33,558,288 at the time of measurement and reports node version 1.25.0.

The last row says the most. The storage value Staking.ActiveEra returns an empty result on the relay chain. No staking runs there any more. On the Asset Hub, by contrast, era 2332 stands, begun on October 23 at 11:36 UTC. An era is the accounting period after which nominators and validators are allocated their rewards; at Polkadot it lasts 24 hours.

How Polkadot arrived at this state

The move did not begin yesterday. On November 4, 2025, the network completed what it calls the Asset Hub migration. Around 1.63 billion DOT and some 1.5 million accounts changed over from the relay chain to the Asset Hub in a little over eight and a half hours, without block production coming to a halt. Staking followed in a second step. What remained on the old blockchain was only what is technically anchored there: deposits for parachain slots and leftovers nobody has collected.

Alongside that, the community reset monetary policy. A cap of 2.1 billion DOT has applied since March 14, 2026, and annual new issuance fell from around 120 million to about 55 million tokens. We recalculated in October how much headroom is left below the ceiling: 392 million DOT remain, as of October 17.

The road to JAM: four workstreams, one hard fork, no date

JAM stands for Join-Accumulate Machine. It means rebuilding Polkadot away from a blockchain with fixed parachain slots attached to it and towards a platform on which compute jobs are distributed freely. The development plan the project presented on September 10 and has updated since divides the work into four streams. It can be read in the post The Road to JAM on the official Polkadot forum.

PolkaJAM is the production node, the software validators are later meant to run. Minimal Relay, internally AHM v2, shrinks the relay chain's duties to the bare minimum. Offchain Messaging moves the messages between the blockchains out of the blockchain. The Parachain Service, finally, is to handle the finality of the existing parachains on JAM. Finality here means the point from which a block counts as irreversible.

What stands in these four streams describes exactly the state we measured above. In the end no DOT is to sit on the relay chain and no user is to send a transaction there. And the route to that point ends, as the plan presents it, in a hard fork: a protocol change that makes old and new software incompatible.

The plan names no date for that cut. The development reports commit to no point in time for switching the main network over. Integration, performance measurements, tests across the ecosystem, a security review and audits are all still open according to the plan.

What the Coretime blockchain will take over

One detail of the plan concerns projects building on Polkadot directly. Registering a parachain, administering the message channels between the blockchains, and booking compute time at short notice, known as on-demand coretime, all move to the Coretime blockchain. The deposits attached to these functions move with them. Whatever free balance remains goes to the Asset Hub. A guide assigning every affected call to its new place has been announced.

For investors who merely hold DOT, nothing changes as a result. Run a project, though, or move money through an application on Polkadot, and the migration of the calls is worth keeping an eye on. Tools still programmed against the old relay chain addresses will run into nothing after the switch.

Gray Paper v0.8 and 255 validators: where the stress test stands

Progress can be read off two figures. The first is the Gray Paper, the technical specification of JAM. PolkaJAM aims at version 1.0; in the development report of October 8 the software supported version 0.8, with 0.8.1 being worked on. The second figure is the test network. There the number of validators rose from 78 to 255, with several validators running on the same machine. Routine runs reported no errors over 24 hours.

255 validators in a test are no proof of a stable main network. Polkadot runs a similar order of magnitude of active validators in production, but on separate hardware and with real money behind it. The public Parachain Service is so far explicitly a proof of concept, not a finished component.

The renaming to JAM is off the table: referendum 1626 rejected

Over the summer a proposal to rename the DOT token to JAM by the end of 2026 went to a vote. Referendum 1626 was rejected, as recorded on Polkassembly. For investors in Europe that is the most important piece of reassurance in this text. Depending on its design, a renaming could have amounted to a swap, and a swap is something different for tax purposes than a software update.

A second vote, referendum 1954 on a DOT DAO mandate, stood at 73 percent against in mid-October. In both cases the community voted against the grand change of name and for the technical rebuild in the background.

Holding period and tax on an upgrade without a new token

In Germany, gains from selling cryptocurrencies are tax free after a holding period of one year, governed by paragraph 23 of the Income Tax Act as a private disposal transaction. What matters is whether a disposal took place in between. A protocol upgrade in which the same token stays in the same position and no new token is allocated is not a disposal under the finance ministry's guidance on crypto assets. The clock therefore keeps running.

It would look different if a hard fork produced a second, split-off token, as happened with Bitcoin Cash. The JAM plan gives no indication of that, and the rejected renaming is a further argument against it. If you want certainty, have your exchange or wallet output the transaction list from before and after the rebuild, and keep both. For tax purposes what counts is what the records show, not what stood in the forum.

Asset Hub or relay chain: where your DOT actually sit

If your DOT are at an exchange, the exchange handled the move for you, or it would have had a problem since November 2025. It gets interesting with self-custodied holdings. Three things can be settled in a few minutes.

1. Update the wallet. A wallet that has had no update since the end of 2025 may still show the relay chain balance, which is to say nothing. The balance is not gone; the software is simply looking in the wrong place.
2. Switch the network. In wallets with a network selector, Polkadot Asset Hub now sits separately alongside Polkadot Relay Chain. The address stays the same, the account shown is a different one.
3. Check the nomination. Anyone staking can see on the Asset Hub whether their nomination is active in the current era. If nothing appears there, the nomination still points at the retired relay chain and has earned no reward since the move.

We measured the state of the rewards on October 11: 2.77 percent a year with a 28-day unbonding period, at a staking ratio of 53.5 percent. These figures refer to that survey and move with the ratio.

A word on custody, since the occasion is fresh: on October 21 Polkadot reported a key leak at Fearless Wallet affecting 17,286 DOT. Fearless was never the network's official wallet. If you hold your own keys and are going into the wallet anyway to switch networks, you can move the holding onto a device without an internet connection at the same time; our comparison of hardware wallets sets out the differences.

The price on Friday: $1.13 and 97.9 percent below the high

The day's figures: $1.13 on Friday afternoon, up 0.87 percent within 24 hours, a daily low of $1.10 and a daily high of $1.20. A range of around nine percent in a day without major news shows how thin the order book has become. Trading volume stands at $191 million against a market capitalisation of $1.93 billion. The all-time high of $54.98 sits 97.9 percent above the current price.

Two levels can be justified. On the downside the daily low at $1.10, which has held several times over recent days. On the upside the daily high at $1.20, where Friday morning's recovery stalled. A break above $1.20 would be the first signal that buyers want to leave the range; below it, this remains a sideways move with large daily swings.

Our assessment: the rebuild is further along than the communication

In this newsroom's view, the gap between the measurement and the outward presentation stands out. The record shows this: 99.986 percent of all DOT sit on the Asset Hub, staking runs there in era 2332, and the relay chain carries 239,153 DOT and no active era. The target state of the JAM plan, no tokens and no user transactions on the relay chain, has therefore been reached in practice on the two points that affect holders. There is still no date for the switch, and the Parachain Service is a proof of concept.

That leads us to this: the risk of the rebuild no longer sits with the balances but with the parachains and their tooling. Against that, precisely this part is the least tested, and a hard fork without a date is hard to plan around, for exchanges as much as for projects. We draw no price view from it; the market has visibly not rewarded the technical progress of the past twelve months.

Polkadot rebuild: with no date, all that counts is where your DOT sit

1. Open your wallet and check whether it knows the Asset Hub. If you want to build up or shift DOT first, the terms are in the crypto exchange comparison.
2. Check your nomination against the current era on the Asset Hub. If you stake through a provider instead, the terms are in the staking platform comparison.
3. Secure your transaction records from before and after the rebuild. Which tools carry the holding period per position is shown in the crypto tax tool comparison.

(As of October 23, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)