On Friday (December 31, 2021) the British computer scientist Dr. Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum ($ ETH), Polkadot ($ DOT) and Kusama ($ KSM), on “What the Polkadot Project Achieved in 2021”. and what lies ahead of us in 2022.
Here is an overview of Polkadot using information from the Polkadot website:
“Polkadot is a network protocol with which any data – not just tokens – can be transmitted over blockchains. This means that Polkadot is a true multi-chain application environment where things like cross-chain registers and cross-chain calculations are possible. Polkadot can transfer this data over public, open, approval-free blockchains, as well as private, approved blockchains.
“This makes it possible to create applications that receive authorized data from a private blockchain and use it in a public blockchain. For example, a school’s private, approved academic filing chain could send evidence to a smart contract for final exam in a public chain. “
Polkadot “combines a network of heterogeneous blockchains, called parachains and parathreads.” These chains “connect to the Polkadot relay chain and are secured by it” and can “also be connected to external networks via bridges”.
And this is what the Binance Academy says about Polkadots Parachains and Relay Chain:
“A single blockchain in the Polkadot ecosystem is called a parachain (parallel blockchain) while the main chain is called a relay chain. The idea is that parachains and the relay chain can easily exchange information at any time. One could imagine parachains to be similar to individual shards in the planned implementation of ETH 2.0.
“Every developer, every company or every individual can build their custom parachain using substrates, a framework for creating cryptocurrencies and decentralized systems. Once the custom chain is connected to the Polkadot network, it becomes interoperable with all other parachains on the network. “
The Binance Academy says the following about the use cases for the $ DOT token:
“Similar to most other blockchain infrastructure projects, Polkadot has its own native token. Known as DOT, it serves as a network token, just like ETH is the token for Ethereum and BTC is the token for Bitcoin.
“There are several use cases for this token. First, it grants token holders governance rights over the entire Polkadot platform. This includes setting network charges, agreeing on general network upgrades, and provisioning or removing parachains.
“DOT was also designed to facilitate network consensus through staking. Similar to other networks that involve staking, all DOT holders have an incentive to abide by the rules at all times. Where from? Well, if they don’t, they could lose their share.
“The third option is to use DOT for bonding. This is required as new parachains are added to the polkadot ecosystem. The bonded DOT is blocked during a bonding period. It will be released as soon as the binding period has expired and the parachain has been removed from the ecosystem. “
Below you will find important excerpts from Dr. Wood on some of the key achievements of 2021 and key areas of work for 2022.
Highlights 2021
Polkadot source code size
“Even at its core, Polkadot is likely to surpass two million lines of code spread across implementations, tools, user interfaces, and key features, which shouldn’t be all that surprising given the overall ambitions of the project, but still an amazing amount of coding has been going on since last year when I estimated it to be around 600,000. “
Marking out on polkadot
“Last year we had around six thousand individual accounts on Polkadot placements and thus contributed to the economic security of the Polkadot network. This year, over twenty thousand accounts on Polkadot, in addition to improvements to the staking logic of Substrates, elect a total of 297 validators to securely maintain the network. “
Kusama and polkadot usage
“At the end of this year we will now see 31 substrate-based mainnets live. The various parachains on Polkadot and Kusama have created almost 3 million user accounts and are operated by 6,000 validators. In the meantime, 540 forkless upgrades have been managed, most of them through decentralized governance processes. “
Launches
“We had an incredible year with the introduction of parachains, slot auctions and crowdloans via not just one but two relay chain networks: Kusama comes live at the beginning of the year and Polkadot will follow in December …
“In block # 7.229.126, the nodes of the Polkadot mainnet were each updated to the runtime version 9110 on the basis of a binding, decentralized voting process. In a world first on several levels, several thousand nodes were distributed all over the world, operated by thousands of different people, from maintaining a “normal” mono-chain in the shortest possible time to operating a fragmented, heterogeneous multi-chain around the next Build and Create Block – About Six Seconds …
“Polkadot closed its first five auctions and saw them every launch days ago, completing the final phase of its launch process. In total, well over 100 million DOT (106 million, that’s a whopping 9% of the total offer) were blocked for two years in order to rent out these first slots. “
Substrate Builder Program
“Substrate Builders Program rocks: 163 new teams applied for a place in the program in the course of 2021, 36 of which were lucky enough to be accepted for a place. During the year, 53 technical reviews were conducted for the teams in the program, with eleven teams reaching all set milestones. “
2022 forecast
More Polkadot Parachain slots go live
“We will bring to life the prospect of scaled-up hyperconnectivity under a single security roof that Polkadot offers as more Parachain teams win auctions and join the Polkadot party. With more than 150 multi-purpose chains under development, many of which are already equipped with test nets, there is much to be expected. “
Decentralized bridges
“We can also look forward to the introduction of decentralized bridges, first the Parity bridge, which will connect Polkadot to Kusama, and later that of Snowfork, which will connect Polkadot to Ethereum.”
Code and technology improvements
“On the core side, we’ll be spending some time redesigning and optimizing the code and introducing new technologies that will help reduce the costs and latency associated with message delivery.
“Our goal is to enable each and every one of Polkadot’s parachains to approach our goal of 1,000 sTPS per shard. (sTPS is our standard transactions per second, a cross-chain standard in terms of what counts as a transaction and basically means a balance transfer from one pre-existing account to another pre-existing account with neither account being read or the block was written.) “
Parathreads
Parathreads are “an idea for parachains to temporarily (in blocks) participate in polkadot security without having to lease a dedicated parachain slot” – something that “is achieved by economically dividing the scarce resource of a parachain slot among several competing resources” happens (Parathreads). ”Chains that otherwise could not acquire a full Parachain slot or do not find this economically viable can participate in the common security of Polkadot – but with a corresponding fee per executed block. It also provides a graceful exit for parachains that no longer need a dedicated parachain slot but want to keep using the relay chain.
Wood says that “the Polkadot team’s efforts will be focused on parathreading so that teams that do not win an auction can still ensure they have the security Polkadot guarantees and take full advantage of XCMP.”
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions of the author or any other person mentioned in this article are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment or other advice. Investing in or trading in crypto assets carries the risk of financial loss.
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