Polkadot in 30 minutes | Seraya Takahashi, Web3 Foundation Grantee | ETHTaipei 2024

uh yeah so I I am sah from the web3 foundation in Switzerland me myself also live in Switzerland um so the web three Foundation uh many people are always asking me what is actually the relationship between PKA do and the web 3 foundation so I just want to talk about that briefly um so Gavin wood which is one of the co-founders of the of ethereum uh actually came up with the term web3 uh back when he was working on the p. white paper and that's why he created the web 3 foundation and that's also the entity that um organized the token sale back in 2017 for Poka do so this is why the web3 foundation is very much um focusing on on U PKA technology and web 3 so uh first of all I want to give you uh a quick overview of what to expect so mostly I will be talking about PKA do 1.0 so that's the current state of poka do um then I will introduce you to some features that are upcoming the near future so still Po 1.x and um finally I will briefly mention po 2.0 which is more in distance and uh more visionary so poka do is actually more than just a blockchain because per uh per definition it is is 45 blockchains currently so it's a whole network of blockchains and the way it works is that uh you have all these layer one blockchains that roll up to the something that we call the the relay chain so that's basically the main chain that connects all the par chains so they just commit the the state route to the relay chain and then they get something that we called shared security so all these layer ones they actually don't need to have their their own huge sets of validators they just need like a handful of them because the relay chain is secure and because they roll up to the relay chain the whole network is actually secured um so that is made possible by something that is called substrate which is part of uh the po.

SDK so that's a a framework for developing app specific blockchains uh in Rust so all these par chains actually um are written using this this framework uh another thing you can do on Block uh on on poot uh you have cross chain messaging so uh we have a format that is called XM uh currently we have an average of 2,000 transactions um per week and there have been over half a million of of transactions in total that have been sent back and forth between different par chains between par chains in the relay chain and uh so all these par chains they they do very uh different things like they can be dexes there there's one that focuses on uh integrating Bitcoin um there is defi stuff um real word assets DS uh fundraising platforms so all kind of different projects um on this network uh it has proven to be very scalable and reliable and um so there has been a a project called The Dot Originals in that's like a PKA encryption project so similar to what was going on or still is going on on on bitcoin and during the peak in in like December 2023 uh there have been more than 1,000 transactions per second and millions of transactions per day and um the network did a good job managing it so we didn't have any problems and uh it wasn't even enough for the uh fee adjustment algorithm to kick in which is supposed to kick in once the network gets like too digested yeah so um another thing that you can do on poad is uh open go so uh Open golf is our uh onchain governance system uh it it is the arguably the word's largest and most decentralized Dow so uh there is also a treasury that is managed by this St currently it holds around or more than 38 million dots so that's currently uh around $350 million us and yeah whoever wants to contribute and be uh compensated for that can hand in a proposal so suggest uh what they want to do and then the community is going to vote on it uh using their tokens so uh that has already been live for for a while um that's also working great and um another thing uh another good use case for that is the technical Fellowship so those are a bunch of core developers and they're actually getting paid through the treasury so it's not like a centralized entity uh paying them and also they don't have to do this for free uh so they get compensated by by the network and the um the treasury and uh they even have a sophisticated ranking system so the the more reputation they build the more they contribute uh they higher their rank goes and the higher the salary goes and that's all on chain that's transparent and uh managed by the community Through the uh something that we call the collective system chain so we have this also this system chains uh or common good chains and other system chains include the asset tub that is more concerned about uh hosting assets and and bridging assets between different networks and uh also the bridge up um right then the next thing I want to talk about is Fork class upgrades so if you build on poka do you will be able to do Fork class upgrades that's um in contrast to other blockchains where you have to update your nodes with the new version of of uh the node program so that's not necessary on polop because first of all you have onchain governance which allows you to propose protocol changes so you will Pro you would propose a new runtime uh to be deployed and then once the community approves it it will be automatically rolled out on on the validators and from a technical point of view that's possible because uh polka do and all these par chains they compile to a wasum binary and this wasum binary is actually part of the blockchain state so uh because of that once you vote it will be automatically uh installed onto the so that the wasm binary is going to be replaced and then the node already runs on the new version of the runtime so that's a very powerful feature because also it avoids Forks hard Forks which split which split the community um I guess the only downside I can see is that you cannot have like or there are a lot of frequent updates so you're not going to have like huge launch parties for like a huge uh Fork that succeeds but I guess that's a good trade-off to make and also we have the Kosama Network so Kosama is the the sister network of poad do uh it's uh more experimental than poad do so one of the slogans associated with it is expect chaos so uh the delivery pipeline usually for par chains and P do uh is that first they would Deploy on a test net before they would then deploying Kosama which is the canary net so hello oh okay uh so actually there is economical value on this network it's not just uh worthless token so you can also make uh economical uh experiments and it's not just limited to to like technical testing so that's also something that is quite unique to poka do I think uh then fin if you choose to build on substrate or the pka SDK but you do not want to leverage all these benefits uh because maybe it doesn't fit your use case maybe you have some reason uh to to do do it differently and you don't need shared security then something you can do is you can run a solo chain so then of course you will be responsible uh for creating a consensus algorithm and validator set that is um safe enough for your users but that's possible because this frame work is very flexible so here's a list of uh different projects that actually use substrate uh some of them are still work in progress some of them have been rolled out some of them have even uh hundreds to billion dollars of uh market cap evaluations yeah so that's it for the first part so this is what polc currently is in the next part I'm going to introduce you to some upcoming features that are already being tested and uh rolled out so first of all um as synchronous backing so backing is uh the the mechanism for rolling up the par chains to the relay chain so to to connecting the the two and and making sure that it it's safe currently this is done in a synchronous way and this process takes around 12 or it takes 12 seconds actually so because the block time on the relay chain is 6 seconds it means that um it takes two blocks to be secured so this is uh what I mean here by synchronous backing so once the backing is over you can start backing the the next block and with the new model it's going to be possible to uh to do this asynchronously so before actually the that block is fully backed you can already start backing the next block so that way uh we can double the throughput uh because yeah as you can see only it takes you can do two blocks in 12 seconds rather than one and also what it allows us or what allows the the nodes on the parain side to do is they um they have four times more time so instead of half a second they now have four seconds due to several optim optimizations to suggest the block that will be included in the relay chain so if we multiply these two factors we actually end up with eight times more block space so this is how PO is going to scale better by yeah eight times in the in the very near future so this is being tested and being rolled out most of the code exists but um yeah it's not fully live yet and then another um feature that is upcoming is a coure time so coure time is basically just the for for Block space on padon right so um right the definition is that one core equals one par chain so if you as a chain have one block H sorry one core all the time then you can be secured all the time uh in the existing setup how it works is that um you will have to go through an auction and you will have to win the something called the par chain auction that secures your connection to the relay chain for two years but this is going to be much more flexible with the new model so it's going to be possible to fractionalize the core into flexible time frames so you can even just purchase uh you can either purchase in bulk for 28 days and then do another 28 days or you can resell them into the market or purchase from this second Market uh sellers that purchase bulk core time so that way you can buy up to just single usage even uh course so if you just want to uh secure your par chain less often and make it cheaper but less secure as a trade-off then that's something you can do and it it will allow the project to to be much more flexible and it will lower the barrier of Entry so we I expect a lot of more projects to to come to the ecosystem due to this um new feature and Improvement uh yeah and so the marketpl is going to be nft based um yeah we already running out of time so then we also have the Bey light client so that's going to make it possible to bridge P to the ethereum uh Network and that is made possible by um creating kind of a comp compatibility later for the two networks to um make their signature schemes compatible because they use different block signing algorithms um there is a implementation called snowbridge so they are going in the process of building this bridge and they're going to use this BV light client that is just yeah it's a light client deployed on on an ethereum smart contract that then connects to the uh PKA Network um so and the snow Bridge side on the Pok out side is going to live on the bridge Hub so one of the system per chains that I mentioned earlier um yeah then just very quickly so what does the future the like the distant future look like Po 2.0 uh it's basically uh will be a um a you be qu's computer that is running in a safe and decentralized way and that allows you to execute pretty much any program and it's even possible to to execute it over multiple blocks and this is actually going to be or that's the current Vision at least um jam is going to make that possible uh that's something that a concept that is that was introduced by Gavin wood last week at Subzero in Bangkok so that's it's it's pretty fresh uh very fresh idea um but yeah I don't really have time to to go much deeper into this unfortunately if you want to learn more about this then we have uh rfc's and the fellowship is mostly maintaining them but everybody is welcome to to contribute so you can check this out um over here I will also share um a c code with the um link to the slides later so finally last slide um how can you contribute so we have different funding programs the decentralized Futures program it runs until the end of June this year so it's a limited amount of time only and it covers around 65 million of funding uh in Fiat and Dot and then we also have the onchain treasury as mentioned earlier um yeah $350 million there in denominated in dot only and then we have the w3f grants that has been around already for like 5 years uh we have signed over 600 grants um that program is denominated in in Fiat so not in Dot and uh it focuses only on technical implementations open source implementations whereas the other two programs or I mean the treasure is not really a program but the other two funding mechanisms they are more versatile so so different kind of projects can be supported there uh if you want to learn more and like get educated about poka do and uh yeah there is a edx course and there's also the pood blockchain academy that uh took place in multiple times already this year it was in January in Hong Kong and then the next Edition is going to be in Singapore in May and June uh so there the students learn everything they need to to start building on polka do and then we have some other programs that help with like decentralizing the community so the decentralized voices is uh a program to to give to amplify the voices of smaller dot holders that are very engaged and motivated in the community and it's very similar for the Thousand validators program so that's also for people who do not necessarily have like huge amounts of funds to to uh run their own validators and have a huge stake so that's how people uh can support it there okay so with that thanks a lot for um your yeah attention thank [Applause] you time for questions open up so so we have some time for questions if anyone has anything to ask here's one hi uh thank you nazin um so kusama that's pretty unique right with How poo approaches things and it's been running for some time um so what are your Reflections on having this incentivized Canary Network um would you change anything about it and what has been great about it so far uh you mean just in a from a macro point of view right yeah I I think so the honestly the the um the auction model to to get this par chain slot it it was kind of difficult for smaller projects to build on polka do because you had to have a lot of Stak so some of in some of these auctions these slots actually sold for more than $1 million or multiple million dollars so of course not everybody has that kind of money right and with agile core time we can uh make sure that pretty much everybody can build on PKA do so uh obviously there is a trade-off because you compromise on security if you well if if you at least if you choose to not um secure on every block but I think it will massively lower the the barrier of entry for smaller projects yeah okay does that mean that with agile core time kusama is slightly less necessary um I wouldn't think so because it's kind of the playground right to to battle test the code be and also incentives before they're going to be deployed on PO yeah thank you thank you thank you do we have any other questions from the crowd all right well thank you very much thank you so much