Continue Capital Invested $5 million More for the Leader of Multi-Chain Technology-Polkadot
Continue Perspective
The blockchain has proven its utility in the following areas:the Internet of Things (IoT), financial services, governance, identity authentication, decentralized network and asset-tracking. A number of blockchain projects have reached significant milestones in the blockchain industry till now. Some are highly functional and open, such as Ethereum, some provide strong privacy, such as Zcash, and many other chains are designed to fulfill the various requirement of enterprises.
Despite the technological promise, we have yet to see signifcant real-world deployment of present technology, the main reason lies in the limited scalability, unreasonable governance mechanism. And the scalability and interoperability restrictions caused that DAPPs cannot be effectively integrated, which makes development difficult and hard to achieve substantial application scenarios. The current blockchain technology has not narrowed the gap between technology and real application, thus the technological theory can’t be transferred into practice.
Currently, all blockchain networks are severely isolated. Unless the old centralized trust mechanism is adopted, data and assets can only be transferred within the same network.So we have Polkadot now. The multi-chain technology of Polkadot broadens the boundaries of existing blockchains, and its unique interoperability brings a new field for practical application and collaboration of blockchain technology, which is expected to push the blockchain industry to the next new stage. Polkadot allows existing blockchains to ignore boundary barriers, while it is essentially an infinitely scalable chain.Each of the crossing chains makes Polkadot more functional, which goes far beyond the limitation of single functional of existing blockchain. Continue believes that the future value and growth prospects of Polkadot are promising.
About Polkadot
Polkadot aims to solve the major issues faced with the blockchain industry, including isolability, scalability, security, privacy, developability and governance,etc. Polkadot is built to connect private and consortium chains, public and permissionless networks, oracles, and future technologies that are yet to be created.Polkadot facilitates an internet where independent blockchains can exchange information and transactions in a trustless way via the Polkadot relay chain.
It allows applications and smart contracts on a blockchain to interact seamlessly with data and assets on other chains, whether the trading chain is open or closed,so that diverse blockchains provide their own functions and form an ecosystem. It is characterized by low threshold, flexibility, autonomous economic activities and shared security . Polkadot makes it easier than ever to create and connect decentralized applications, services, and institutions.
Polkadot was named by Bloomberg as one of the “Four Major Projects Determining the Direction of Digital Currency Development in 2019”, founded by Gavin Wood, who is the Ethereum pioneer and the author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper and officially launched in October 2017 . Most of the team members are from Parity Technologies.
Founder: Dr. Gavin Wood
Dr. Gavin Wood is a pioneer in the blockchain industry ,a former co-founder and CTO of Ethereum ,and author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper. He invented fundamental components of the blockchain industry, including Solidity, Proof-of-Authority consensus, and Whisper. At Parity, Gavin currently leads innovation on Substrate and Polkadot. He coined the term Web 3.0 in 2014 and serves as President of Web3 Foundation.
Co-founder: Robert Habermeier
Robert Habermeier is a Thiel Fellow and co-founder of Polkadot. He has a research and development background in blockchains, distributed systems, and cryptography. A longtime member of the Rust community, he has focused on leveraging the language’s features to build highly parallel and performant solutions.
Co-founder: Peter Czaban
Peter is the Technology Director of the Web3 Foundation, where he works on supporting the development of the next generation of distributed technologies. He obtained his Masters of Engineering degree at the University of Oxford, reading Engineering Science where he focused on Bayesian Machine Learning. He has worked across defense, finance and data analytics industries, working on mesh networks, distributed knowledge bases, quantitative pricing models, machine learning and business development.
Core Technology
Polkadot (polkadot) solves the isolability, scalability, security, privacy, developability and governance problems mentioned above by building a multi-chain structure, which allows for interoperability between independent blockchains or parachains.This unique architecture enables different blockchains to share and amplify the innovative functions of each other.
Main Features
- True Interoperability
Since Bitcoin genesis block was mined in 2009, the whole blockchain ecosystem is booming. However, most of the dollar value was gathered in only a few chains, transferring value from one chain to another can only achieved through a centralised exchange.It can be concluded that the greater problem behind it is that the current blockchain ecosystem consists of distinct, isolated and non-interactive chains.
We envision a future where any arbitrary message, including various types of data structures or data and value, can be transferred between diffierent chains. Communicating arbitrary messages unlocks a host of use cases that were not possible before. For example, an IoT device can feed its data to an oracle chain which verifies its integrity and transfers that data to an insurance DApp to pay out and settle an insurance claim.Applying multiple chains that are interconnected with eachother will also help to spread the transaction load across many more nodes, which will decrease the cost of executing smart contracts and improve scaling and decentralisation at the same time.Polkadot enables different blockchains to transfer any type of data or assets, not just tokens seamlessly, and the blockchains connected to Polkadot can interoperate with various blockchains in the Polkadot network.
2. Scalability
Scalability is a key factor that hampers DApp usage and development. Developers tend to move towards the most popular chains with the largest user group to reinforcing the network effects. This is a sensible decision but it increases the strain on the most popular networks and it makes it is harder for new chains, which offer value and unique innovations, to enter the blockchain ecosystem.
The mission of Polkadot is to alleviate above effects with its hosted multiple parachain architecture. The core of the platform is the Relay Chain, which connecting the chains together by coordinating the multi-chain transactions and providing the consensus mechanism for the whole platform.
The multiple parachain architecture is designed to provide a horizontal scaling solution where a very high number of transactions can be processed in parallel. Polkadot also allows for parachains to have state machines that can be customised for particular tasks, which will improve the storage efficiency and processing speed.
3. Shared High Performance Security
Polkadot introduces “shared security,” whose consensus algorithm is a proof-of-stake variant with the property of Byzantine Fault Tolerant.The validator nodes provide security for all chains within the platform, including the relay chain and all parachains. These nodes check the validity of all blocks. If a block is correct, the validators will ‘seal’ the block and approve the block to be added to the chain.
Validators are economically incentivised to behave honestly and are rewarded by receiving a pro-rata pay from DOTs. Should a validator behave maliciously or faulty, they will have their stake of DOTs ‘slashed’ (decreased).
Attacks against the platform are related to the value of DOTs. If the price of DOTs is low then it is cheap to purchase a significant amount of DOTs in order to affect the outcome of the consensus mechanism. This is true for any POS blockchains.However, due to the public nature of blockchains it should be easy to spot most attacks.
When miners, or validators in general, migrate to new chains,the new blockchains decrease the security of other chains . Polkadot is different. As validators seal the blocks of all chains, they are regarded as providing a “pool of security”. New chains can therefore tap into the security already provided rather than provide their own. This allows for experimentation without decrease the security of existing chains.
Adding or removing more parachains does not require more validators being added. The security of the platform is broadly independent from the number of chains.However, an increasing number of users brought by an increasing number of parachains, can increase the total economic value of the platform which can help to provide higher security. As DOTs become more expensive, attacking the consensus algorithm will also become more expensive.
Multi-Chain Structure
Polkadot consists of many parachains with potentially differing characteristics which can make it easier to achieve anonymity or formal verifcation. Transactions can be spread out across the chains, allowing many more to be processed in the same period of time. Polkadot ensures that each of these blockchains remains secure and that any dealings between them are faithfully executed.Specialised parachains called bridges can be created to link independent chains.
- Relay chain: Coordinates consensus and transaction delivery between chains.
- Parachains: Constituent blockchains which gather and process transactions.
- Bridges: Link to blockchains with their own consensus such as Ethereum.
Polkadot is the first project by Web 3 Foundation, a Swiss Foundation founded to facilitate a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web.The Web3 Foundation is partnering with best-in-class entities to build Polkadot and foster development of the services and applications that will run on it.
Researchers from Inria Paris and ETH Zurich, developers from Parity Technologies, and capital partners from crypto-funds such as Polychain Capital are all working together to develop a superlative realization of Web3, with Polkadot at its core.
Website：https://polkadot.network
Github：https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/
Twitter：https://twitter.com/polkadotnetwork
Telegram：https://t.me/polkadotofficial
Reddit：https://www.reddit.com/r/dot
Technical Documentation：https://wiki.polkadot.network/en/latest/
