What exactly is Polkadot?
When mentioning Polkadot, people will always see words like “heterogeneous cross-chain and 10,000-chain interconnection”. In fact, this vocabulary is a high-level generalization of Polkadot technology. In addition to technology, you can also stand To understand Polkadot in a higher dimension, for example, think about why we have to develop a project like Polkadot from the ground up, and why in the near future, there will be many applications born on this platform.
That is, why is Polkadot new? Why is Polkadot stable.
1. Why develop a blockchain from scratch?
Why don’t we “fix” the existing blockchain so that this blockchain has advanced technical characteristics to meet current needs?
For example, why didn’t Vitalik Buterin fork out a bitcoin and then add smart contract functions to this blockchain, but started in 2013 and spent 3 years to develop a new blockchain. Why didn’t Gavin Wood add heterogeneous multi-chain functions on Ethereum, but since 2015, it took such a long time to develop Polkadot?
There are two main reasons.
First, the existing blockchain platform may not be able to meet the flexibility and customizability required by applications.
Take Bitcoin as an example. The bottom layer of Bitcoin is composed of several modules: storage layer, data layer, network layer, consensus layer, and application layer. However, the customization of Bitcoin is extremely limited, and developers want to control any of them. It is extremely difficult, time-consuming and laborious to improve a module to adapt to current needs, and it is easy to cause a hard fork.
As we all know, after BCH forked from Bitcoin, it took a few years to have the function of smart contract. The price is that the Bitcoin community was severely split. Later, it experienced two serious hard forks of BSV and BCHA, each hard fork. They are all “broken muscles and bones”. No matter how the BCH community tells the story, it can’t make up for the cracks it once had.
By the same token, although Gavin Wood participated in the development and architecture of Ethereum from the second half of 2013 to 2015, he made great contributions to the protocol development of Ethereum 1.0, and also participated in the architecture design of ETH 2.0. Fang has become a huge ship, and it is very difficult to change its course in a short time.
Regardless of technology or internal communication, Gavin could not have any influence on the state of Ethereum at the time.
After the birth of Polkadot, compared with ETH2.0, Polkadot has at least four advantages in terms of technical architecture. They are more advanced sharding design, more advanced smart contract language, more advanced consensus mechanism, and more Advanced governance methods.
Let’s take the ETH2.0 slice design as an example. According to the Ethereum technology roadmap, after all the three stages of ETH2.0 are completed, the number of shards is 64, but Polkadot can achieve unlimited expansion. Polkadot relay chain early stage There are only 100 parallel chains, but the relay chain can also be connected to the relay chain to achieve the purpose of unlimited fragmentation.
Take smart contract language as an example. The important point of ETH2.0 upgrade is to transition from virtual machine (EVM) to WASM module. Polkadot currently has WASM module, which is convenient for developers to conduct smart contracts in a faster and more in-depth manner. Programming, and it is ready to use. In contrast, ETH2.0 will take several years to go online.
These properties, if Gavin continues to stay in Ethereum in 2015, it is impossible to appear.
Secondly, on the original chain, all your actions must be restricted by the original chain, that is, the issue of autonomy.
For example, the application you build on the smart contract platform must accept the governance rules of the original chain, such as block time, gas pricing, rollback and change state, etc. These original chain attributes are based on this blockchain. Developers must Observing is like acting in a country, you must abide by the laws of that country.
However, if the Polkadot blockchain is developed from scratch, all states are freely defined by the developer. In addition, using the blockchain developed by Polkadot Substrate toolbox, developers can define various attributes of the blockchain, such as storage layer, data layer, network layer, consensus layer, application layer, all of which can be greatly modified .
If it is not on the new blockchain to develop new protocols and add new development tools, it is hard to imagine developing on the old blockchain protocol.
2. Polkadot is stable, from the developer to the underlying technology
The stability here includes the stability of the development team and the stability of the underlying technology.
The reason why developer stability is important is that once the core developer seeks a temporary interest and seeks a new blockchain project from a blockchain project that is not yet stable, this will have a huge negative impact on the development of the project.
A more extreme case is Bytemaster, the developer of EOS, known as BM.
Regarding the resignation of BM, the following paragraphs are circulating in the blockchain industry:
BM released BTS in 2013 and declared in 2014 that it “has not announced any new projects and will not leave BTS”; subsequently, STEEM was released in 2015, and in 2016 it declared that “no new projects have been announced and will not leave STEEM”; subsequently, EOS was released in 2018 and declared in 2018 that “no new projects have been announced, nor will EOS be left”; subsequently, a new project Voice was released in 2019.
Although we have not experienced the early development of BTS, it is conceivable that in the early stage of the blockchain, the resignation of the project founder will shock the community! This is equivalent to before 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto announced that he would hand over Bitcoin to the community and he was going to develop new projects. What would be the result?
In the real world, the stability of the founder is also important to the company’s development.
Take Apple as an example. In 1976, 21-year-old Jobs and his friends founded Apple in their garage. Later, due to development concepts, they were expelled from investors and partners. Later, the company that Jobs founded was acquired by Apple. Taking this opportunity, Jobs returned to the decision-making level, and this is how Apple is today.
Looking back at Polkadot founder Gavin Wood, from the second half of 2013 to help V God develop ETH1.0, to design ETH2.0 architecture in 2015, and then to start development of Polkadot, Gavin’s work in the second half of 2015 There is continuity and goal support. The ultimate goal is Web3.0.
To this end, Gavin and Polkadot developers created the “Blockchain Developer Toolbox Substrate” in 2018, allowing developers to build a brand new blockchain within 10 minutes. In 2017, they established the Web3 Foundation. Fully support the research and development of Polkadot and Web3.0 ecology. In addition, Parity Technologies also provides great technical support for Polkadot ecological developers around the world.
All of the above is actually to illustrate a problem, that is, the founder of Polkadot is a stable, dedicated, and structured developer, who guarantees the stability of the Polkadot project from the perspective of “people”.
So, why should I repeatedly emphasize this stability?
Because the stability of the underlying public chain is too important for the long-term development of the project.
Before 2019, we often heard the slogan “The XX public chain is the killer of Ethereum”, similar to the public chain of XX proposed a new governance concept, with performance far exceeding ETH, and it is becoming an Ethereum killer.
However, the end result is that many of the underlying public chains of the blockchain that have shouted similar slogans have disappeared. The fundamental reason is that “no matter how powerful your public chain is and how low the cost is,” it will ultimately be implemented at the “application” level, that is, how many projects are willing to bear fruit on your public chain.
At present, the DeFi projects that we have seen that have blossomed on ETH, such as MakerDAO/Compound/Uniswap, etc., have actually been developed on Ethereum as early as 2018. That is to say, these teams definitely do not value Ethereum. Performance, but the stability of Ethereum.
Because the blockchain is far from Window and MAC, and it still cannot achieve the performance of one-click migration. All blockchain projects have to face a problem: extremely expensive migration costs.
Therefore, many blockchain projects would rather spend a high cost to block Ethereum than go to EOS, because Ethereum is stable enough, although it is also congested enough.
The question is, is Polkadot stable enough? Yes, I think that from Polkadot founder Gavin, to Parity CEO Jutta Steiner, to Polkadot Co-Founder Robert Habermeier, they are all stable, and to Polkadot’s vision, they are even more stable and forward, so Polkadot ecology Attracted many projects and developers.
As of December 15th, polkaproject.com has included 312 Polkadot projects, exceeding all public chains except Ethereum.
The developer’s choice may be the best answer.
