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As blockchain interoperability and multi-chain architectures gain traction, Polkadot has risen as one of the most prominent “Internet of Blockchains” projects.
For developers building across parachains or investors seeking diversified crypto asset exposure, understanding Polkadot is essential. Time to explore the ecosystem!
Polkadot was founded in 2016 by Dr. Gavin Wood, one of the original co-founders and CTO of Ethereum. Along with spearheading much of Ethereum’s early architecture, Wood authored the ERC-20 token standard that became building blocks for the DeFi movement.
However, as Ethereum grew, Wood envisioned technical shortcomings that prevented it from effectively scaling to become a seamless multi-chain environment. He departed Ethereum and began architecting an entirely new blockchain to directly address interchain communication and scalability hurdles.
This new base layer eventually came to be known as Polkadot — envisioned to power an internet of interoperable blockchains specialized for their own use cases. By late 2019, Polkadot’s mainnet was launched after several years of closed development.
Now with continuous functionality established, Polkadot aims become a general framework facilitating an internet of interconnected blockchains — an ambitious vision now materializing.
As the brainchild of Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, it’s unsurprising that Polkadot brings deep technical sophistication to achieving its multi-chain aspirations. Key innovations include:
Specialized Parachains At its core, the Polkadot network allows customized application-specific blockchains to connect into its ecosystem. These standalone chains are called parachains (or parathreads for simple chains). Teams can optimized their parachain unfettered for a given use case.
Central Relay Chain Polkadot’s central component is its Relay Chain — responsible for organizing consensus and communication across all parachains in the…
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