Polkadot is a crypto that has taken off and rightfully so. It's one of the most innovative new launches in the crypto space as of late.
Polkadot is much like Ethereum in it's goals which is being able to enable customized side-chains that connect with other public blockchains. The founder of it is Gavin Wood who was previously the Chief Technology officer and co-founder.
Ethereums big issue has been scalability just like any of the old school blockchains such as Bitcoin and Litecoin. Ethereum was built to be a multi token platform in which other tokens could be launched for it. However as of 2017 that posed major issues as gas prices shot up like crazy. This in turn lead the team to try and develop a way to scale Ethereum which is still underway.
The initial thought was for the solution was to enable sharding. To put that into simple terms it means taking the blockchain itself and breaking it down into multiple blockchains known as shards. What this does is enables more validators which should enable scaling of the entire system instead of a single validator.
Instead the validator now checks the shards to make sure they are operating as they should. Thus creating many less calls reducing costs and speeding up transactions.
The other big change will be taking Ethereum to a POS (Proof of stake) system instead of a POW (proof of work) It might very well be worth holding on to your Ethereum and staking it to earn some passive income.
Born Was Polkadot
Like anything a released tech should always be advanced. However with blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum they are old school first born solutions which have limitations and issues have been found. Because of that new chains are always being born which takes what we learned from older blockchains and apply them to new ones.
This is the case of Polkadot. It aims to remove all the issues Ethereum faced in 2017. This is done by the following.
1 Scale
A blockchain is always going to increase in size and usage if it has good groundwork behind it. These massive blockchains after 10 years take weeks to download and sync. Polkadot removes much of this by creating side chains which can be started up and paired to Polkadot and attached to other outside blockchains. These are called parachains and they have just recently been released.
2 Specialize
The other great benefit of this blockchain is the ability to configure it for what you need it for. It creates the framework in which can be changed and adapted for your projects needs.
3 Self-govern
The communities decide what they want to happen on the chain. Consider it like a voting system we have here on Hive.
4 Upgrade!
The blockchain can actually be upgraded and has features in place to make it easier compared to other alternatives. This allows for scaling and other issues that might come up down the road which are unforeseen.
It's possible and it's going to greatly depend on how Ethereum 2.0 launch goes and if people move off of it on to Polkadot. Right now it's a bit on the new side so it's utilization it's that great yet.
However really Polkadot pairs as a solution to Ethereums issue instead. Etherium has a gas price. Think of it as a highway and to get on that highway you have to pay a gas charge. As it becomes more congested that gas price increased.
What Polkadot does it splits those highways off into parachains allowing transactions to happen on new highways while the core highway now manages those parachains. This creates less congestion on the main highway thus reducing gas prices.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I haven't invested in Polkadot, but it surely looks really interesting!
I've got more DOT this week
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta