Although Ethereum has become the blockchain of choice for the most popular cryptocurrency in the digital asset world, the next-generation blockchain network is also attracting the attention of application developers.
According to a recent report issued by Outlier Ventures, the harmless-sounding Polkadot platform created by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood is the platform with the largest number of active developers of all major cryptographic protocols . The report found that although developer interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum has declined, the number of developers active on Polkadot has increased by 44% in the past 12 months to May.
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Wilson Withiam, an analyst at encryption research firm Messari, said: “From a pure design perspective and the size of its community, it really stands out.”
According to the tracking website PolkaProject, Polka Network was launched in May of this year. There are currently 253 projects based on Polka, ranging from so-called stable coins to social networks. This is an increase from less than 200 in early September.
Unlike running applications through smart contracts (relatively small pieces of code running on the Ethereum blockchain ), Polkadot allows each application developer to create their own blockchain and talk to other ledgers. Developers can decide how to charge transaction fees and the speed at which transaction blocks are confirmed on the digital ledger.
Gavin Wood said in an interview in Berlin: “We will see many different innovative products, and they are impossible to exist in the smart contract environment.” Blockchain. These are difficult to deploy in a smart contract environment.”
The 40-year-old British programmer has a PhD in music visualization. One month after co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a white paper, he joined the development of Ethereum.
Wood was also the first CTO of Ethereum, and he played an important role in creating features that made Ethereum attractive to developers. But he felt that the final design of Ethereum had limitations, so in 2016, he wrote a Polkadot white paper, printed it on the paper with a polka dot pattern, and proposed a new method. He chose the name Polkadot because this is a pattern without a beginning and an end, and it incorporates the idea of decentralized applications-a pattern without a center.
Polkadot has overcome some difficulties to come to today. Although the project raised $140 million in its first token issuance in 2017, a security flaw in the Parity wallet that Wood participated in was exploited by users, causing a large part of the funds to become unusable. Polkadot still raised a round of private placements in 2019 and raised another $43 million in a private placement this summer.
This optimism can be seen in the soaring value of Polkadot’s DOT token, which has soared by about 25% since mid-August, reaching around US$3.75 billion. According to statistics from the CoinMarketCap.com website, this makes DOT the eighth largest cryptocurrency in the world by market value, ahead of established cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin that have long occupied the list.
“Polkadot’s transaction price is only 10% of the value of Ethereum,” said Dan Morehead, founder of Pantera Capital Management, a Menlo Park, California-based company (Pantera Capital Management). “But we predict that its chance of becoming a competitor to Ethereum is much higher than 10%.”
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Translation: PolkaWorld Community
