Polkadot has been making headlines in recent weeks because of the network’s parachains auction. Over the past five years, the network has been under development, and now, the first set of parachains is going live.
Parachains are individual blockchains that will run parallel to the Polkadot network. The launch of parachains is a crucial development for the Polkadot network because it will be a major step towards having interconnected blockchain technology.
First Parachains go live
The parachains slots are allocated through auctions. The first projects to win these slots include Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar and Clover. The projects deal in various offerings, including decentralized finance (DeFi), investments, smart contracts and loans.
By winning these slots, these projects have leased Polkadot’s Relay Chain for up to 96 weeks. The parachains are expected to impact the blockchain space because they coincide with the major boom of projects such as the metaverse and other protocols that will become more visible.
The Polkadot platform will offer 100 parachain slots. Additional slots will be allocated in the coming months, and this will be done in batches. However, not all 100 parachain slots will be allocated via auctions. Some will be dedicated to governance.
More teams in the blockchain space getting parachain slots will boost interoperability by interacting with DOT. Therefore, Polkadot will achieve its vision of boosting decentralization and supporting Web 3.0.
The next set of parachains auctions are expected to commence on December 23, 2021. Six projects will emerge as auction winners, and the projects will go live on March 11, 2022.
Acala is one of the DeFi projects to go live on Polkadot. The co-founder of Acala, Bette Chen, commented on this stating, “After taking a bet on Polkadot and the Substrate framework when we started building over two years ago, we couldn’t be more excited to be launching Acala’s parachain to provide a DeFi platform and native, decentralized stablecoin (aUSD) to the Polkadot ecosystem and beyond.”
Polkadot transforming the blockchain space
The Polkadot blockchain was launched in May 2020. The blockchain was founded to achieve interoperability. Its founder, Dr Gavin Wood, launched a layer zero protocol known as Relay Chain, supporting 100 parachains and independent blockchains that will work together securely.
“No single blockchain design works optimally for every use case. Each chain comes with trade-offs making it good for some applications and not others. The parachain model was created with the belief that the future of Web 3 will involve many different types of blockchains working together,” Wood said.
According to Wood, blockchains need to work similarly to the internet by offering various services, and parachains can make this possible.
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