On 13th October 2021, the Polkadot founders Gavin Wood and Robert Habermeier announced that the network had reached the technical capability to support its first ever cohort of parachains. This was followed by a motion submitted to the Polkadot Council to open the network’s first parachain auction beginning from 11th November, 2021. We at Mapleblock Capital support multiple projects in the Polkadot ecosystem, and share the multichain vision of the Polkadot team. In this article we give an in-depth look at parachains, the auction mechanism, and look back at the Kusama parachain auctions that happened this year

What are Polkadot & Kusama?

The Polkadot network is a project by Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies that can be best described as a blockchain of blockchains. Its vision is based on interoperability and a shared security model between multiple different blockchains, by running them as parallel networks across its numerous shards called parachains. At the core of the Polkadot network is the relay chain which serves as a layer 0 protocol designed to provide security and cross-chain interoperability to all the layer 1 networks in the ecosystem. It is one of the biggest plays focused on building an infrastructure layer for a multi-chain future.

Kusama is the ‘canary network’ of Polkadot and serves as an experimental network to test new code, features with faster iterations and lower stakes. It is in a way a proof-of-concept for Polkadot’s NPoS consensus model.

The Polkadot ecosystem offers the following features to the parachain:

  1. Interoperability: cross-chain communication between blockchains
  2. Self-Governance: blockchains can customise their governance
  3. Upgradability: Polkadot enables forkless upgrades
  4. Shared-security: reduced cost of network security & more secure consensus layer

Network Architecture

The network architecture can be divided into 4 main components:

Relay Chain

The relay chain is the heart of the network responsible for consensus and cross-chain interoperability, but has reduced functionality. The relay chain can’t run smart contracts.

Parachains

Parachains are a diverse set of specialised blockchains that connect to the relay chain for consensus. They are the core component of Polkadot’s multi-chain model. The network also has common-good parachains that serve as public utility infrastructure controlled by Polkadot governance

Parachains are native blockchains that have the following features:

Parathreads