Today we talk about Polkadot, which ranks 14th in market capitalization. Its token name is dot. The full white paper has 21 pages. This is the most emotional white paper I have seen so far. For example, the article talks about the darkness of the encrypted world and quotes Mark Twain: "Governments and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason" - Governments and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason. Waiting for many similar words to express some of his views on the issues before the blockchain. Although Gavin Wood has a PhD in science and engineering, he feels that he is also a man of temperament.
Let’s talk about Lin Jiawen, the founder of Polkadot. We all know that Ethereum was actually proposed by V God, and Lin Jiawen is the person who truly realized and built the foundation of Ethereum. He is a person who has studied the technology and history of Ethereum in depth. Everyone knows the importance of Lin Jiawen as the founder of Ethereum. Lin Jiawen almost wrote the earliest C++ version of the Ethereum client by himself. In 2014, Buterin launched the Ethereum project. He personally wrote the initial white paper, then initiated crowdfunding and organized development. Lin Jiawen joined Ethereum as CTO, and then wrote a book-level yellow paper, describing the most detailed logic of Ethereum. and architecture are described. Due to various reasons, he withdrew from Ethereum and released the Polkadot project in 2016.
Next, let’s take a look at the white paper. Polkadot is a sharded blockchain, which means that it connects multiple chains in a network, allowing them to process transactions in parallel and exchange data between chains while providing security. Polkadot calls a network composed of heterogeneous blockchain shards a parachain. These chains are connected to and secured by the Polkadot Relay Chain. They can also connect to external networks through bridges.
The core of Polkadot is its relay-chain, which has two main tasks: one is to ensure the security of the merger, and the other is to ensure the trustworthiness of inter-chain transactions. The parachain running on it can be regarded as the client of the relay chain. The purpose of the relay chain is to protect and coordinate the parachain.
Parachains are linked to the Polkadot main chain through "slots", so that each parachain and relay chain form a cross-chain system, and cross-chains between any two chains can be achieved through relay chains. Polkadot can realize heterogeneous cross-chain protocols with interoperability, scalability, and shared security. It is a collection of heterogeneous blockchains composed of multiple blockchains. The main purpose of Polkadot is to connect currently independent blockchains. Through Polkadot, communication and data transfer can be carried out between different blockchains, thereby realizing cross-chain functions.
The emergence of Polkadot is not to compete with any mainstream public chain in the existing blockchain world, including ETH2.0. Instead, Polkadot hopes to "hold up" all chains to enable cross-chain communication between different blockchains - with the goal of establishing a unified ecosystem for the decentralized blockchain world.
NPOS即Nominated Proof of Stake，又称提名权益证明，是波卡团队提出的一种新的POS共识机制。在NPOS中，有两个重要的角色：验证人和提名人。二者均会获得DOT通货膨胀的收益，也就是Staking收益。
The relay chain is essentially a blockchain. Validators ensure the security of this blockchain. Validators will run Polkadot nodes. Validators will occasionally be given the power to generate new blocks. If they perform their duties well, They will be rewarded for doing a job well done.
Anyone can become a validator, as long as they have enough chips behind them. The so-called chips here are the "national currency" DOT of the Polkadot relay chain. According to the number of DOT pledges, the first few hundred validators will be elected in order to become active. Validators (active validators).
There is also a fisherman, who is a bit like a third-party hunter who can monitor the verifiers. If they find that they have violated the rules, such as recording the transaction incorrectly, recording a transaction twice, which is a double spend, etc., they will Notify the system and get a big bonus.
This structure is actually somewhat similar to the management method of DAO. Each point has its own incentive method and then restrains each other.
Polkadot’s token is DOT, with an initial issuance of 10 million. In 2017, it raised approximately US$140 million in crowdfunding. In 2019 and 2020, Polkadot conducted two private placements, raising a total of approximately US$100 million.
In August 2020, Polkadot split the DOT token 100 times, increasing the total issuance to 1 billion, and the price became 1/100 of the original price.
Polkadot Ecology
The success of a project depends not only on technology, but also on ecology. Among many public chains, the development of the Polkadot ecosystem is second only to the Ethereum network. This year, dark horse projects such as Chainlink and Kusama were born, which shows that the market recognition is high.
1.Kusama
Kusama is Polkadot's test network, also called the canary network.
Simply put, any new function deployed on Polkadot needs to be deployed on Kusama first, tested, and then migrated to Polkadot after success.
Kusama, don’t think of it as just a test network, but as an early and highly experimental version of Polkadot that exists in a real economic environment - you can understand it as Polkadot Beta version, or wavelet. Card.
He has his own token system, and the price has skyrocketed to 30 US dollars each;
It has its own community with more than 350 validators (including many well-known domestic and foreign investment institutions and staking institutions);
Dot’s 100x split voting and proposals were all conducted on Kusama;
Kusama will not disappear with the launch of Polkadot like other testnets. As long as the community exists, the Kusama network will always exist and will be bridged to the Polkadot network as the first batch of parallel links.
The KSM token has a maximum increase of more than 50 times and is highly sought after by the market, even exceeding the increase of Polkadot DOT.
Chainlink is the leader in oracle machines, and will be explained in a separate article later. ChainLink is definitely a king-level project, very awesome.
In conclusion, Polkadot is at least currently the project with the best chance of becoming a blockchain 3.0, because there are currently many chains, and there are isolated islands between each chain. If he can integrate all the chains It can be cross-chained, not to mention all, even if it integrates all 100 auction chains across chains, then it can be called blockchain 3.0, so that assets on the chain can be easily transferred. If each chain is equivalent to a country's bank, then it has opened up cross-border transfers in various countries. This is a huge progress for the blockchain. Its current market value is only about 9 billion US dollars. Take a look at the following area. Ethereum in Blockchain 2.0 is worth US$200 billion, so if it becomes Blockchain 3.0, it currently looks like there is still room for growth of 20-30 times.