DOTUSD
Polkadot / United States dollar
crypto

Polkadot is a blockchain network designed to support various interconnected, application-specific sub-chains called parachains (short for parallelized chains). Each chain built within Polkadot uses Parity Technologies' Substrate modular framework, which allows developers to select specific components that suit their application-specific chain best. Polkadot refers to the entire ecosystem of parachains that plug into a single base platform known as the Relay Chain. This base platform, which also leverages Substrate, does not support application functionality but instead provides security to the network's parachains and contains Polkadot's consensus, finality, and voting logic. Polkadot features a variety of technical components, including the relay-chain, parachains, the Polkadot Runtime Environment (PRE), and cross-network bridges. Relay-chain Polkadot's relay-chain is built with Substrate, a blockchain building framework that is the distillation of Parity technologies learnings building Ethereum, Bitcoin, and enterprise blockchains. It is at the core of the network, helping map addresses to account information, coordinating communications, and providing consensus through a pooled security mechanism utilizing proof-of-stake (PoS). All validators stake their DOTs and produced blocks directly on the relay-chain. The relay chain lacks features like smart contracts and instead is designed to be a minimal protocol to connect other network participants and provide transaction finality. Since this central chain is handling the bulk of the network's transaction flows, actions on the relay-chain may come at a premium. But the relay-chain will delegate a significant portion of the computational work to the surrounding parachains, which can have "differing implementations and features." Parachains Parachains will be used to collect and process transactions while using the relay chain for finality. To increase transaction throughput, parachains will process transactions concurrently across multiple chains, instead of queuing transactions and processing them sequentially. Polkadot does not place any constraints on the design and structure of parachains. These network components can be application-specific or support a particular feature (e.g., privacy or scalability). But each parachain must generate a proof regularly so a designated Polkadot validator can verify and reconcile past transactions. Parachains also share the same state as the relay-chain, meaning if the relay-chain should revert at any point, then all parachains would revert as well. In terms of composability, cross-parachain communication is native to Polkadot. Therefore, parachains will be able to send messages (including transactions and data) to each other "without the need for smart contracts to perform the bridging functionality." Polkadot Runtime Environment (PRE) The PRE consists of the networking, consensus and WebAssembly Virtual Machine subsystems. Polkadot breaks the components of the PRE down to: Network Interactions State storage and the Storage Trie Consensus Engine Wasm Virtual Machine (VM) Polkadot's state machine is compiled to WebAssembly (WASM), a high-performance virtual environment. WASM is developed by major companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla, that have created a large ecosystem of support for the standard. Polkadot's networking uses libp2p, a cross-platform network framework for peer-to-peer applications that handles the peer discovery and communication in the Polkadot ecosystem. The Polkadot runtime environment is being coded in C++, and Golang to make Polkadot accessible to a wider range of developers. Bridging Polkadot will eventually enable the connections to outside networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin through a series of specialized bridge contracts or modules. There are two different types of external bridging in Polkadot: Bridge contracts: Smart contracts that connect Polkadot's relay-chain to external chains (for example, the Parity Bridge between an Ethereum Proof-of-Authority (PoA) sidechain to a Substrate-based chain) In-built bridging modules: Purpose-built modules that help external chains connect with Polkadot