Table of Contents:

· Polkadot has been actively seeking change in the past year

· Polkadot's major layoff event

· Polkadot's unique parallel chain slot auction

· Polkadot 2.0 is not new

BlockBeats news, on October 19th, according to PolkaWorld, Parity research analyst Joe Petrowski stated in the Polkadot governance forum that Agile Coretime (Polkadot 2.0) is expected to launch on the Rococo testnet at the end of the year, launch on the Kusama canary network in the first quarter of next year, and launch on the Polkadot mainnet in the second quarter.

This means that the project will soon be able to directly access Polkadot relay chain services without the need to rent parallel chain slots for a long time.

Polkadot has been actively seeking change over the past year

Therefore, for a long time, this has led to a lack of liquidity in the Polkadot ecosystem, causing many projects to leave. This year, there are still projects choosing to exit the Polkadot ecosystem.

Lido developer MixBytes announced the suspension of Lido's staking services on Polkadot and Kusama on August 1. Lido had terminated staking on Polkadot and Kusama on March 29 and automatically unstaked all assets on June 22, with the official termination date being August 1. On September 15, the PolkaWorld Chinese community stated that due to the rejection of their proposal for official funding, PolkaWorld has suspended operations for half a month.

However, Polkadot has been actively seeking change.

On January 30th, Bifrost, a DeFi derivative protocol in Polkadot, announced the launch of its ecosystem fund, "BIFROST Ecosystem Fund," aimed at cultivating and promoting the development of the ecosystem, incentivizing the development of multiple DApps on the ecosystem, and providing support for projects based on the Bifrost ecosystem.

On June 15th, Polkadot launched a decentralized and open governance platform called Polkadot OpenGov, which simplifies its governance model. The improved governance platform abolishes the "first-class citizens" such as the Polkadot Council, and replaces the Polkadot Council and Technical Committee with a newly elected institution called the Polkadot Fellowship. It has no real power over the network and cannot change parameters or move assets. In addition, the new governance model supports voting on multiple issues at the same time, all of which are directly controlled by the community. Although PolkaWorld once criticized Polkadot's new governance framework OpenGov in a tweet.

On September 13th, Zodia Custody, a subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank, announced its plan to collaborate with Parity Technologies to provide custody services for the Polkadot ecosystem. The two companies plan to offer staking services for Polkadot's native token, DOT.

On September 23rd, Polkadot's core developers are seeking to expand the current limit of 100 parallel chains in the ecosystem, with the goal of eventually adding 1,000 parallel chains with the help of software updates. "Asynchronous backin" is reportedly one of the updates to Polkadot's parallel chain consensus protocol.

Related reading: ""1000 Parallel Chains and Millions of TPS", Will Polkadot Seek a Second Spring for Its Ecosystem?"

"Asynchronous support provides flexible scheduling for our future expansion work through Elastic Scaling and Instantaneous Core Time," said Sophia Gold, Polkadot Parity's engineering director in a statement. "Asynchronous support will also more than double the number of validators on Polkadot to around 1,000 by the end of 2024, which is the most important evolution of parallel chain consensus since we launched parallel chains nearly two years ago."

On October 10th, Web3 Foundation, the development organization of Polkadot, announced a new plan aimed at supporting teams and individuals who hope to make contributions to the success of Polkadot. The plan will invest 20 million Swiss francs and 5 million DOT tokens by 2024 to promote community-driven growth. Announcement.

The approximately 100 million DOT locked in the first batch of Crowdloans for Polkadot will be unlocked on October 23. To address this unlocking and to better adapt to the future Polkadot 2.0 situation, the community has initiated Governance Proposal #166, which proposes a slight increase in the ideal staking rate for the Polkadot network, expected to increase from 52.5% to 60%, allowing the network to accommodate newly entered DOT into the staking system after the unlocking without reducing staking rewards.

Polkadot's Major Layoff Event

Although Polkadot has been working hard behind the scenes, compared to 2021, Polkadot can now be said to have been forgotten by people, and when Polkadot is talked about again, it is because of "layoffs".

On October 12th, Scimitar Capital partner thiccy cited sources to reveal that Parity Technologies, the Polkadot ecosystem development organization, has laid off more than 300 people this week. Subsequently, Parity Technologies denied the rumors, but it is seeking to transfer some of its existing functions to multiple teams within the Polkadot decentralized ecosystem, which will indeed affect the company's personnel configuration, but any personnel changes related to the decentralized transition to various ecosystem funding entities will occur in the next few months.

Parity Technologies is a blockchain infrastructure company responsible for developing the Polkadot blockchain. A spokesperson for Parity stated in an email to DL News, "Thanks to our team members who played an important role in achieving today's success. Although this is a challenging step for Parity, it is a necessary one for Polkadot."

It is reported that in this wave of layoffs, only the company's core engineering, developer relations, ecosystem operations, and Asian team have not been laid off. According to several current and former employees, with the reduction of funds and employees accusing senior management of paying themselves generous salaries, Polkadot and Parity are now embroiled in internal conflicts.

Related reading: "Polkadot lays off employees: executives receive over $1 million in cash; Asian team not fired"

According to Parity employees, the company has laid off employees due to cash depletion. They said that Parity has been heavily recruiting in the past 12 months, leading to financial difficulties.

One employee said that the company's leadership should have better managed costs during the bear market. "The company spends money as if it were still in a bull market," the employee said.

Others blamed the layoffs on excessive salaries paid to executives, with executives typically receiving over $1 million in cash.

One employee said: "Once, a vice president in charge of digital marketing accidentally sent his salary to the entire company via email, showing that his income was about $700,000."

Polkadot's Unique Parachain Slot Auction

Gavin Wood left Ethereum to create Polkadot in order to build what he believes is the most suitable web 3.0 technology for long-term development. Polkadot's most distinctive design is the parallel chain slot auction. The Polkadot white paper mentions that there will be 100 slots in Polkadot, and Polkadot also uses a candle auction mechanism.

Related reading: "Acala CTO analyzes Polkadot's underlying technology: shared security and parallel chain slots"

Why 100 slots? What if the 100 slots are used up? To address the issue of insufficient slots, a secondary relay will be created. Polkadot will connect to 100 parallel chains, and each of these 100 chains will also be a relay chain. These 100 chains will then connect to another 100 chains, giving us a total of 10,000 chains. So this is Polkadot's solution. How did the number 100 come about? Polkadot's initial design supported 1,000 validators, and they would then allocate 10 validators to verify a parallel chain. So with 1,000 validators and 10 parallel chains, we get the number 100.

The candle auction mechanism will encourage everyone to turn in their chips earlier before they randomly go out. Because even if you bid in the last second before the start of the new cycle, it doesn't matter. Others can just see your bid and add to it later. Because adding bids before the start of the actual cycle has little effect. But if you choose to bid in the last second of the extinguishing cycle, there is a high chance that your bid will be invalid.

Polkadot is designed to achieve interoperability between different blockchain networks, allowing different blockchain systems to communicate with each other and share information. Its main components include: relay chain, parallel chains, parallel threads, and cross-chain bridges. Parallel chains do not need to maintain their own security facilities, and all security is provided by the relay chain, which can share the security of the relay chain.

On Polkadot, "slots" are rented out to the public in time periods of 6 months to 2 years, and parallel chains obtain positions on the relay chain through auctions. The funds (DOT) used in the auction are only locked and not consumed, and will be fully returned upon expiration. Typically, parallel chain projects incentivize with their native tokens and raise funds from users through "crowdloan" for auction participation.

The first round of Polkadot's parallel chain slot auction began in November 2021, with a two-year expiration date. The first batch of projects that successfully won the slot are about to expire. The first slot was won by Acala, with over 81,000 community members contributing more than 32 million DOT when the DOT price was close to $50. The funds involved in participating in Acala's slot auction reached $1.3 billion.

Currently, there are still a few months left until the expiration of the slots from the first round of auctions, and the tokens that were locked up will soon be unlocked. According to the original plan, if a large amount of tokens need to be locked up for future auctions, it will not have an impact on the price of DOT.

On January 30th, Aleph Zero won the 38th Polkadot parallel chain slot auction; on February 21st, Hashed Network won the 40th Polkadot parallel chain slot auction; on April 3rd, NFT ecosystem Moonsama won the 42nd Polkadot parallel chain slot auction.

Polkadot 2.0 is not new

Last year, at the Sub0 conference for Polkadot developers, Gavin Wood, co-founder of Polkadot and architect at Parity Technologies, announced Polkadot's development plan for 2023 and beyond, which includes the cross-channel and cross-consensus message passing protocol XCM and a new agile, more decentralized network governance process called OpenGov.

At the Polkadot Decoded conference in late June of this year, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood gave a speech stating that Polkadot may cancel the auction of parallel chains and shift to an application-centric model. He proposed a new perspective on Polkadot: no longer limited to existing parallel chains and relay chains, but focused on the more fundamental resources needed for blockchain - computing cores (nuclei), viewing Polkadot as a multi-core computer.

Related reading: "Polkadot 2.0: Abandoning Slot Auction Mechanism, Selling Core Time in the Form of NFTs and Allowing Cutting and Combining"

According to Gavin Wood, Polkadot's supercomputer currently has about 50 cores, which will grow to 500-1000 in the future. In terms of performance, the bandwidth of each core is equivalent to 1 MiB/s, the Geekbench 5 test score of computing power is about 380, and the latency is 6 seconds. These data will improve with hardware development...

In the new leasing mechanism, cores will be allocated based on core time (Coretime), including batch leasing and instant leasing conducted monthly. The batch leasing plan accounts for 75% of the total, and will sell core time for 4 weeks at a fixed price; instant leasing is priced by automatic market makers, with the goal of allowing project parties to purchase as needed, so that all cores are utilized.

The core time obtained from batch auctions exists in the form of NFTs and can be cut and combined.

"Direct access to Polkadot relay chain services" and "no need to rent parallel chain slots for a long time", can Polkadot get rid of long-standing risks because of this?

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