Polkadot (DOT)

In the year 2017, there was a surge in the number of available cryptocurrencies as many experienced individuals realized the true potential of cryptocurrencies. As a result, many newer ambitious projects that focused their energies towards the development of a decentralised internet, also known as Web 3.0, came into the limelight. Polkadot is a similar project that seeks to power the future of a decentralised internet. The technology has identified the lack of inter-operation between different cryptocurrencies, and therefore has empowered its own blockchain to be interoperable with other blockchains regardless of whether it was within or outside the cryptocurrency. This is indeed one of the greatest powers of the Polkadot project. Polkadot also provides the relevant infrastructure and technology through its blockchain platform which allows for the creation of smart contracts and even new blockchains built on top of the Polkadot network. The Polkadot technology is built on a modular design and is upgradeable. The network of this futuristic technology is decentralised and is governed by those who hold DOT, the native token of the Polkadot cryptocurrency (Krupka, 2020).

Polkadot is a revolutionary project whose main aim is to establish a more decentralised internet. As a matter of fact, it is backed by the Web3 Foundation, which is a Swiss-based organisation working actively to realise the dream of free and decentralised internet. The actual product is hard to describe in simple words. Polkadot is easily one of the most complicated cryptocurrencies of this era. To get a deep understanding of the technology, Polkadot Foundation has series of articles dedicated to explaining the technology. However, Polkadot can be visioned as an ecosystem of blockchains. The backbone of the project is the main blockchain known as Relay Chain. The Relay Chain can have Parachains growing out of it which can have their own tokens, protocols, methodologies and mechanisms (Platts, 2019).

The founding figure of Poladot is none other than the cryptocurrency sensation, Dr. Gavin Woods. Dr. Woods was one of the pioneers of the Ethereum cryptocurrency and is an experienced individual with over 20 years of experience in the software industry. He has been involved with many blockchain projects including Ethereum, and is also renowned for creating the programming language Solidity (Matinger, 2020). In 2017, Dr, Gavin started working on a new cryptocurrency, which eventually came out as Polkadot and was created to deliver on the promises which Ethereum could not.

Polkadot is surrounded by teams of experienced individuals who are working actively on the cryptocurrency. The founder of the project is Dr. Gavin Woods who is also heading the Polkadot Foundation. The proejct has a great suport from the Web3.0 team as well.

The Polkadot Foundation is actively working and solely responsible for the code development of the Polkadot blockchain. Frequent code changes and updates are seen on their Github repository where over 50 contributors are working actively.

With the amazing show Polkadot has managed to pull off during the launch of its mainnet, things are looking promising for Polkadot. The technology has reached the top 10 cryptocurrencies based on market capitalization, and it would be interesting to see it competing the likes of Ethereum in the coming days.

Polkadot is technically a decentralised organisation which means that it will be governed by its community alone. This also means that the future development and projects will fundamentally be decided by the community at large.

Polkadot is a cryptocurrency which checks every box in the list of most revolutionary cryptocurrencies. According to many experienced analysts, Polkadot is just getting started. It has a great potential for growth and could become the biggest platform for smart contracts.

Polkadot organised its ICO in October 2017 on top of the Ethereum blockchain. The ICO for the DOT cryptocurrency was tremendously successful and managed to raise a huge amount of $145 million USD. During the ICO, 10 million DOTs were sold to the public which is essentially half the supply of the DOT cryptocurrency. Each DOT token was released at a price of $28.80 USD. The main scandal of the DOT history came in two weeks later when after the Parity Hack, about 2/3 of these funds were permanently frozen. The cyber-attackers exploited a weakness in the code of the Parity Wallet. Despite this huge loss, the founding team decided to carry on with the project. In order to overcome this loss, another private funding round was organised in 2019. This time, each DOT token was sold at $120 USD, raising a staggering figure of over 60 million USD. The team behind Polkadot delivered the highly anticipated project by launching its main net in August 2020. Soon after the launch, Polkadot price valuation soared up high, making it amongst the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capital.

Polkadot has also consolidated its community in the previous years. Along with working on its technical infrastructure, the Polkadot team has also worked greatly to build a community around it. Polkadot has massive representation on Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, Github etc.

Polkadot has emerged as a complete cryptocurrency which has established itself in each domain which is expected from a good cryptocurrency. It has brought many companies on board, a number of which are cryptocurrency trading exchanges. A comprehensive list of all the Polkadot partners can be found on their official website (Foundervine, Impact Hub Accra, Lend With Care, Hatch Enterprise).

Polkadot is a cryptocurrency which offers a complete ecosystem to build other blockchains and decentralised applications on top of it. Even though the founder has refused categorically that it is not a competitor to Ethereum, analysts clearly regard it as a substitute of the Ethereum technology.