CCN Coin of the Week : Polkadot

The Future of Decentralized Applications

Polkadot Origins

With the combined effort from Web 3, based in Switzerland, and Parity, based out of Berlin, the development teams have worked hard to bring to the public the Polkadot blockchain.

Dr. Gavin woods, previous CTO of Ethereum, and his team have been working on a blockchain that helps individuals, businesses, and governments use private applications without the need of an intermediary.

What makes Polkadot Different?

Scalability

Polkadot is a blockchain that allows any custom built blockchain to interact with one another through the Polkadot chain.

Each blockchain specializes in doing one thing well and only uses the parts of Polkadot’s blockchain that are required for its application. For instance an online retail shop may not need to use the parts of the Polkadot chain that deal with identity verification.

This allows for a a faster and more efficient output. Experts are saying that Polkadot could theoretically handle upwards of a million transactions per second. That is league’s better than ethereums @ 15 transactions per second or Visas @ 60,000 transactions per second.

Governance

The governance of the Polkadot blockchain is democratic by design with the ability of users to vote for council members and for changes to the rules in the chain. Users can run for council and vote in the issues that are important for them.

This is different than some chains who either have no way of making changes or rely on a central authority to make changes to the network.

Security

Polkadot makes security extremely easy for developers by allowing them to use Polkadot security as a sort of drag and drop code to allow the developers to specialize in what they do best. They can trust the network security and validators of Polkadot and focus on their specific nodes and use cases.

Updates

Polkadot removes the need to split or fork the chain by coming to a consensus before the next block is added. There should never be an instance of two parrallel Polkadot chains having two separate sets of code. This makes changes to the code seamless and has none of the headaches that blockchains with soft and hard forks have. In my opinion this is one of the best features of the Polkadot blockchain.

Future of Polkadot

I believe Polkadot will see three main categories of use cases: Consumers, businesses, and government.

Consumers

In the future consumers will be able to use the Polkadot blockchain for things like real estate, signing documents, sending secure messages, gaming, and owning their data on social media sites.

Businesses

Businesses will be able to develop use cases for things like Healthcare, finance, data storage, indexing, and fraud prevention.

Governments

Governments could theoretically use the Polkadot chain for identity verifications, licenses, certificates, changes to law, and many other use cases.

It’s no secret that the web 3.0 is already being developed and will change the future of many industries. Polkadot finally solves the problems that are so inherent in other blockchains. It is my belief that meta chains like Polkadot will be the future of decentralized application building with an attention to developer ease of use and chain efficiency.

Thanks for reading CCN’s Coin of the week.

Tune back next week for our next token!

• Josef S Loffler