The team behind Polkadot (DOT) recently announced that they are the first parachains have launched. Five years after the parachain vision was first described in the white paper from Polkadot by founders Robert Habermeier and Gavid Wood the time has finally come.
Parachains
Parachains are standalone layer-1 blockchains that run parallel to the main Polkadot network and are also linked to the Polkadot Relay Chain. This ensures that the network can process many more transactions and that projects with their own blockchain do not get stuck due to blockages on another chain.
The first parachains will focus on different aspects of the crypto industry. For example, there are decentralized finance (DeFi), smart contracting and lending parachains.
The first parachains will be a slot rent on the Polkadot Relay Chain for 96 weeks. Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar and Clover, among others, will be the first parachains to operate on the Polkadot network.
After 5 years of research and development, and a multi-stage launch that began in May of 2020, Polkadot launch is now complete, with all auction-winning parachains currently producing blocks on the network.https://t.co/V40mY3WEwZ
— Polkadot (@Polkadot) December 18, 2021
The Polkadot team believes that in the future, as the project gets more attention due to the rise of the metaverse, among other things, the Polkadot ecosystem will continue to grow. The shift of a single blockchain to a network of different, linked blockchains will then be complete.
Interoperability
It’s just this multichain framework that Gavin Wood had in mind when he split from Ethereum (ETH) to set up his own blockchain project. According to him, parachains are the ideal way to make a blockchain useful for various purposes.
“No blockchain design works optimally for every use case. Each chain comes with pros and cons that make it work well for some applications but not others. The parachain model was built with the idea that the future of Web3 will revolve around many different types of blockchains working together.”
At the moment there are only a handful, 13 to be exact, parachain slots available on the Polkadot Relay Chain. These are already running on Kusama, it canary Polkadot network. However, more than 100 parachain slots will become available in the coming months.
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