Polkadot DOT

Polkadot is an open-source protocol that uses an innovative approach to breaking data into small chunking - called sharding - to facilitate decentralised, scalable and secure data transfers. This means that Polkadot can facilitate both payment transactions and decentralised applications. Polkadot’s real differentiator is interoperability, which means that it can connect transactions across different blockchain systems built within its ecosystem.

Their ambition is to provide a a decentralised and secure system of interconnected web applications that can share information with each other through. 

Polkadot’s native token, DOT, enables its holders to participate in governance whilst also facilitating the multichain aspect of Polkadot through incentivising validation. 

Polkadot was founded by the Web3 foundation - an organisation based in Switzerland - dedicated to the production of decentralized web projects. The founders include Dr Gavin Wood (Ethereum co-founder) Robert Habermeier and Peter Czaban. 

By being a “multichain” protocol, Polkadot processes transactions in parallel with each other - known as ‘parachains”. This allows the protocol to achieve much higher levels of scalability than had previously been possible with proof-of-work mechanisms. 

The network is also highly flexible and adaptive, meaning that upgrades can be rolled out without the need for a “hard-fork”. 

Polkadot has four core components:

1. Relay Chains - these create consensus and are the main driver of the Polkadot protocol. 
2. Parachains - independent chains that can have their own tokens and be optimized for specific use cases; allowing for increased scalability. 
3. Parathread - similar to parachains but with flexible connectivity based on an economical pay-as-you-go model; allowing for increased interoperability. 
4. Bridges - allows parachains and parathreads to connect and communicate with external blockchains like Ethereum.

The network is governed by its own community and uses the Nominated Proof-Of-Stake mechanism. NPoS selects validators and nominators and provides a high level of chain security. This unique validity scheme enables chains to interact with each other securely under the same rules, whilst remaining independent. 

Who is using Polkadot?

Polkadot is now the second most active defi ecosystem after Ethereum and growth of the network doesn’t look like slowing down. On coinmarketcap.com DOT is on over 400,000 watchlists and has recently grown from 1,600 daily active addresses to over 6000. 

Google trends backs this recent surge in adoption, showing that Polkadot’s main levels of interest have occurred over the last few months during the end of 2020 and the start of 2021. 

It also shows that unlike other popular crypto coins, the main amount of interest in Polkadot comes from China. 

This is interesting and unique to Polkadot and could indicate that the network poses a serious threat to the likes of Ethereum where Chinese interest is considerably lower. European nations Austria and Switzerland also rank high which isn’t surprising considering where the Web3 foundation is based. 

What is the size of the Polkadot network?

The DOT supply was originally capped at 10 million but to avoid having to deal with small decimals numbers within transactions and to make calculations easier this was increased to 1 billion in August 2020. Proportionally, everyone’s DOT was increased by a factor of 100 and so relatively everyone’s value remained the same. 

At the moment Polkadot supports a limited number of parachains - around about 100 but the foundation has plans to increase this moving forward. The network currently has 66% of all DOT supply staked. The total DOT supply is capped at 1 billion tokens so this means that around 667 million DOT are staked. This has a US dollar value equivalent of over $24 billion. 

As of May 2021 there are currently 297 validators producing blocks on the Polkadot network - the latest figure for this can be checked here: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/#/staking

What is the size of the Polkadot community?

The official Polkadot accounts have just under 350K followers on Twitter but just 25K on Reddit which is strangely unbalanced. Some have questioned how equally distributed DOT is, claiming that just 100 wallets control over 70% of the supply which may leave the coin open to inflation. 

However, there are 45 full time employees working on Polkadot so this is no small project. 

How much DOT is traded?

Average 24hr trading volume for DOT sits just under $3 billion at $2.7. The coin has a total market cap of over $37 billion and the coin is ranked #8 on coinmarketcap.com. The biggest exchanges for DOT are Binance and Huobi with DOT/USDT (US Dollar Tethered) and DOT/BTC being the most popular trading pairs.