What is Polkadot (DOT)?
Polkadot (DOT) is a network that connects individual blockchains to each other. It allows these blockchains to share data in a decentralized way.
Similar to Cosmos Network, Polkadot (DOT) focuses on solving two main problems of blockchain: interoperability and scalability of the network.
Polkadot’s vision is to create a “Decentralized Web”, where our identities and data will be controlled by ourselves, not by any organization or government.
Features of Polkadot
DOT can cross-blockchain transfers of any type of data or asset, not just tokens. Connecting to Polkadot brings you the ability to interoperate with a wide variety of blockchains in the Polkadot network.
Economic & transactional scalability
Polkadot offers unprecedented economic scalability by enabling a common set of validators to secure multiple blockchains. Polkadot gives transactional scalability by spreading transactions across multiple parallel blockchains.
Easy blockchain innovation
Create a custom blockchain in minutes by using the Substrate framework. Connect chain to Polkadot and get interoperability and security from day one. This ease of development helps Polkadot’s network grow.
Forkless and future-proof
It can upgrade without hard forks to integrate new features or fix bugs. This capability enables DOT to easily adapt to changes and upgrade itself as better technologies become available.
Security for everyone
Polkadot’s novel data availability and validity scheme accepts chains to interact with each other in a meaningful way. The chains remain independent in their governance but united in their security.
User-driven network governance
It has a sophisticated governance system where all stakeholders have a voice. The upgrades to the network are coordinated on-chain and enacted autonomously, ensuring that the development of Polkadot reflects the values of the community and avoids stagnation.
Highlights of Polkadot
This is basically the same way Tezos is doing, it’s Voting to vote on Update Protocol proposals.
Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS)
NPoS is quite similar to DPoS. Brothers lock their DOT, authorize a stake to a Validator to validate and add new blocks to the chain, then Share the block reward.
The key difference here is that the Validators will be selected randomly from the qualified ones, and this will change several times per day.
The design of Para Chains does not require it to be necessarily Blockchain. As long as it can provide verifiable evidence by the Validators assigned to it.
All Para Chains connect to Relay Chains via proof of stake on the Relay Chain. So the more Para Chains, the more secure and secure the network.
Interactions on Para Chains are handled in parallel. So the transactions can be spread across Para Chains so that Polkadot Network can process more transactions at the same time.
Substrate can simply be understood as a framework to help you build blockchain more easily.
Substrate is not part of Polkadot, but projects built with Substrate can run natively on Polkadot. You can use Substrate to build new Blockchains right now without waiting for Polkadot Launch Mainnet.
What is DOT?
DOT is the native token of Polkadot Network. DOT with Polkadot is like BTC with Bitcoin, ETH with Ethereum.
Here are the three main functions of DOT in the Polkadot ecosystem from the user’s perspective:
- On governance: “DOT Holders Control Polkadot’s Future”. In addition to rewards from staking, DOT holders manage special events like protocol upgrades and bug fixes.
- Used as a reward for staking activities: DOT token will be considered as a reward for those dedicated to maintaining network security, ensuring the network works smoothly.
- Transaction fee on relay chain and para chains.
The idea of Polkadot (DOT) includes a mainchain (Relay Chain), a layer 2 scaling solution (Para Chain), and a bridge with other blockchains (Bridges Chain). Inside:
Relay Chain: The Central Chain of Polkadot. It is responsible for connecting validates of Para chains. In detail, the validators will stake DOT above to protect the network, transactions including network administration. The transaction fee on the Relay Chain is higher than that on the Para Chain.
Para Chain: Is a solution to expand the network of Polkadot. Basically Para Chain is not necessarily a blockchain. It can be a Dapp or a Data structure, as long as it can provide proof that can be validated by the validators assigned to that Para Chain. Most of the computations that happen on the entire Polkadot network will occur on Para Chain.
Bridges Chain: It can be envisioned as a bridge between Polkadot Network and other blockchains, providing interoperability between networks with each other.
Robert Habermeier – Founder: has research and development experience in blockchain, distributed systems, and encryption. A longtime member of the Rust community, he focused on leveraging the features of programming languages to build highly efficient, parallel solutions.
Dr. Gavin Wood – Founder: Gavin started in blockchain technology as a co-founder and CTO of Ethereum. He invented the basic components of the blockchain industry, including Solidity, Proof-of-Author consensus, and Whisper. At Parity, Gavin is currently pioneering innovation with Substrate and Polkadot. He coined the term Web 3.0 in 2014 and was President of the Web3 Foundation.
Peter Czaban – Founder: Peter is the Chief Technology Officer of the Web3 Foundation, where he works on helping develop the next generation of distributed technology. He holds a Master of Engineering from Oxford University, majoring in Engineering Science, where he focuses on Bayesian Machine Learning. He has worked in the defense data analysis, finance and data analysis industries.
Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Polkadot immediately mentions a major public network and network protocol that runs this protocol. Polkadot is intended to be an open and free project, the protocol specification is under the Creative Commons license, and the code is set under the FLOSS license. The project is developed in a way that is open to and accepting useful contributions anywhere. An RFC system, unlike the Python Improvement Proposal, would allow a means of publicly collaborating on protocol changes and upgrades.