The Polkadot Platform Overview: Is It Worth Your Attention?

In 2016, Gavin Wood, who was one of the people who started the Ethereum project, put together a team of developers to work on the Polkadot project. Today, Polkadot is more than just a cryptocurrency; it’s a huge ecosystem with two working “parent” blockchains, dozens of projects launched on them from different fields, and the DOT token itself, which is in the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

What is Polkadot and How Does It Work

Polkadot is an open source, decentralized blockchain. It is a basic network that makes it possible to build parachains on its own. This makes it easier for new projects to build blockchains.

The network makes it possible to put together different blockchains and their DeFi assets into a single ecosystem. Even the word “parachain” was used for the first time. It is thought of as separate blockchains that connect to the main network and have their own tokens. Their functions can be changed to fit different needs.

If certain conditions are met, a system that doesn’t use blockchain technology can become a parachain.

Who came up with the idea for Polkadot?

Polkadot’s history starts with the Ethereum project, or more specifically, with Dr. Gavin Wood, who was one of the co-founders of Ethereum (PhD in Software Engineering). He has been making software for more than twenty years, both inside and outside of the cryptocurrency space.

He wrote the code for the first version of Ethereum that worked, and he also put together the Yellow Paper for the project. But Dr. Wood is best known for making the Solidity programming language, which is used on the Ethereum network for smart contracts.

In January 2016, he quit his job as Ethereum’s CTO and main developer. His leaving has been explained in different ways, even by Dr. Wood himself, but they all boil down to the fact that he was unhappy with how slowly Ethereum 2.0 was being made.

Later, in 2016, Dr. Wood started making a new cryptocurrency that would “deliver the promises that Ethereum could not deliver.”

The Parity Technologies team also made their own distributed network. Blockchain is the backbone of the decentralized internet, and Parity is a multi-wallet that uses blockchain.

Substrate is a simple and advanced place to build blockchains on Polkadot. Programmers can make circuits that meet a specific need. For the Chainlink project, the most important thing was making oracles, which are services that smart contracts use to get information. For the Acala Network, the most important thing was making decentralized applications. It’s possible to make more than one chain (different blockchains can interact within 1 network).

Peter Chaban, who has a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Oxford, and G. Wood started working together in the summer of 2017. They set up the Web3 Foundation, which makes software for the internet’s decentralized protocols. Robert Habermeyer was another person who worked on the project. Important dates:

In October 2017, there was an ICO for the project. In three days, $145 million was raised. During the first sale, 5 million DOT were bought by private investors and businesses.

• The Web3 Foundation sold another 500,000 tokens in June 2019.
• In July 2019, Kusama, an experimental network, went live. It lets developers try out their ideas without restrictions.
• In May 2020, the main network began to work.
• In July 2020, the Web3 Foundation sold private tokens worth $43.6 million.
• In August 2020, the coins became free to trade on the exchanges.

The Polkadot network is called Ethereum’s killer. On Ethereum, unlike Bitcoin, you may build arbitrary “smart contracts” and issue ERC-20 tokens.

Gavin has said Polkadot is not a competition to Ethereum and will find its own niche.

The Polkadot Cryptocurrency

Since 2017, the Polkadot network has been using DOT, which is its own cryptocurrency with the same name. The Polkadot website says that the DOT token is used for three different things:

Governance: The people who own tokens have full control over the protocol. Members of Relay Chain (people who own DOTs) will be able to do everything that only miners on other platforms can do. This includes managing special events like protocol updates and fixes.

Game theory encourages people who have tokens to act in a fair way. This way, good network members get rewarded, and bad network members lose their stake in the network. This makes sure that the network is safe.

Connect: Link tokens are used to add new parachains. Associated tokens are deleted to get rid of obsolete or useless parachains.

In total, Polkadot issued 10 million tokens. But once trading began, the token was “valued” 100 times. So, the 10 million tokens that were created at first turned into 1 billion tokens that are now used on the network. Polkadot’s market value didn’t change because the new coins were worth about 1/100 of the old ones. However, the change made the token easier to use.

In Conclusion

Polkadot (DOT) is becoming more important in the decentralized finance industry, and it is also becoming one of the most widely used cryptocurrencies. The whole ecosystem of Polkadot is getting better and better over time. The Polkadot development team has a clear plan for how to make blockchain interactions even better in the future and take the platform to the next level.