Polkadot Builders Keep Building
Bits of Signum | Bill Laboon, Moonbeam, President Biden-ESG, Polkadot's X-Factor (XCM)
“Polkadot is basically a meta platform for developing your own blockchain. The idea is that there’s no single solution to solve all problems, so it allows developing blockchains which can be specialized for some specific purposes.” - Bill Laboon in Blockchain.com interview
Happy US Open Finals Sunday! We thought it was a good time to do a quick update, in answer to the question, “What is going on at Polkadot?” In short, the heads down building continues. We discuss Moobeam, one of the leading teams built on Polkadot, and new interoperability pathways that are being forged. Their announcement below backed our conviction that has been building over three years of working with Web3 Foundation - Polkadot is simply vertical agnostic, use-case agnostic software that operates in the background as a highly secure, future-proofed and regulatory compliant way for entrepreneurs to build new applications as blockchains.
Separately, we have been waiting for President Biden’s pending update to the March Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets - this week we got the first response as reported by Blockworks on the first response - Climate and Energy of Crypto Assets in the United States. It urges developers to build on technologies that are more environmentally friendly. This seemed like a surprising attack on Bitcoin, given it has has so much support to date as the only digital asset that has crossed the chasm as a recognized commodity. However, the the report also states, “An alternative, less energy-intensive consensus mechanism, called Proof of Stake (PoS), was estimated to consume up to 0.28 billion kilowatt-hours per year in 2021, less than 0.001% of global electricity usage.” See Messari chart below - Polkadot and Tezos are the only protocols that are there so far, and Ethereum’s 2.0 plans to follow their lead in answering the ESG question.
We were also excited to read Steven Alexopoulos' JP Morgan’s “primer” on Web 3.0 and to see the cover, which gives Dr. Gavin Wood, Founder of Polkadot and ex CTO/Co-Founder of Ethereum, a shout out for coining the term in 2014.
Stay tuned for a thread on crypto banking - we co-hosted a podcast with ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood, interviewing Caitlin Long, Founder and CEO of Custodia, which was extremely educational and insightful. Thank you Caitlin and Cathie!
Connected Contracts Could Be a Key Component of Web3
Despite the turbulence of the crypto markets, developers in the Polkadot ecosystem continue to build. Moonbeam, Polkadot’s largest parachain by market cap, announced last week its integration with cross-chain messaging protocol LayerZero to help facilitate cross-chain communication with other platforms that have integrated with LayerZero. LayerZero currently supports messaging with Ethereum, Binance’s BNB chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Fantom. Developers in the Moonbeam ecosystem can now use LayerZero, Axelar, and, of course, Polkadot’s own XCM messaging standards to build cross-chain applications.
Why Does This Matter?
Integrating all of these messaging standards makes Moonbeam a great starting point for developers to build applications that have optionality and composability in the future. By building on Moonbeam, developers minimize the opportunity cost of choosing to build on a blockchain network that doesn’t gain traction with users. They can focus on building their application, knowing that it will be ready for user demand, regardless of where such user demand originates. In other words, they will have the greatest optionality in terms of which networks to connect to and be future-proofed in a multi-chain world.
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What’s a Connected Contract?
Moonbeam is implementing these cross-chain messaging platforms so that developers can create applications that interact across different blockchain ecosystems on the backend using what they call Connected Contracts. Moonbeam defines Connected Contracts as “the cooperation of smart contracts on the backend of the DApps users interact with on the blockchain. These contracts are connected across blockchains so there is no need to bridge assets in order to use assets in any application, on any connected chain.” Connected Contracts on Moonbeam are able to work with any user, token, or service, regardless of the underlying blockchain. This means users of the apps won’t have to worry about swapping or bridging assets to interact with other ecosystems and can have a seamless, optimized experience.
Example of Connected Contract functionality on Moonbeam using Axelar
Recently, Moonbeam and Astar labs announced that users can now move tokens between the two chains using Polkadot’s XCM.
As JP Morgan noted in their recent “In Focus” research report,
“Polkadot Founder, Gavin Wood, coined the term Web3.0, which he envisions as an ‘open and decentralized vision of the internet’ where users can exchange money and information without the need for a company acting as a middleman.”
These decentralized messaging protocols are making it easier for money and information to flow, and Moonbeam is building to be the top of the funnel for developers looking to innovate in the Web3 world. For more on Connected Contracts, check out Moonbeam’s blog post.
Polkadot Proves to be Future-Proofed on ESG
The White House released a report on Proof-of-Work crypto mining, highlighting that these protocols contribute to global greenhouse gas “emissions, additional pollution, noise and other local impacts.” The report also points out that “less energy-intensive consensus mechanism, called Proof of Stake (PoS), estimated to consume up to 0.28 billion kilowatt-hours per year in 2021, less than 0.001% of global electricity usage,” and could be the solution to this problem.
Messari Report from July 27, 2022 on the most eco-friendly blockchain networks - Polkadot and Tezos are in a league of their own.
Join Polkadot Forum to Discuss the Future of the Network
The Polkadot community also announced the launch of the Polkadot Forum–a public message board for the community to discuss the development of the Polkadot ecosystem. As stated on the page itself, all posts on the board “should be made based on the long-term ecosystem benefits instead of the short-term individual profits.” Polkadot’s Lead Developer, Shawn Tabrizi, has already written a post highlighting Polkadot’s XCM (cross-consensus messaging) technology. XCM, as noted above, allows different blockchains to communicate with each other in a completely decentralized way and allows Polkadot to fulfill its role as a general, use-case agnostic, highly secure, Layer-0 metaprotocol.
Source: Polkaproject, SGC Analysis
UPCOMING Polkadot Developer Event - Sub0 - Nov 28-29:
For those interested in getting a glimpse into Polkadot’s developer-first community, Sub0, Polkadot’s largest developer conference, will be in Lisbon on November 28 and 29 later this year. Tickets are free and will be available in September. You can sign up to receive updates on the event here.
Disclaimer: SGC is an Advisor to Web3 Foundation