Join Polkadot Founders Gavin Wood and Rob Habermeier Tomorrow to Discuss the Launch of the First 5 Parachains
Bits of Signum 12.17.21
It’s a good night for an update on Polkadot - the Polkadot parachain launch process, which is the final phase of rolling out the network, is happening in batches of five. The first batch ended this week on December 16.
Tomorrow, Saturday, December 18th at 12pm ET / 6pm CET, the first five parachains will officially launch on the Polkadot network, and there will be a gathering in which founders Gavin Wood and Rob Habermeier will be answering questions from the community. We are hoping you may be able to join the broadcast on Twitter.
The Polkadot team is gathering questions from its community that will be answered on Saturday. Many questions have already been submitted—interestingly, the first two that came in (below) give a sense for how Polkadot treats communications. The builders in the Polkadot ecosystem are developers who have spent the last four years heads-down coding with a goal of delivering a truly decentralized network.
Polkadot is the flagship project by Web3 Foundation, a Swiss Foundation founded to facilitate a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web. The Web3 Foundation aims to communicate in a way that educates users on the ethos of Web3 generally, supports all projects in the ecosystem equally, and provides participants with useful information. The Web3 Foundation website states -
Our passion is delivering Web 3.0, a decentralized and fair internet where users control their own data, identity and destiny.
To understand how Polkadot auctions work, it’s important to first understand parachains, which are individual blockchains running in parallel within the Polkadot and Kusama networks. The Polkadot architecture will start with roughly 100 parachains which are connected to and secured by a central chain, known as Polkadot’s Relay Chain.
The parachains that are launching on the Polkadot network are Layer-1 networks, similar to Ethereum and Bitcoin. The Polkadot network itself is a Layer-0 network, securing the parachains and other blockchains. The DOT is used to bond any blockchain/parachain to the central security of the Polkadot Network. One often hears that Polkadot is differentiated in its is ability to enable “interoperability” allowing blockchains to communicate and send assets to each other. We think of it as more similar to Linux than other Layer-1 networks.
Below are the five projects which secured enough DOT from their respective communities to win an auction slot. Also below are more details on Moonbeam and Acala, the first and largest parachain auctions, from their respective AMAs this past week. Moonbeam is a general purpose blockchain which offers existing applications on Ethereum the ability to access the Polkadot security layer, Polkadot’s high transaction throughput, and to escape the Ethereum gas fees. As Gavin Wood has said in the past, it is not likely that the future version of the internet will require users to pay gas fees for every action as one does on Ethereum (think of paying for a Google search). Acala is the largest decentralized finance network and liquidity hub in the Polkadot ecosystem, which can be described as an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform optimized for DeFi.
Moonbeam Overview & Launch Update
Overview: Moonbeam is the parachain that aims to serve as an EVM compatible blockchain with the ability to onboard applications from Ethereum to Polkadot. The community has grown organically from only a handful of people in 2020 to a very sizable community of builders in 2021. In its 2022 outlook today, Moonbeam indicated that because they are a parachain on Polkadot, they will be taking advantage of “XCM” (cross chain messaging). In a few weeks, we will be able to see more products demonstrating interoperability in action.
Moonbeam’s Canary Network, Moonriver, launched only four months ago. A few key metrics in these four months:
70+ live integrations
13m+ substrate and EVM transactions
3000 ERC-20 Tokens
359,000+ wallet addresses
80 Prominent Projects
58 Moonriver Collators
Acala Overview & Launch Update -
Acala is the largest decentralized finance network and liquidity hub of Polkadot. It’s a Layer-1 smart contract platform that’s scalable, Ethereum-compatible, and optimized for DeFi and scaling DApps to Polkadot. The Acala team has developed an EVM+ Toolkit that combines EVM and Substrate in an easy-to-use SDK for developers. Thanks to Substrate’s scalable framework, Acala can process transactions with minimal gas fees paid in any of a variety of tokens.
Acala was the first Polkadot parachain winner and recently hosted a conversation to go over the platform's near-term plans and progress thus far. The platform’s EVM+ offers wallet compatibility (MetaMask, Truffle, Hardhat) and Substrate customization so that developers can manage their own chains to scale their users and assets. The platform has built in features such as a decentralized stablecoin (aUSD), DEX, and liquid DOT Staking, and is entirely Ethereum-compatible. Acala currently has 35+ people on its team, of which 90% are engineers, economists, and designers. The platform has integrated with US Fintech app Current.com to provide it’s 3 million users DeFi access. Acala also provides DOT and LDOT to Compound Gateway, Compound’s multi-chain money market. Token transfers on the Acala network will be enabled by Q1 2022.
Key Stats (Acala and Karura):
830,000+ community members
72,000 Account Holders
45+ Ecosystem Partners
$300M TVL(Total Value Locked) for Karura
45+ Ecosystem Partners
Full disclosure - in 2019 Signum Growth came across Polkadot in its search for a blockchain that had the ability to power high transaction throughput, mass market applications - we are clearly biased as we joined the Web3 Foundation as an Advisor in 2019!