Editor's Note: This article comes fromHoneycomb Finance News (ID: fengchao-caijing), Author: Kyle, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Honeycomb Finance News (ID: fengchao-caijing)
Honeycomb Finance News (ID: fengchao-caijing)
After Polkadot rushed to the top five in the market capitalization of encrypted assets, it has received more widespread attention. The architecture design of the relay chain + parallel chain endows it with the ability to communicate with each other, which expands the imagination space.
More than 120 project parties have established ecology on Polkadot. Although the mainnet has not yet been officially launched, Polkadot has whetted the appetite of the market. The "Blockchain 3.0" stick was handed over to Polkadot.
Polkadot with a grand vision will inevitably be compared with EOS and Ethereum by the outside world. Of the latter two, one star halo is dimming day by day, and the other is still the leader of the blockchain network, which is regarded by the market as the "lower limit" and "upper limit" of Polkadot respectively.
From the perspective of technical architecture and positioning, Polkadot has a higher dimension and supports any developer to build a parallel chain. It is regarded as the infrastructure of the chain and is expected to realize the interconnection of ten thousand chains. However, this road is obviously not easy to go. The old leek has already tasted disappointment from the changes in the EOS market. Before the blueprint drawn by Polkadot is realized, the "lessons learned from the past" may be able to provide some warnings for the market.
Polkadot's ecological "overspeed" development
Few people were surprised by the rise of Polkadot.
According to data from CoinGecko on September 14, the market value of Polkadot token DOT reached 4.747 billion US dollars, ranking fifth among all encrypted assets. At this time, it has been less than a month since Polkadot officially opened the transfer function, and this young project is widely favored by the market.
"Cross-chain star" Polkadot is gradually getting rid of this rigid and abstract definition. It takes the relay chain as the core and links the structural design of parallel chains, which fully demonstrates the scalability of the Polkadot network. People begin to look at it from the perspective of "universal public chain".
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Polkadot relay chain and parachain relationship
In Polkadot, the relay chain is equivalent to the "commander in chief". The verifier ensures the safety and reliability of the relay chain by staking DOT, verifying the proof of the parallel chain, and reaching a consensus with other verifiers. Parachains exchange information and conduct transactions through instructions issued by the relay chain.
The Polkadot official made a clearer introduction on this. As a network protocol, the Polkadot network can transmit any data (not limited to tokens) to all blockchains. This means that Polkadot is a real multi-chain application environment, making cross-chain registration and cross-chain calculation and other similar operations possible. An example would be a school's private blockchain for degree records that could send proofs to a degree verification smart contract on a public chain.
At present, the Polkadot ecosystem has included multiple application scenarios such as oracle machines, DAO, DeFi, smart contracts, games, wallets, infrastructure, browsers, and forums. According to incomplete statistics, at least 120 project developers have built applications and services around the Polkadot network, including well-known projects such as ChainLink, ChainX, IPSE, and Celer Network.
Although Polkadot's mainnet has not yet been officially launched, this fertile soil has already grown a bud. Any project related to the Polkadot ecosystem has received enough attention from the market.
On September 11, Phala Network, which is positioned on the Polkadot privacy computing parachain, was listed on the Huobi Watch Zone. In 4 days, its tokens rose from the opening price of 0.01USDT to a maximum of 0.21USDT, a 21-fold increase. Polkadot has become a new term for wealth creation.
Such a project with a top five market value and huge expectations from developers and investors, it is hard not to be compared with Ethereum and EOS, especially since they have similarities in many dimensions.
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The repeatedly mentioned "EOS pain"
When the market value of Polkadot is soaring, it is difficult to ignore a type of voice in the currency community. Some people use "the next EOS" to express their pessimism or "not so optimistic".
In fact, whether it is technical architecture, positioning or consensus mechanism, Polkadot and EOS are not very comparable. Polkadot, which is positioned in a "multi-chain environment", adopts the NPoS mechanism, allowing the system to select verification nodes with a large total number of pledged DOTs, and eliminate candidates with a relatively low total number of pledges, so that it is difficult for hostile groups to become verification nodes.
This is different from EOS, which measures the proportion of votes based on the number of pledges of validators. Polkadot gives the selected validators equal voting rights in the consensus agreement, making it more fair and secure.
Although the two are very different in terms of technical design, Polkadot and EOS do have many similarities in terms of market perception.
EOS used to raise US$4 billion as a project with high expectations from the outside world. Polkadot raised about US$145 million through a Dutch auction in October 2017, and opened two more rounds of fundraising in June 2019 and July this year. Total funds raised exceeded $250 million. It is worth mentioning that when EOS was raising funds, ICO was in full swing, and Polkadot was a model for raising funds against the market after the ICO was banned.
High funding means that both projects have received enough start-up funds. As a representative of technical blockchain infrastructure, EOS used to be the same as Polkadot today. It was on the altar before the mainnet went live, and the ecology once blossomed everywhere, known as "Blockchain 3.0".
These similarities have attracted special attention from some "old leeks". In particular, EOS has fallen to the altar, the Dapp story has little lingering sound, BM has become a hands-off shopkeeper, and the currency price has plummeted from its high point. Investors who have been cut off one round are worried that Polkadot's hype expectations are too high, and the "Pain of EOS" may repeat itself.
However, in the opinion of an EOS community member, the main reason for the decline of EOS is that BM and the Block.one Foundation have not done enough. They only contributed a technical underlying architecture, but did not pour power into the ecology. Polkadot is different from this.
In addition, from the perspective of developers, another friendly feature of Polkadot is that it lists in detail the tutorials for establishing Polkadot parachains on its official website, and has established a modular framework to help project parties quickly complete the development of new chains.
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Polkadot provides a tutorial on building a parachain
Compared with BM, Gavin Wood's personality is also more technical and practical. Some investors believe that BM has been "talking more and doing less", while Gavin Wood continues to contribute to Polkadot, especially technical support. For example, on EOS, super nodes can get more money, but Gavin Wood has designed more rigorous rules for Polkadot, "Although some people can own a lot of DOT, if his parachain has no essential purpose, he still can't make money. money."
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Higher dimensional Ethereum?
It seems that Polkadot at this stage has more room for imagination than EOS, but in the face of Ethereum, the leader of the public chain widely recognized by the technical genre, is Polkadot so capable?
Although the rise of Polkadot is fast enough, the objective fact is that compared with the long-established Ethereum, it is still a baby. In the early days of the Polkadot test network Kusama, it was unable to generate blocks due to downtime, which caused concern.
In Gavin Wood's view, it is normal to have problems and unimaginable difficulties. After all, it is very easy to come up with a vision that is more ambitious than other projects, but it is difficult to implement these statements into an achievable, truly useful and functional product. It's not easy.
People are becoming more and more aware of Polkadot's positioning. Gavin Wood compared Ethereum to one of his experiments, a product prototype to verify whether the technology is feasible, "Just like my school, I graduated from Ethereum and wanted to try more things."
In his eyes, the most obvious difference between Polkadot and Ethereum is that users do not need to pay gas fees to verifiers (miners). Moreover, on Polkadot, users can not only design smart contracts, but also design their own chains, economic models, etc., "This was not possible on the previous Ethereum."
Crust Network, the developer of the decentralized storage incentive layer protocol, once made a choice between Ethereum and Polkadot. The team's CPO Dean said that the development process found that there are some problems in Ethereum, including but not limited to high Gas fees, low TPS, limitations of development tools and functions, and state explosion.
In contrast, Polkadot has a late-mover advantage because it was aware of these problems during development. Dean believes that Polkadot has the advantages of large throughput and cross-chain capabilities. At the same time, its heterogeneous parallel chain design has a high degree of freedom, and its protocol governance and upgrades are very simple, and it supports fork-free upgrades. In the end, Crust Network chose Polkadot for development. "The most important thing is compatibility. For example, Polkadot's off-chain working machine has strong on-chain and off-chain interaction capabilities, which is very suitable for the Crust storage and retrieval service market."
