A Brief History of Polkadot
The history of the creation of Polkadot is closely connected with Ethereum. Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and developer of the Solidity programming language for smart contracts, left Ethereum in 2016 to create a new blockchain.
There is an opinion that Gavin Wood was unhappy with the slow development of Ethereum 2.0. Many ETH users repeatedly face the problem of low bandwidth, which causes queues in the network and increases fees. Wood decided to create a new scalable platform with a minimum network fee Polkadot.
In the summer of 2017, Wood began a partnership with Peter Chaban that resulted in the founding of the Web3 Foundation. The goal of the project was to create protocol software for a decentralized Internet, in which users independently own their data, transactions are secure, and information exchange is decentralized.
At the moment, Polkadot has the following structure:
- Relay Chain — the main blockchain Polkadot, which integrates parachains, is responsible for security and interoperability.
- Parachains — blockchains operating in parallel to the main Relay Chain blockchain, which have different architectures, control systems, tokens.
- Bridge — connects parachains with external blockchains (for example, Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.).
In 2017, the Polkadot ICO took place, the project raised about $140 million. Then another $100 million was raised in 2019 and 2020. In May 2020, the Polkadot beta mode was launched. To date, the Polkadot blockchain is popular in the crypto community. The main currency of Polkadot is the DOT token.
Features of Polkadot
- The main distinguishing feature is the provision of interoperability between blockchains.
- Opportunities to create a new blockchain compatible with the entire ecosystem.
- A good development team with great experience and reputation in the crypto community.
- Competitive scalability due to the use of parachains, allowing anyone to connect without slowing down the network.
- Anyone can verify the reliability of the network or help in finding errors, since the project is open source.
- Reward and penalty system. All network participants from validators to ordinary users can receive a reward for helping to develop the network or a fine for actions that do not comply with the consensus. According to the developers, this will help ensure the reliable functioning of the project.
- The purpose of the DOT token. The token allows the holder to vote on amendments to the program code. All important project events are accompanied by user voting. The token is used for staking and paying rewards to control nodes. Adding new parachains and deleting inactive ones is paid for with the DOT token.
Disadvantages of Polkadot
- Currently, there are many projects that solve the interoperability problem of blockchains. Consequently, there is high competition and it is not yet possible to say for sure whether it will also be successful and popular in the future.
