The first half of the blockchain in 2020 has been completed. Bitcoin halving, Ethereum 2.0, DeFi, Filecoin, hot spots are staged in turn.
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"King of cross-chain" Polkadot
Polkadot is the pioneer of cross-chain technology and is recognized as the "king of cross-chain".
Led by Gavin Wood (Lin Jiawen), the former CTO of Ethereum, the sword is aimed at ETH, and 485,331 ETHs are raised-Polca has its own halo since its birth. In 2020, with the launch of the Polkadot mainnet candidate network, Polkadot ushered in a bright moment, and the market value of tokens rushed into the top ten, becoming a star project in the blockchain industry.
Polkadot was born in 2015. In 2017, it conducted a world-renowned first fund-raising offering, with a fundraising amount of up to 140 million US dollars. A two-year closed development period followed, and some notable progress was made. By 2019, with the decline of many public chains, Polkadot began to attract the attention of the public, and was placed with new hopes for the development of public chains.
According to Gavin Wood's description in the Polkadot white paper, "Polkadot is a heterogeneous multi-chain architecture designed to solve the problems of scalability and isolation in the blockchain architecture." In layman's terms, Polkadot is a collection of blockchains composed of multiple blockchains.
Scalability has always been the most troublesome problem facing the blockchain, and it is also the main problem that limits the application of the blockchain in reality. Taking Bitcoin as an example, the current maximum transaction volume per second is 7. Although Ethereum has improved in TPS compared with Bitcoin, it is still far from being used for daily payment, let alone Visa and Alipay. financial level.
Therefore, Gavin Wood proposed the concept of "relay chain" and "parallel chain". Polkadot realizes the problem of cross-chain and scalability through relay chain, parallel chain and transfer bridge. The block chains are connected to enable communication and data transfer between different block chains, and the invocation of smart contracts.In order to better understand the advantages and differences between Polkadot and traditional public chains, we can make an analogy with Ethereum and EOS. Ethereum is a public chain that carries various application projects, and EOS is an operating system that can build a public chain on it, so Polkadot is a telecom operator service provider that provides bandwidth data exchange. For another example, assuming that public chains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and EOS are independent communication networks such as China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, then Polkadot is equivalent to a protocol to open up gateway interfaces. After Polkadot, China Mobile, China Unicom, and Telecom can communicate with each other.
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scalability mission
As a former core developer of Ethereum, Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot, has a deep understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of Ethereum after deeply participating in the Ethereum project, and has also deepened his understanding of the blockchain.
Gavin Wood has long wanted to solve the expansion problem of the blockchain. In 2016, based on his previous development experience, he created Polkadot to solve the problem of expansion through the parallel chain universe, and solve the cross-chain problem through the relay chain and transfer bridge.
The Polkadot network consists of a collaborative decentralized blockchain network called the relay chain, which is also the core of the entire Polkadot network. It interacts with parallel chains running in parallel. These parallel chains can be regarded as the core of the relay chain. Clients, the purpose of the relay chain is to secure and coordinate parachains. The transfer bridge is connected to Ethereum.
When a node on Ethereum sends information to other blockchains, the data will be passed to the relay chain through the transfer bridge, and the relay chain will go through several routes before finally finding the correct parallel chain and then verified by the verifier. Calculate processing information.
In the Polkadot network, there are four important roles, namely collector, fisherman, nominator, and validator. The collector is responsible for collecting various information of the parachain, and packages the information to the verifier; the phisher specially checks the malicious behavior, and gets the reward after checking it out; people; validators help to package new blocks in the Polkadot network.
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Usher in the highlight moment
The first white paper of Polkadot was released in 2016. In October 2017, Polkadot completed its first round of financing and sold 5 million DOTs. Well-known venture capital institutions including Bosst VC, Pantera Capital and Polychain Capital participated in the investment.
From 2018 to 2019, Polkadot Network released four versions of POC one after another to further ensure the security and reliability of the network. In June 2019, Gavin Wood released the development kit tool Substrate; in August, released the Polkadot advanced experimental network Kusama.
Entering 2020, Polkadot began to usher in a bright moment.
On May 26, 2020, the Polkadot main network candidate network CC1 was launched, which means that the first version of the main network was officially generated. On June 18, Polkadot announced that the main network officially entered the second phase with the NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake) consensus algorithm, and the main network currency of DOT was also officially generated in the second phase.
On July 21, Polkadot officially announced that the first phase of the CC1 candidate mainnet has been upgraded, and the governance rights will be transferred to DOT holders, which means that the network will be more decentralized. On August 19, Polkadot allowed balance transfers, and the community voted to officially complete the DOT split. After the split, the price of DOT once exceeded 6 US dollars, successfully breaking into the top ten digital currency market capitalization rankings.
Although the launch of the Polkadot mainnet was delayed until this year, its ecology has already taken a step ahead.
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Polkadot Ecological Project Data source: polkaproject.com
With the popularity of DeFi this year, the DeFi ecology of Polkadot Network has also ushered in the wind. According to Cao Yin, Managing Director of the Digital Renaissance Foundation, and Marco, Chairman of the ChainX Council, with the rise of the Polkadot ecosystem, many projects are considering migrating to Polkadot, hoping to deploy directly on Polkadot, or cross-chain to Polkadot. on the card. Cao Yin, who started investing in DeFi in the early days, also said that he is very optimistic about the new DeFi on Polkadot.
Next, Polkadot will conduct a parachain slot auction and launch core functions. These will be a reflection of the value of Polkadot, but also a test.
In any case, Polkadot has become a new ecological concept, and there may be many new stories to tell in the future.
