(2021-05-17) Wood The Launch Of Parachains

Gavin Wood: The Launch of Parachains. Now, phase five, the final phase in the launch of Polkadot is beginning. Polkadot is a heterogeneous scalable multichain. In its brief history, Polkadot has demonstrated a highly decentralised and inclusive staking system (anyone with as little as 1 DOT may take part in Polkadot’s staking system and be rewarded), seamless upgrades to its core logic and open, functional governance. However it has so far existed only as a single chain in isolation. With the launch of parachain functionality, this is about to change and the final vision of a heterogeneously sharded system is about to become reality.

For the next two months, effort will be directed towards reliability, refactoring and performance. At present, transaction volume is intentionally capped to a conservative limit

Following this restive period there are three new features, beyond those originally envisioned, in focus for Polkadot: Parathreads, Off-chain XCMP and Spree.

Off-chain XCMP is an upgrade to the basic XCMP that was released with the 0.9 series. Whereas the basic XCMP allows messages to be passed between parachains by routing the message data through the Relay-chain, Off-chain XCMP achieves the same thing while routing data directly between the two parachains’ collators. This means that the Relay Chain no longer sits as a bottleneck for message passing.