Gavin Wood’s Polkadot: ‘King of the [Blockchain] Mountains’
By far the most ambitious, and most complicated, blockchain project in existence, this layman’s guide will abstract away much of Polkadot’s labyrinthine complexity to clarify its use cases, value propositions, and why you should consider its Parachain offerings.
Gav of York
One cannot begin to explain Polkadot without first acknowledging the outsized capability and extraordinary journey of its totemic founder, Dr. Gavin Wood.
Wood was lurking around the Bitcoin community in 2013 when an associate introduced him to Vitalik Buterin. Shortly thereafter Wood co-founded Ethereum, and as its CTO proposed, and to a large extent developed, the Solidity programming language, Ethereum Virtual Machine and runtime system for smart contracts upon which it still relies today.
Having coded Ethereum into existence, Wood was acutely aware of the scalability, interoperability, governance and sustainability trade-offs made in Eth Version One. British to his bootstraps, Wood naturally wanted to get on with “doing the job properly,” aka: developing Ethereum 2.0. His desire sat at odds with the other co-founders more commercially oriented objectives, so in January 2016 Wood departed to pursue his “dream” of an “open, transparent, jurisdiction-neutral techno-legal system” designed, very specifically, to “deliver on the promises Ethereum could not.”
Layer Zero
After first co-founding Parity Technologies (formerly Ethcore) with partner Jutta Steiner, Wood’s “sparkly new venture” was to develop Substrate, a blockchain-specific programming language that would become the catalyst for Polkadot: what he inimitably describes as the “blockchain of blockchains.”
Using Substrate’s native tooling powered by industry standard WebAssembly, Wood’s proposition was to build a “Layer Zero” protocol by which to abstract and generalise (“the first lesson of computer science”) over everything preceding it in the space.
“The problem” with the current blockchain ecosystem, Wood contends, “is that if you want to build a new blockchain … a new business logic, you have to do an awful lot of work to get a relatively small amount back.” From securing the Proof-of-Stake system; Devising interoperability protocols to connect with other blockchains; Producing an un-forkable governance architecture to the building of a community, “[w]hat Polkadot does is … allows you to shortcut on an awful lot of that work.”
Wood envisaged Polkadot’s scaling, interoperation, governance and security solutions would provide developers the opportunity to easily experiment with and freely explore the near-infinite use cases and value propositions a truly decentralised Internet could deliver. By eliminating barriers inhibiting the growth and adoption of this revolutionary technology, Wood’s mission is to facilitate an Internet of blockchains capable of delivering humanity sovereignty over its interactions and decisions.
The Future is ‘Multi-Chain’
The most important thing to understand about Polkadot, and how it succeeds the limitations of general purpose blockchains such as Ethereum, is that Polkadot is not a single chain, but many.
All running off the fulcrum-like Polkadot ‘Relay Chain’, Polkadot ‘Parachains’, as they are called, leverage the scalable, interoperable, governance and all-important security architecture of the Layer Zero Relay Chain to best optimise their own specialised use case.
Parachain projects (called such because they run in ‘parallel’ as Layer One’s on top of the Layer Zero Relay Chain) have absolute freedom to craft their own jurisdictional rules, logic and laws of governance as they see fit. There are no prerequisites for teams proposing a Parachain, the selection process determined entirely by the community of Polkadot token holders who contribute their DOT to crowd-loans in exchange for a project’s native token.
This is where things get very interesting for Polkadot, as its provision of specialised blockchain services: that is, the very basis of its ongoing growth and value potential, is inextricably tied to the diversity, proficiency, and ultimate success of the Parachain projects that come forth to build on it.
“Innovation Maximalism”
The overarching goal of Wood’s growth model for Polkadot is ‘optimisation’ at all cost. As evidenced, his approach to achieving this entails outsourcing the provision of Polkadot’s specialised services in something akin to an open tender. As Wood reveals: “I accept and actually believe in running experiments, running multiple different potential ways forward at once, and then competing them and somehow picking the best one.”
With the Parachain selection process based on a naturally selected, laissez-faire style community crowd-loan process, the idea is that the best specialised use cases and applications on Polkadot will organically emerge, thereby creating a more robust, market-attuned composite decentralised ecosystem from the outset.
An overt rebuttal to the blockchain community’s penchant for Bitcoin or Ethereum et al., “maximalism,” Wood thus defines himself, and his multi-chain vision for Polkadot, as “innovation maximalist.” As he states:
“I think the one thing that gets to the crux of it for me is innovation. We are solving the problem of innovating fast … [By] facilitat[ing] other projects, other teams, other chains, to do as much as they can without Polkadot getting in the way [we are] celebrating the fact that there are many chains, rather than trying to force everything under one chain, and one economy. I think that’s probably the most powerful bit of ethos Polkadot has.”
Optimisation Maximalism
As mentioned, fundamental to Wood’s innovation maximalist, meta-protocol vision, is giving Parachain developer teams and the community responsible for choosing them, free-reign to fulfil the specialised functionality Polkadot needs to thrive.
According to Derek Yoo, founder of Moonbeam, one of the first projects awarded a coveted Parachain slot, the most interesting specialised services at present are “infrastructural”: smart contract, compute, storage, identity and De-Fi. In this respect, Parachains have already self-organised the delivery of what Yoo analogises to an “AWS menu” style of Web3 “toolkit.” “This,” he contends, “combined with the [multi-chain] networking element, combines to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Whether this self-organisation equates to self-optimisation and compounding network effects remains to be seen. Themselves optimised to be highly performant and efficient, Polkadot’s faith in its Parachains is in large based on the anticipated emergence of organically derived novel properties from them. Core to this thesis is the mechanism by which Polkadot Parachains are engineered to ‘cross-chain’ interact.
Spontaneous Emergence
Built on Substrate, Parachains endogenous to Polkadot are uniquely able to interoperate cross-chain between them selves, thanks to Polkadot’s ‘XCM’ cross-consensus messaging format.
Using XCM, Parachains will be able to communicate, transact and transfer data seamlessly. Furthermore, XCM has been buttressed by the recent addition of Moonbeam’s XC-20 token framework that, reflective of the ERC-20 standard, provides the ability to move assets not only cross-Parachain, but bridge to other chains outside the Polkadot ecosystem.
While it was only anticipated that, through the advent of cross-consensus functionality, novel ‘spontaneously emergent’ properties and value propositions would present themselves, Composable Finance, one of the recent Parachain slot winners, has wasted no time in substantiating this claim.
Utilising the XCM pallet architecture to optimise the flow of liquidity within this new cross-chain environment, as OxBrainJar, co-founder and head of product at Composable reveals, cross-consensus messaging:
“… facilitates new kinds of yield through the reduction of liquidity fragmentation across ecosystems … Be it from single-sided staking, where users will be able to obtain yield directly from fees generated from transacting, producing a new revenue generating opportunity in the ecosystem unlike anything ever before seen … or an open-sourced bot protocol that broadens the depth of liquidity the system can provide … This feature in and of itself [is] radical [that] no-one’s done before.”
The novel, native properties emerging from XCM’s seamless movement of information and assets is already proving to be a game-changer for not only DOT, but the broader blockchain ecosystem as a whole.
DOTSAMA: A Dual Network Thesis
Among all of Wood’s innovations with Polkadot, what is considered perhaps most unique, and potentially impactful, is the addition its complementary ‘Kusama’ chain.
A tokenized canary test-net designed to implement real-world, skin-in-the-game value-signal conditions, Kusama shares the same code and design as Polkadot, but is configured to run four times faster.
The idea behind Kusama is that Parachain projects can run their code and experiment with new ideas and features in a value bearing test-network to assess conditions before deploying to Polkadot’s higher value, marquee main-net. This linear process, however, does not mean Kusama eventually gets left in the dust.
As we are witnessing, Kusama’s “fast moving, no promises, expect chaos, make it or break it” environment is better suited to meet the persuasions of a certain class developer and community. As Yoo of Moonbeam reveals of his experience in launching sister chain ‘Moonriver’ on Kusama, “this network doesn’t always want to be second fiddle to Polkadot … these things tend to have a life of their own, and a way of expressing their own collective will … and we’re seeing teams that are targeting Kusama as their final deployment destination … they’re like, ‘no that’s where I want to be’, and don’t even want to go to Polkadot.”
Much more than a mere test-net, Kusama’s value bearing network is producing a hot-bed of dynamic experimentation in which developers and communities alike can use the latest technology to adapt and change their raison d’être at lighting speed. Perhaps more than any other chain in operation, Kusama enables teams to push the boundaries of what’s possible, which is perhaps the most critical criteria for developers in the fast-Darwinian natural selection of this still embryonic ecosystem.
While Marmite Toast of Composable suggests “Kusama runs so Polkadot can walk,” he also intimates that many developers are so enamoured with Kusama, there is speculation it could rival Polkadot for significance! Irrespective of this inclination toward bias (and heaven forbid, more maximalism!), Dotsama’s symbiotic-by-design, more-then-the-sum-of-its-parts dual-network approach, something “fundamentally different to anything else we have seen in crypto,” will likely continue to challenge our assumptions, and expectations of what’s possible, for eons to come.
Gavernance
As founder of Polychain Capital (an early investor in Polkadot) Olaf Carlson-Wee suggests, Polkadot’s solution to bootstrapping new projects, use cases and behaviours in this space is nothing short of epochal, going so far as to demarcate this ecosystem into a “pre” and “post” “Polkadot world.”
If we take into account Wood’s achievements “pre” Polkadot alone, his place alongside the greats of British computer science: Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Geoffrey Hinton and Tim Berners-Lee, was already secure. How he will be received when hundreds of Parachains work in concert to network effect his vision of an Internet of decentralised blockchains, one capable of delivering humanity sovereignty over its interactions and decisions, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Despite Wood confessing he chose the name Polkadot because it connoted having “no centre” and is “fun … because a good part of life should be about fun,” given he and the and the meta-brain capacity of seventy of his closest friends have dedicated over five years of diligent hard work to bringing his vision to fruition, I can’t help but muse he must also be a cycling enthusiast.
If, as Guy from CoinBureau contends, “cross-chain interoperability is the mountain standing between where we are now, and where we hope to get in the future … a free web which relies on decentralised blockchain-based systems rather than monopolised centrally controlled networks,” to extend the alpine metaphor, the future of decentralisation, and for that matter Wood’s legacy and posterity, will live or die on how well Polkadot climbs that hill.
As Wood contends, if they can get there, “the views, I expect, will be magnificent.”
Polkadot Parachains are now live! Stake with StakeBaby.
Russell Hughes has a PhD from the RMIT School of Architecture and Design, and is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Queensland Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology.
