Written by: Sharon, Lucy, BlockBeats Edited by: Jack, BlockBeats
On September 21, at the Polkadot Developer Conference Sub0, Polkadot announced that it would support up to 1,000 parallel chains and more than one million transactions per second through the implementation of a series of improvements and plans. Behind these improvements and plans, it is also clear that the Polkadot ecosystem will undergo "major changes."
1000 Parachains and Millions of TPS
Polkadot announced at the conference that it plans to begin experimenting with a new and revolutionary network expansion solution, asynchronous support, in the next few weeks. The so-called "asynchronous support" refers to "Asynchronous backin", which usually refers to a technology or mechanism that allows system components (such as validators, nodes, or services) to operate without the need for real-time or synchronous interaction.
Parity Technologies, a major contributor to Polkadot, said at the conference that the asynchronously supported version will be deployed to Polkadot's Rococo testnet in about two weeks, and will also be expected to support Polkadot up to 1,000 parallel chains and more than one million transactions per second. At the same time, asynchronous support can halve the parallel chain block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds and increase the block space of each block by 5-10 times.
“Asynchronous support provides flexible scheduling for our future scaling work through Elastic Scaling and Instantaneous Core Time,” said Sophia Gold, head of engineering at Polkadot Parity, in a statement. “Asynchronous support will also enable Polkadot to more than triple the number of validators to around 1,000 by the end of 2024, which is the most important evolution in parachain consensus since we launched parachains nearly two years ago.”
In fact, Polkadot has continued to receive attention from the industry since the official release of Polkadot 1.0 on July 19 this year. The full version of Polkadot 1.0 provides Polkadot's initial architecture based on heterogeneous sharding, including relay chains and connected parachains, all of which are protected by a shared validator set, as well as core functions such as staking systems, on-chain governance, cross-chain communication and transaction routing, and fork-free upgrades.
Polkadot's parachains have also been further expanded. For example, the Uniswap community announced in May that Uniswap V3 will be deployed to the Polkadot parachain Moonbeam. After that, Circle officially launched USDC on the Polkadot mainnet in September to improve the liquidity of the entire ecosystem. However, as the Polkadot ecosystem expands, the issue of community governance has gradually entered a wider field of vision.
Governance problems to be solved
On June 15, Polkadot officially launched the Polkadot OpenGov community governance model. Once released, OpenGov attracted widespread discussion and attention.
As Polkadot's new governance model, OpenGov supports voting on multiple issues at the same time, and everything is directly controlled by the community. At the same time, OpenGov abolished the Council and Technical Committee of Polkadot Governance V1 and replaced them with a newly elected body, the Polkadot Fellowship. The Fellowship has no real power over the network, and cannot change parameters or move assets. It is reported that the Fellowship has 45 members, and the number of members may continue to grow in the future.
In the abolished Polkadot Governance V1, all referendums have the same weight, voters can only vote on one referendum at a time (except for emergency proposals), and the voting period may last for several weeks. In addition, the alternating voting schedule allows voting on public referendums or parliamentary motions every 28 days; OpenGov builds on the voting delegation function of Governance v1 by introducing the function of multi-role delegation, allowing voters to delegate their voting rights to another voter.
Overview of the structure of Polkadot OpenGov, source: Polkadot documentation
The OpenGov governance model has generated some reactions from PolkaWorld, the largest Chinese community of Polkadot. On September 15, PolkaWorld announced that its application for official funding was rejected, so it suspended operations. So far, PolkaWorld has been suspended for nearly a month.
PolkaWorld explained that under the original governance framework, DOT holders would select a council with professional knowledge reserves to evaluate specific proposals. This effective treasury mechanism should be integrated into the OpenGov governance framework; however, under the current OpenGov governance framework, DOT holders often resist all proposals to cash in treasury reserves, which means that many long-term contributors and organizations do not receive the funding they deserve.
In fact, some people have left the Polkadot ecosystem because of this. PolkaWorld published a post on September 18th saying that Brushfam has withdrawn from the Polkadot ecosystem. As an infrastructure developer, Brushfam provides consulting services to many development teams to help companies join Polkadot. PolkaWorld therefore calls on all DOT holders to realize that the treasury exists to promote the development of the ecosystem. If OpenGov leads to the loss of ecological projects, then this may mean that DOT holders are making wrong votes under OpenGov.
Twitter users' comments on OpenGov
Many crypto enthusiasts have also criticized OpenGov. At the same time, PolkaWorld said that the original intention of OpenGov was to make Polkadot's governance more decentralized and improve the efficiency and transparency of the treasury, but the current treasury management mechanism under this framework has led to the repeated rejection of funding applications from many long-term contributors and organizations.
Perhaps while continuing to advance the ecosystem, Polkadot also needs to spend more time improving its community governance solutions to allow more community participants to better invest in construction.