Like Ethereum, but Better: Polkadot Could Be the Secure Future of the Blockchain

Polkadot has attracted significant attention since the project’s inception in 2016 is due to its founding team. Polkadot is the brainchild of Dr. Gavin Wood, who is one of the original co-founders of Ethereum and who came up with the idea of the Solidity programming language. Wood left his position as CTO at Ethereum in 2016, shortly after the platform launched on mainnet. He’d already shared a vision for how Ethereum’s development could pan out, but it seems his co-founders disagreed. So Wood decided to implement his vision as Polkadot, a new project. Features of Polkadot Polkadot has several features designed to make it stand out from competitor platforms. One of the most notable is that Polkadot has a kind of sibling network called Kusama, which runs on the same codebase. Kusama serves as a midpoint between Polkadot’s testnets and a full Polkadot implementation. Along with the ability to experiment, Kusama is expected to remain operational as a live environment for lower value applications that don’t require Polkadot’s enterprise-grade security and stability. However, the two platforms are comparable in architecture and operation. Architecturally, Polkadot draws comparisons with Ethereum 2.0. Both platforms use sharding as a way of increasing processing capacity, each deploying a central chain responsible for maintaining the state and security of the overall blockchain. Polkadot’s central chain is called the Relay Chain, wh...