In the past month, the token DOT of the cross-chain network Polkadot has risen by 80%. During this period, the Polkadot Parachain test network Rococo V1 has been launched. According to the plan, the Polkadot test network Kusama (KSM) and Polkadot main network (DOT) will successively open the Parachain slot auctions, which means that the long-awaited Polkadot ecological project will be connected to the Polkadot network for the first time.
Due to the need to pledge KSM and DOT tokens to participate in the auction, the secondary market is the first to change, and both currencies have recently entered a rising period.
As a representative of "Blockchain 3.0", Polkadot is regarded as a value project comparable to Ethereum. Before the full mainnet has officially landed, more than 300 ecological projects have been developed based on Polkadot's underlying technology framework, Substrate, and we look forward to seizing the opportunity to access the Polkadot mainnet as soon as possible.
At the same time, exchanges, investment institutions and many secondary market investors all regard Polkadot as a key deployment direction in 2021. Various Polkadot ecological funds have been established one after another, and industry participants hope to capture the next 100 times or even a thousand times return of assets in the Polkadot ecology.
In December 2020, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood shouted the slogan "Make the blockchain great again". The parallel linking into the Polkadot relay chain will become a substantial beginning, marking the beginning of the construction of the Polkadot cross-chain empire.
Slot auction is coming, KSM and DOT rise
Polkadot depicts a future of multi-chain interconnection, but currently no application is officially deployed on the Polkadot network. This is because the parachain that carries the application has not yet been linked to the relay chain of the Polkadot network. But soon, Polkadot will open the Parachain Slot auction, and its blockchain network blueprint has taken a substantial step forward.
Recently, a developer revealed that the Polkadot parachain testnet Rococo V1 will open the parachain slot registration on January 11. On December 23, 2020, Polkadot co-founder Robert once confirmed that the parachain testnet RococoV1 has been up and running. The testnet aims to test the parachain consensus process and verify the interactivity of the parachain established by members of the Polkadot community.
On December 8th last year, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood stated that after the Rococo V1 testnet is running stably, it will be the first to open a parachain slot auction on the Polkadot mainnet testnet Kusama, and the winning parachain will be launched on Kusama. . This process will then be copied to the Polkadot mainnet. From the perspective of progress, the parachain slot auction is coming soon.
Due to performance and network computing resource constraints, Gavin Wood estimates that the upper limit of the number of parachains is about 100. Only one slot will be released per auction. By the end of 2020, more than 100 chains are ready to connect to Polkadot. In this way, the demand for card slots may be greater than the supply. Whether it is Kusama or Polkadot, the first slot auction will be eye-catching.
According to the rules, project parties interested in participating in the auction need to pledge KSM or DOT to bid for the slot quotas of the Kusama testnet or Polkadot. During the bidding process, a "safe period" and a "random period" will be set. During the safety period, each bidder can freely "bid". After entering the random period, the auctioneer will drop hammers from time to time according to the random number on the chain. At that time, the one with the most pledged tokens will win.
However, getting the slots is not once and for all. The lease period of each slot is 6 months, and the project party can bid for 1 to 4 lease periods at a time, that is, 6 to 24 months of slot usage rights.
In order to alleviate the "financial" pressure brought by the auction to the project party, Polkadot has designed a bidding system that allows users to help the project party pledge tokens for bidding. Usually, the project party will take out its own tokens to incentivize users who come to help. The tokens pledged by users will be locked for 6 to 24 months without staking income. In this case, users have to bear the risk of the downside of the token price.
Gavin Wood named this auction model PLO (Parallel Chain Lease Issuance). He explained that this is equivalent to crowd-loaning, which is similar to crowdfunding, but without actually paying hard money to exchange coins, it is more like It is a kind of loan, and you can get back tokens after unlocking.
As the slot auction period approaches, the secondary market is moving. From December 25, 2020 to January 4 this year, KSM rose from US$50 to US$70.8, an increase of 41.6%. DOT rose from 5.06 US dollars to a maximum of 10.5 US dollars, a 10-day surge of 107%. The market value of DOT has risen to the sixth place in the ranking of encrypted assets, after BTC, ETH, USDT, XRP and LTC, this chain and its assets are becoming more and more mainstream.
327 ecological projects gain momentum
Positioned at "Blockchain 3.0", the cross-chain network Polkadot is on the rise. Honeycomb Finance has published an article "EOS and Ethereum, who is the frontrunner of Polkadot" introducing its network characteristics and its similarities and differences with EOS and Ethereum networks.
As a latecomer, although Polkadot is late, its advantages are also obvious. This is mainly reflected in its technical positioning at a lower level, focusing on "issuing chain" rather than "issuing currency"; on the other hand, developers and investors who have missed the dividends of Ethereum have created a new generation of infrastructure " "Hurry up" to participate in the expectation of return. Therefore, while the Polkadot main network is still in progress, its ecology is already quite large.
According to PolkaProject data, as of January 5, 327 projects have been born in the Polkadot ecosystem, including network infrastructure such as Acala and ChainX, development tools such as Noise Explorer, wallets such as Polkawallet and Ledger, validators such as Validators, Polkascan, etc. Blockchain browser, as well as DEX such as Polkaswap. In addition, many developer forums and working groups have been derived from the Polkadot ecology, forming a huge developer gathering place.
PolkaProject contains 327 projects of the Polka Ecosystem
At present, Polkadot can only perform basic functions such as staking, block production, and transfer, and has not yet been applied online, so most of these projects are developed based on Polkadot's Substrate technical framework. Substrate is also the underlying framework of Polkadot. Any project party or individual developer can use Substrate to build a blockchain, which can seamlessly interact with Polkadot's main network in the future. The chain built on Substrate is also called Polkadot's "isomorphic blockchain".
According to PolkaWorld statistics, in 2020, Polkadot added 68,778 lines of code, and Substrate added 130,226 lines of code. By the end of 2020, more than 100 chains are ready to connect to Polkadot, and more than 60 testnets have been online.
The growth of Polkadot's ecology is inseparable from Polkadot's official financial support. Throughout 2020, a total of more than 14 million US dollars will be used to fund more than 200 Polkadot ecological projects. Since the launch of the governance plan, 23 proposals have been funded by Polkadot's "National Treasury", and a total of 118,456.63 DOTs have been spent, or approximately $1.1 million. In addition, the Web3 Foundation, founded by Gavin Wood, has distributed $4.1 million for 145 proposals.
Before the arrival of the Parachain Slot auction, many long-established projects have expressed their intention to participate in the auction, including Acala, Chainx, Bifrost, MXC, Plasm, etc.
Acala is aimed at Polkadot’s DeFi field. Its business includes stable currency issuance, DEX, etc. It hopes to become the first parachain on Polkadot and Kusama; Chainx focuses on the cross-chain business of digital assets; Bifrost focuses on DeFi agreement for pledged asset liquidity release business; It is reported that Bifrost reserves a total of 13.5% of tokens for slot auctions, which will be used to bid for 4-year parachain usage rights.
These relatively well-known and financially strong projects obviously want to compete for the right to use the first parachain slot. It is not difficult to imagine the advantages of the first "Polkadot Parachain": First, it can be the first to interact with the Polkadot relay chain and go online in advance; second, it will have a "first launch" effect, attracting applications to the chain.
However, not all projects need to bid for slots, because the cost is too high, and the number of slots is also limited. For some DApp developers, they can choose to develop on the parachain connected to the Polkadot network. In addition, Polkadot also introduced a more economical access channel-parallel threads.
Gavin Wood said that some applications do not need to process transactions in every block, and are more suitable for parallel threads that pay on demand. Oracle is an example. If some data does not need to be continuously uploaded to the chain, nor does it need to be uploaded very accurately at a certain time, such as weather data, use parallel threads.
This provides more options for application development and better accounting of input costs.
The slot auction is coming soon. Polkadot, which has been planning for many years, is ready to open the door to its ecological infrastructure and applications. When more than 300 projects are linked to the main network, Polkadot's blockchain empire will rise on the ground.
Multi-party betting on the Polkadot ecology
Gavin Wood has publicly stated that if Polkadot is compared to a house, 2018 is the year of laying the foundation, 2019 is the year of constructing the framework, and 2020 is the year of "decoration" and "moving in". "If we deploy Polkadot and demonstrate its core technology in 2020, we will see the technology integrated into the main network in 2021."
Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot
In the minds of many people in the industry, Polkadot is one of the most important hot spots not to be missed in 2021. Like the early Ethereum, it is now regarded as a depression of value.
Therefore, exchanges, investment institutions, and many secondary market investors regard Polkadot as an important investment target, and they have invested in the layout.
On December 4, 2020, Huobi Innovation Lab announced the establishment of the "Pokadot Ecological Support Fund", with US$5 million to support projects and individuals that promote the development of the Polkadot network; on the 24th of that month, Binance announced the establishment of a US$10 million Funds, empowering innovative projects in the Polkadot ecosystem and providing more resources; OKEx then established the Block Dream Fund with an initial capital of US$100 million, focusing on investing in the Polkadot ecosystem and DeFi.
Sally, the investment director of Shuimu Financial Technology, revealed that in the next one to two years, Web 3.0 will be its focus area, including Polkadot.
There are also many individual investors who have expressed their optimism about Polkadot on social media, claiming to focus on the layout and ambush related currencies, including both DOT and Token issued by various Polkadot ecological projects.
Some people in the industry believe that when choosing a Polkadot ecological project to invest, several factors must be considered, including whether they have received funding from the Web3 Foundation and whether they are a member of the Substrate Builders Program community. Generally speaking, for the projects listed on Polkadot's official website, the priority and competitiveness of participating in the parachain auction are usually higher. In addition, projects invested by major institutions and well-known institutions, as well as projects with larger communities, are more worthy of investment.
Although Polkadot's ecology is still in its infancy, most of the projects related to Polkadot have performed well in the secondary market. ChainX token PCX has increased by 200% in the past year, and MXC token MXC has increased by 637% over the same period.
Not only are the projects within the Polkadot ecology, even if it has something to do with Polkadot, there are positive aspects. For example, after the Polkadot ecological DeFi agreement Biforest announced its cooperation with the Ethereum Layer 2 Loopring agreement, the Loopring agreement token LRC has also risen rapidly, with an increase of 141% in the past week. The founder of Loopring, Wang Dong, feels a little confused. "Now LRC The change, I don't know which force is controlling it, I'm confused."
Gavin Wood hopes that Polkadot can solve the versatility of the blockchain. On December 3 last year, at the first Polkadot community meeting, he planned that in the first half of this year, Substrate is expected to release version 3.0, which will bring compatibility to heterogeneous blockchains such as Ethereum. This important person in the Polkadot ecology said: Make blockchain great again.
It seems that entering 2021, the new generation of blockchain networks has just begun.
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