Polkadot India: An Introduction

5 min readSep 23, 2020

Recently, a large portion of the community in India has started exploring interoperability and the interest in Polkadot Network is rising by the day. Polkadot enables scalability by allowing specialized blockchains to communicate with each other in a secure, trustless environment. India is a nation with the second-largest Blockchain developer ecosystem and the crypto community in the nation is growing at a staggering rate. With growing interest from leading global VCs, Incubators, Exchanges and Layer 1 protocols, India is becoming a hub of innovation and market for mass adoption. When both, Polkadot and India join hands together the possibilities of achievements are limitless.

Who are we?

Polkadot India aims to educate the Indian Blockchain Crypto community about Polkadot Network, bridging the gap between Polkadot global ecosystem and the Indian ecosystem. Providing opportunities to the Indian developers, builders and entrepreneur while growing the Polkadot ecosystem.

Polkadot Network: An overview

Polkadot is an open-source project founded by the Web3 Foundation. It is a living network with the core pillars of governance and upgradability. The network has an advanced suite of governance tools and, using the WebAssembly standard as a ‘meta-protocol’, can autonomously deploy network upgrades. Polkadot adapts to your growing needs without the risks of network forks. By connecting these dots, Polkadot serves as a foundational part of a decentralized web, where users control their data and are not limited by trust bounds within the network. It is built to connect and secure unique blockchains, whether they be public, permission-less networks, private consortium chains, or oracles and other Web3 technologies. Polkadot enables an internet where independent blockchains can exchange information under common security guarantees.

Key Features

True Interoperability
Economic & Transactional Scalability
Easy Blockchain Innovation
Forkless and Future-Proof
Security for Everyone
User-driven Network Governance

Why Polkadot?

Back in the early 2000’s, when the internet was gaining popularity for the first time, the internet featured read-only, static, basic web pages. The online connected world at the time was only the beginning of virtual data, identities, and more. The internet during this time was also called the Web 1.0.

As social media platforms and online businesses began to emerge, the internet transformed into the Web 2.0. This upgraded internet, which we still use today, features dynamic, interactive web pages, where users can read and write information plus publish their own for others to see. This version of the web though, comes with downsides dealing with data control, privacy issues, and trust. This is where the Web 3.0 comes into the picture.

The Polkadot network is heading towards a future with a secure ecosystem for decentralized applications (built with blockchain technology) to communicate and interact in. Polkadot has deep roots in the blockchain industry and is working hard to build on existing blockchain concepts like governance, scalibility, and many more. The goal is to transform the internet into a decentralized web, where users control their own data and identity in a trust-free environment. The Web 3.0 movement aims to remove intermediaries and build a trustless infrastructure.

How does Polkadot work?

The Polkadot network uses a sharded model where shards — called “parachains”, allows transactions to be processed in parallel instead of one-by-one. Each parachain in the network has unique state transition functions (STF). Based on Polkadot’s design, as long as a chain’s logic can compile to Wasm and adheres to the Relay Chain API, then it can connect to the Polkadot network as a parachain.

Polkadot has a Relay Chain acting as the main chain of the system. Parachains construct and propose blocks to validators on the Relay Chain, where the blocks undergo rigorous availability and validity checks before being added to the finalized chain. As the Relay Chain provides the security guarantees, collators don’t have any security responsibilities, and thus do not require a robust incentive system. This is how the entire network stays up to date with the many transactions that take place.

Polkadot India is looking forward to:

Showcase the Polkadot tech stack to Indian developers to understand the potential of the Polkadot and build robust Blockchain projects easily using the well-structured modules.
Kickoff a self-sustainable community of Polkadot developers that are able to mentor other developers who are getting started in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Fostering a developer community to build tooling and bridges for inter-chain communication and inter-chain assets exchange complimenting the existing infrastructure of Polkadot Network.
Create a resource pool for driving innovation and research in the Interoperability area.
Bridge the gap between the Polkadot Network and the Indian Blockchain projects (existing and upcoming), acting as a catalyst in the adoption of technology developed by Substrate/Web3/Kusama/Polkadot.

How to get involved?

Polkadot Network has a very vibrant, supportive and growing community that is building and collaborating to grow the ecosystem. Their amazing community is made up of developers, individuals assisting in community growth or hosting events, Validators supporting the infrastructure, security, and governance of the network, among many other things. The best way to get deeply integrated into the community is through the Ambassadors program. Polkadot has over 300 top-notch builders, developers, founders, enthusiasts, and more from all backgrounds and geographies in their Ambassadors program. You can read more about it here and fill the form here.