Composable Wins 8th Polkadot Parachain Slot, Positioning Composable as an Early Entrant in the Inevitable Dotsama Season
Our Composable Finance team and community are incredibly excited to have won the 8th parachain slot on the Polkadot Network. We look forward to joining the other parachain winners (Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Parallel, Clover, and Efinity) as Polkadot Ecosystem members, and are so grateful that the community has provided us with the support (6,075,487 DOT, equivalent to $166,529,091 USD at the time of writing) that propelled us to obtain this coveted position.
As we are all aware, there has been a great deal of excitement around the Polkadot ecosystem, and for good reason — Polkadot offers a multitude of advantages over other blockchains including the enhanced modularity of Substrate, the shared security model of the Polkadot/Kusama relay chain, and the ease of development with Substrate.
Yet this blockchain framework is still relatively new, and its technological superiority means that the Kusama/Polkadot ecosystem (together called “Dotsama”) still requires more time to reach its full, impressive potential. The fact that Composable is entering into Dotsama while it is still nascent is a good thing for our protocol and users. In this current position, Composable has the advantages of early access and the opportunity to become a significant player in the space, helping to mould its development while securing a prominent role of influence and success in what is projected to be an incredibly popular and powerful ecosystem.
As we deploy and develop our eponymous Composable Parachain on Polkadot, we hope to both further our mission of enhancing interoperability in DeFi as well as to participate in the growth of the Dotsama ecosystem.
Why Composable is Building on Dotsama
Polkadot has been a critical component of the Composable Finance vision from the very beginning. While the exact specifications of the Composable Ecosystem have grown and changed over time, we have always strived to reduce barriers to interoperability in DeFi, with the ultimate goal of fulfilling this with a Polkadot parachain of our own.
When we introduced ourselves on Medium more than nine months ago, we iterated these core ideas. Now, approaching a year down the line from the ideation of Composable, we have more faith in this mission than ever.
Our reasons for centring our vision along Polkadot are manifold, with a number relating to advantages of Substrate, the language of Polkadot. These reasons are summarized below:
Pallets are Superior to Smart Contracts in Terms of Composability and Power
As we have described in our Gitbook and one of my previous blogs, the pallets that comprise Substrate’s language are modular and allow for greater composability compared to the smart contracts found on Ethereum and many other chains. This means that developers can easily combine various portions (i.e. pallets) within Substrate in a LEGO-like manner to build whatever they can dream up. Or, developers can create their own pallets to add new uses. Combined, this means developers do not have to create every protocol or app from scratch every time but can combine existing pallets and even new pallets in novel ways to achieve their goals.
Unlike smart contracts, pallets are also built directly into a parachain’s runtime. This makes them incredibly powerful and also highly customizable — down to very granular features of transaction fees, governance, and more.
The modularity, composability, power, and customization of pallets make Substrate the ideal language for building the Composable ecosystem. Specifically, pallets allow us to create our ecosystem from the ground up, enabling us to fine-tune every point of development for our infrastructure project. This is critical, as our goals for totally unifying the DeFi space have not been achieved by other protocols to date using other chains with their own set of capabilities. Only Polkadot pallets allow us to bring our vision to life with precision, and to provide developers with the tools they need to join us in building in this space.
Polkadot’s Design Offers Enhanced Interoperability
Speaking of interoperability, Polkadot is the best blockchain to make this objective happen — another reason why Composable is building in this ecosystem. With the interoperability of the overall DeFi industry as our ultimate goal, the built-in interoperability of Polkadot helps us realize our mission. Parachains on Polkadot and Kusama are all able to communicate natively with each other, yet offer many advantages of acting like separate blockchains.
Thus, Composable is able to architect our parachain to our exact specifications as described above, while also providing our parachain with native integration with all other projects deployed on parachains in the ecosystem. This powers the interoperability we are building within our own ecosystem.
Using Polkadot as our foundation, Composable is able to build infrastructure that connects and taps into all other ecosystems. For example the combination of Centauri (via IBC bridge) and Mosaic (via linking EVM L1/L2s) allows us to create a cross-chain hub on Polkadot that we wouldn’t be able to do elsewhere.
Parachains are Highly Customizable and Built for Security
In Dotsama, parachains are linked to the main relay chain of the network. This has several advantages, including that it allows parachains to be customized to the exact needs of the protocols that have obtained them, while also sharing in the enhanced security of Dotsama and the relay chain.
Overall, Composable is only capable of realizing its lofty goals of interoperability in DeFi by using Polkadot, an ecosystem that we believe will grow to realize its full potential.
How Dotsama’s Nascent Ecosystem Benefits Composable — and Our Users
Compared to other relatively new blockchains like Avalance, Solana, and Fantom, Dotsama has not developed as quickly. We believe that this is largely attributable to the fact that Polkadot is superior, technologically — meaning that it takes longer to build. Some of these technological complicating factors include the relative newness of its Substrate basis, as well as its relatively new concept of cross-chain message passing (XCMP), which pose new challenges for developers to tackle and learn.
In Composable’s eyes, the newness of Dotsama positions us to be a driving force and achieve success within this ecosystem, as it inevitably booms in the future. We pride ourselves on our forward-looking approach, and recognize that this is an optimal position to be in.
Because of the many advantages of Dotsama that have been built into its design, we project this ecosystem to be one of the top blockchain ecosystems in DeFi over the next year. Our entrance into this ecosystem now, with our Kusama and Polkadot parachains, will put us well ahead of the curve of growth on this chain — allowing us to drive development in this space and secure a significant portion of the market.
The Composable Parachain is just the 7th parachain on Polkadot, and Picasso is one of the twenty parachains that were auctioned off in Kusama (plus Statemine, the parachain that was not procured by auction). Not all of these 27 auction-winning protocols have deployed their parachains yet, but Picasso is live and we hope to get Composable live soon as well. Thus, Composable is one of the first few dozen protocols to have secured a parachain and native building capabilities within the Dotsama ecosystem.
Entering any market early has advantages. Consider Bitcoin’s ongoing dominance in the broader cryptoeconomy, which continues to hover around 40–50% despite the many other available tokens and the many years that have elapsed since its creation. Such an early entrance positions a project to learn the space early on, to form influence on the space and shape its future, and to secure a significant portion of the market.
Composable hopes to have a leading, influential role within the Polkadot space, not only because of our early entrance, but also because our mission of promoting DeFi interoperability has been so well-received by you, our supporters and users. We intend to use any influence we gain to further this mission, and develop Polkadot into a hub of DeFi interoperability.
Summary
Dotsama is an incredibly promising blockchain, with many unique attributes compared to other available chains. These powerful tools have taken time to be constructed and subsequently learned and understood by developers in the space. This means that Dotsama is still in a relatively early phase of growth. This is an ideal entry point for Composable Finance, as we work to deploy our protocol along the parachain slot we have procured on Polkadot. Through this early access to the space, we are positioned to gain a significant, influential role in the Dotsama before it realizes the massive potential that we all know it can achieve. This will help us push interoperability forward in DeFi, built on the unique power of the Dotsama ecosystem.
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If you are a developer with a project you think fits our ecosystem and goals, and you would like to participate in our interactive testing landscape at Composable Labs, reach out to me on Telegram at @brainjar.
