(2017-10-17) Polkadot Passes The140m Mark For Its Fundraise To Link Private And Public Blockchains

Polkadot passes the $140M mark for its fund-raise to link private and public blockchains. In effect, Polkadot is the interchange and translator between multiple blockchains which creative people developing on the Ethereum blockchain have been looking for in order to build a wealth new projects and infrastructure.

As companies develop their own side-chains, they needed, somehow, to link these projects to Ethereum’s public blockchain.

For the technically minded among you, a relay chain sits at the centre of the Polkadot protocol. Next, developers build ‘para-chains’ on top of it, thus linking into this relay chain. This is different to a ‘bridge chain’, which is not built on Polkadot. Polkadot means you can link public and private blockchains.

As of the weekend, Polkadot launched first the private sale for its token sale, and then on Sunday, its public sale. In this private round, it raised $83m Swiss Francs.

Beyond the “ICO hype” aspects of this story, Polkadot is a critically important technology that will help address mainstream blockchain adoption by tackling a couple big issues: interoperability, scalability, and shared security.

Gavin Wood commented thus on a public forum seen by Techcrunch: “Ethereum supercharged experimentation and (so far) let us explore the high-value ETH-for-share-in-a-project (“ICO”) contractual exchange. Polkadot is all about extending the generality and efficiency of that by introducing new state-transition engines, and by allowing them to be securely interoperable without having to do all the usual faff of building a secure blockchain. In my mind, it’s all about having a “creative commons” on which people can build the social experiments of the 21st Century; it should be as free as possible in both senses of the word.”

Seperately, I asked him what he think might be the biggest ideas to emerge from Polkadot. He said: “A substrate of trust-freedom underpinning the economic activity between people, business and organsations; changing the landscape of bureaucracy, trade and industry.