According to their light paper, they are a next-generation blockchain protocol that unites an entire network of purpose-built blockchains, allowing them to operate seamlessly together at scale.
Basically, it’s a multi-chain framework platform that is designed to offer interoperabiltiy and scalability solutions for those blockchains that are built on it.
💭 Polkadot History 💭
The original Polkadot whitepaper was released back in October of 2016. It was the brainchild of Dr Gavin Wood who was one of the founders of Parity Technologies. He was one of the original co-founders of Ethereum.
In 2017, Dr Gavin Wood and a fellow Parity founder founded the Web3 foundation. This would support the research and development of the Polkadot network.
In October of 2017, the Web3 foundation conducted the Polkadot public sale and they were able to raise $145 million.
10 days after, someone was able to accidentally and permanently freeze most of the funds in the wallets.
They still had enough money to develop after this and they managed to complete two subsequent private sales
📈 Polkadot Tech Stack 📈
Polkadot is built on top of Substrate blockchain framework. Substrate is another product that was developed by the protocol team.
Polkadot is a sharded blockchain that is broken into a number of other Parachains.
– The Relay Chain: This is the heart of the polkadot network which is responsible for security and the cross shard interoperabiltiy.
– The Parachains: These are the sovereign blockchains in the network that will have their own token and will be optimised fro their own use cases.
– The Bridges: These are special blockchains that will allow the Parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem to communicate with external networks (Bitcoin, Ethereum etc)
Sharded blockchains have immense value when it comes to scalability. This all comes down to the concept of parallel execution and transactions.
🗳 Polkdot Consensus 🗳
On the polkadot network, we have 4 distinct roles that manage the state of the blockchain. These are the Validators, the Collators, the Nominators and the Fisherman.
Nominators are basically tasked with selecting the validators on the network. They will have to stake DOT in order to be a nominator. Validators are the nodes that secure the relay chain. This is done by staking the DOT.
Collators maintain the transactional state in the individual shards and then the fisherman are tasked with reporting bad behaviour to the validators.
In terms of the consensus mechanism, Polkadot have a unique mechanism that is called GRANDPA. It’s a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
🍴️ No Fork Upgrades 🍴
Polkadot has developed a governance system that is able to completely bypass the need for any sort of forks. The blockchains can effectively update themselves without the need for any sort of human intervention.
The Polkadot blockchain has a system of transparent on-chain voting mechanisms built into the relay chain. Participants in the relay chain will vote on important development initiatives aimed and upgrading and securing the Polkadot network
💲️ DOT Tokenomics 💲
There are three distinct purposes that are fulfilled by the DOT token. These include, staking, fees, bonding & governance.
When DOT was initially sold, there was a 10 million DOT supply. Polkadot held one of its first on-chain governance votes to debase the token by 100.
The target inflation rate is set to 10% with a total supply staked of about 50%.
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📜 Disclaimer 📜
The information contained herein is for informational purposes only. Nothing herein shall be construed to be financial legal or tax advice. The content of this video is solely the opinions of the speaker who is not a licensed financial advisor or registered investment advisor. Trading Forex, cryptocurrencies and CFDs poses considerable risk of loss. The speaker does not guarantee any particular outcome.
