PolkaDot Review: Interoperability Of The Future Or Complicated Mess?

Let’s cover a topic I haven’t touched in some time — Interoperability.

The goal is to have a future where you can build any chain you want and connect every chain together.

This is the goal of projects like Polkadot. Other projects like Cosmos, ICON, and Wanchain also focus on this problem and solution, but Polkadot has a pretty compelling approach.

Polkadot is an ambitious project that leverages a form of proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus for the broader ecosystem of blockchains that are connected to it and is scheduled for official launch in Q3 2019.

The people behind it, such as Dr. Gavin Wood, creator of the Solidity programming language, Polkadot facilitates a heterogenous multi-chain framework where parachains operate through a trust-minimized federation structure.

What that means is that that you have chains that talk to each other in a scalable fashion.

From their whitepaper (https://polkadot.network/PolkaDotPaper.pdf):

Polkadot is a scalable heterogeneous multi-chain. This means that unlike previous blockchain implementations which have focused on providing a single chain of varying degrees of generality over potential applications, Polkadot itself is designed to provide no inherent application functionality at all. Rather, Polkadot provides the bedrock “relay-chain” upon which a large number of validatable, globally-coherent dynamic data-structures may be hosted side-by-side. We call these data-structures “parallelised” chains or parachains, though there is no specific need for them to be blockchain in nature.

In other words, Polkadot may be considered equivalent to a set of independent chains (e.g. the set containing Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Namecoin and Bitcoin) except for two very important points:

• Pooled security;
• trust-free interchain transactability.

These points are why we consider Polkadot to be “scalable”. In principle, a problem to be deployed on Polkadot may be substantially parallelised—scaled out—over a large number of parachains. Since all aspects of each parachain may be conducted in parallel by a different segment of the Polkadot network, the system has some ability to scale. Polkadot provides a rather bare-bones piece of infrastructure leaving much of the complexity to be addressed at the middleware level. This is a conscious decision intended to reduce development risk, enabling the requisite software to be developed within a short time span and with a good level of confidence over its security and robustness.

This scalability and freedom for parachains allows a lot of flexibility for developers. Not only that, but the inheritance of features from one parachain to another make it a system that works like an Agile development process — faster innovation combined with cutting edge security.

Users could deposit BTC onto a DEX parachain using a ZCash powered parachain, as one example.

This blend of disparate technologies in a radically scalable way means you could pick and choose the features from different cryptocurrency standards you want and come up with something totally unique and new. Multi-chain frameworks allow us to experiment like this and will lead to completely new technologies born out of the fusion of existing ones.

It’s pretty cool to think about.

But of course, no system is perfect, and using PoS is a potential liability, for example.

PoS is still untested at scale and in duration, and add in the complexities of a multi-chain framework and suddenly there’s a lot that could go wrong.

In a sense, the more complex the possibilities, the more complex the problems.

Additionally, if they don’t attract the developers and users, it remains to be seen if there’s any true utility or if its hypothetical.

But yet, I think Polkadot is an exciting vision of the future and I look forward to seeing progress of projects built on it and and frameworks like it.

Read their litepaper here: https://polkadot.network/Polkadot-lightpaper.pdf