Today is an exciting and historic day for Polkadot. 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.
The onboarding process for Polkadot’s first batch of five auction-winning parachains
began with the start of lease period 6 at 10:07 pm UTC last night. As of this
morning, all five parachains have now successfully onboarded to the network.
The winning parachains from Polkadot’s first batch of auctions were, in order,
Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Parallel Finance, and Clover.
After building an impressive
level of community support through crowdloans, to the tune of nearly 100 million
total DOT locked, all of them are now successfully onboarded and producing
blocks.
The launch of parachains on Polkadot represents the culmination of the original
vision outlined in the Polkadot Whitepaper (aka the Polkadot Paper) in 2016. The
Polkadot Paper outlined Polkadot’s core features and sketched out the network’s
sharded multichain design. Parachains are the final piece of core functionality, as
outlined in the paper, to be fully launched. How Polkadot evolves from here is up to
its community of DOT holders, who will approve any future upgrades via the network’s
on-chain governance system.
The Road to Parachains
Providing blockchain teams with several key advantages over alternative and legacy
technologies, parachains are a key component of the original vision of Polkadot.
This vision has its roots in the early days of Ethereum, when Polkadot founder and
Ethereum cofounder Gavin Wood and others first began to think about what a
next-generation, sharded version of Ethereum could look like.
But the first concrete steps toward parachains came in the summer of 2016, when the
key insight was made that a sharded blockchain network could allow each shard or
blockchain in the network to have its own design. The idea for heterogeneous
sharding was born, and the vision for parachains was outlined shortly after in the
Polkadot Paper.
In terms of code, Polkadot and parachains began when Polkadot founder and parachains
Lead Developer Robert Habermeier made the first commit to the Substrate Repo on
November 7th, 2017. The basis of Polkadot and all of the parachains now connected to
it, Substrate has since had over 6000 commits from
more than 300 total contributors
— a monumental effort from the Polkadot developer community. After nearly 3 years of
development, Polkadot’s launch kicked off on May 26th, 2020, and parachains got
their first dedicated testnet with Rococo that
August.
What’s Next
The next batch of Polkadot auctions will begin on or around December 23rd, 2021
(block 8263710). The second batch will feature 6 auctions in total, with the 6
winning parachains to be onboarded on or around March 11th, 2022 (block
9388800).
Several future upgrades have been proposed for Polkadot that will continue to expand
the network’s capabilities into the future. These and all future upgrades will need
to be approved by Polkadot’s on-chain governance community. Proposed upgrades
include parathreads, which will allow parachains to join the network on a
pay-per-block basis rather than leasing a slot via auction, and the full launch of
XCM, Polkadot’s cross-chain message format.