According to CryptoPotato, Polkadot has recently made significant improvements to its network performance, increasing its transaction processing speed and capacity. Alongside these technical advancements, the protocol is also considering a potential $8.8 million sponsorship deal with American soccer club Inter Miami.

Polkadot has been in the news recently due to several important advancements. It has enabled Asynchronous Backing on its network, an optimized approach for validating parachain blocks by the Relay Chain. The Relay Chain, a central chain of critical importance to Polkadot's ecosystem, facilitates communication and interoperability between different parachains and handles the inter-chain messaging passing (XCMP) protocol. Following this upgrade, blocks are produced twice as fast, and available block space has increased by 6-10 times. The development has also resulted in 3-5 times more extrinsic per block and higher utilization of parachain blocks.

The team at Polkadot announced that Async Backing has increased throughput by 8 times without compromising security. This enhancement paves the way for supporting Web3 applications across various verticals, including gaming and DeFi, bringing Web2 scale within the reach of Web3. This is particularly crucial for large-scale platforms like Mythical Games.

A few weeks ago, Polkadot released the Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM) Gray Paper, a prospective design to promote the advancement of the Relay Chain. It combines elements of Polkadot and Ethereum, providing a global singleton permissionless object environment, similar to the smart-contract environment pioneered by Ethereum, paired with secure sideband computation parallelized over a scalable node network.

In addition to these technical developments, Polkadot is also considering a partnership with American soccer club Inter Miami. Nico Zini, Partnership Marketing and Media Rights for the sports team CF, revealed that the team might collaborate with the blockchain protocol on an $8.8 million sponsorship deal. Notably, Inter Miami's biggest star is Argentine legend Lionel Messi, and its co-owner is David Beckham. This would be Polkadot's second attempt to enter the soccer world, following a previous opportunity to become FC Barcelona's official jersey sponsor, which eventually went to Spotify.