On November 27, 2020, at the first Blockchain Service Network BSN Global Technology Innovation and Development Summit held in Wuhan, Hubei, Fabian Gompf, Vice President of Parity Technologies, shared the theme of “Polkay Overview and Parachain Prospects”.
The full text is organized as follows:
Hello everyone, I am Fabi, the vice president of Parity Technologies, the core engineering company of the Polkadot project. I will give you a conceptual overview of the actual meaning of Polkadot and its ecosystem.
The Polkadot project started in 2015 and 2016. This idea was fully elaborated in the 2016 Polkadot white paper. The white paper written by Gavin Wood represents Polkadot’s core ideas. Over the years, the content described in the book has expanded and many implementation details have also changed. But in general, in the past four years, we are still trying to achieve the same idea.
If I were to describe Polkadot today, I might do something different, just because we have more industry terminology, and people now understand the industry terminology, you don’t have to describe all these things from the first principle. The characteristics of Polkadot are: Polkadot is scalability achieved through sharding; Polkadot is proof of rights and interests; Polkadot is interoperable. These are all within the Polkadot ecology.
In the system, all the shards are connected. This means that all shards deployed on Polkadot can communicate with each other, understand each other, and pass bridges. This means that Polkadot can do it or use the application on Polkadot to talk and understand with external systems, such as the Ethereum blockchain or the Bitcoin blockchain.
Polkadot is very adaptable, it is amorphous. What you will often hear is that it is governed by on-chain logic. Blockchain governance is a big topic, but Polkadot is more than just these tags, similar to what you see in Bitcoin or Ethereum. Polkadot is a public network, but it is also a technology stack. This is an ecosystem of tools, infrastructure and applications, and this is an enterprise ecosystem. It’s a bit difficult to analyze in detail, but if we look at it from a more technical point of view, I think this is a good conceptual model. It is essentially the first layer of meta-infrastructure. You can think of it as the zeroth layer or platform platform. This meta-infrastructure can be deployed on the first layer to obtain many different benefits, but the main features It is interoperability and security.
From another perspective, Polkadot is a heterogeneous shard, similar to what Ethereum to Ethereum 2.0 does. In terms of scalability, one chain corresponds to the scale of the first layer. What we have to do is to find many, many chains and combine them under the same security umbrella. This is what we call the beacon chain, or relay chain in Polkadot. We let them communicate with each other, and through this, we can scale the entire system horizontally, and Polkadot pays great attention to this.
The difference is that the beacon chain is heterogeneous, meaning that not every of these shards are in the Ethereum execution environment, but is completely abstracted from the logic of these shards. So, you can have a Bitcoin, Ethereum or Zcash like, and you can build whatever you want in the blockchain. You can deploy it as the shortest Polkadot chain, so this is the conceptual part. There are many documents, specifications, code documents, etc. on the Internet, if you are interested, you can study them.
Polka Eco
Polkadot ecology is a very active ecosystem and emerging ecology, which can be established and deployed to different shards of Polkadot. Currently, we have more than one hundred under development. These are the first-tier blockchains, and these are compatible Polkadot. Many testnets are running, there are many mainnets already running, and a large backlog of teams are waiting to be deployed on Polkadot. On the other hand, we have a lot of infrastructure, tools, integrations, these things are not necessarily shards or applications on Polkadot, but they are just useful components for participants in the Polkadot ecosystem. Therefore, you can consider things like validator tools, developer tools, deployment infrastructure and the like.
Polkadot’s manufacturers are located all over the world, focusing on Europe, because Parity is headquartered in Europe and the VP Foundation is headquartered in Europe. Therefore, we have a stronger foothold there. For us, North America, Asia, and China in particular are actually a very, very large market.
Ecosystem growth
This is just zoomed into the chain/shard part of Polkadot. You can roughly see that since the first quarter of 2019, the technology stack has been stable to a certain extent, just as you can use it. This is the first time we really show it to developers, just like appearance, it can solve the problem, and iteratively solve it. Since then, we have seen considerable growth and continued growth. A quarter of people started using our technology stack, and we have more than a hundred people now. This is the last quarter, and it may be higher now. There are more than one hundred companies and enterprises are building fragments for the Polkadot ecosystem.
Therefore, there are some different views on the same data. This is not the number of chain stores, but the actual composition, what kind of things or who built them. Therefore, you will see three major categories here: application-specific chains, domain-specific chains, and industry-specific chains.
This is a bit like a fictitious classification, but I think this is a good mental model. Therefore, domain-specific chains are chains that solve specific problem domains, such as privacy, scalability, file storage, oracle. Industry-specific chains are application-specific and vertical. DeFi is currently the largest game, but also a game, the Internet of Things. An application-specific chain is a chain that is fully optimized for a single application.
Ecosystem support
The other side of the ecosystem growth that I just showed is that we have a complete support infrastructure to provide services to people in the ecosystem. Therefore, if you want to build in our ecosystem, you can insert various programs and resources to essentially ensure your success, or at least greatly increase the likelihood of success.
Broadly speaking, you can categorize them into three or four buckets. It provides you with comprehensive technical support in a variety of different ways, either directly through Parity and developers or only through assistance partners and delivery partners. So, such a thing. This is community/marketing. Therefore, many of these first tiers will not need to redirect their own developers and user communities. Therefore, we have provided a lot of support for this.
With funding, you have many different ways to do this. We have venture capital or grants. But in fact, one of the very interesting places is the Polkadot Fund Library, which is actually a large-scale on-chain DAO that can allocate funds to the Polkadot ecosystem, which is very interesting on the chart. You see a projection here. What is this DAO? Therefore, if all this money is not spent next year, there will be approximately $300 million in assets in this DAO. For the ecosystem, this is a considerable capital deployment mechanism.
Yes, so as the closing slide, please take a quick look at the road map. We launched Polkadot from the beginning of the year. Therefore, you will see that we have started from the very beginning of the inception. It is not a real virtual chain, but not much has happened. It is just an authority proof network that upgraded it to an equity chain and upgraded it to be similar to what we have already Have a complete on-chain governance mechanism and delete all the master keys held so that the balance can be transferred at the end of this summer.
The next important milestone at the beginning of next year will actually enable this core feature. So, we are talking about fragments, this parachain. These things will actually be supported early next year. Therefore, this will be the next big question.
Finally, thank you all for listening, thank you BSN for the invitation
