Polkadot Projects
Scaling and Interoperability two buzzwords that are bandied about way too frequently in the crypto space liberally peppered into every second white paper together with ethereum killer Polkadot projects and community governance.
One that may have been flying under your radar for over three years one that has just launched their mainnet and could indeed be that scalable interoperable community-governed utopian blockchain.
What the hell is the polkadot network anyway well according to their white paper they are a quote next-generation blockchain protocol that unites an entire network of purpose-built blockchains allowing them to operate seamlessly together at scale.
Basically, it's a multi-chain framework platform that's designed to offer interoperability and scalability solutions for those blockchains that are built on it.
This is a compelling pitch mainly because scalability and interoperability are two of the most pertinent problems facing blockchain networks today scalability because networks are bloated and slow.
They cannot realistically be expected to reach the throughput and efficiency required to be used on a global scale.
Interoperability because blockchains operate as independent nodes and it's often hard to transfer information and value from one to the other.
Polkadot is able to solve these problems because it's one network that's made up of a collection of separate blockchains a sharded blockchain connects several chains together in a single network allowing them to process transactions in parallel and exchange data between chains.
This is just the performance aspect of Polkadot there is one more angle that they're trying to attack and that is governance this is actually also a really important consideration as a lack of governance structures means users cannot easily agree on future code changes this intransigence often leads to destructive chain splits that we've seen at other blockchains.
Polkadot was built from the ground up with important governance mechanisms in place mechanisms that allow the community to vote on code changes and upgrades.
Despite Polkadot only just recently launching their mainnet the project has quite an interesting history the original polkadot white paper was released back in October of 2016. it was the brainchild of Dr.Gavin wood who was one of the founders of parity technologies for those of you who haven't heard his name before he was also one of the original co-founders of ethereum and he's the inventor of the solidity smart contract language so something of an overachiever.
Then in 2017 Dr.Wood and a fellow parity founder Peter Czaban founded the web3 foundation this was a swiss non-profit organization that would support the research and development of the Polkadot network of course this being 2017 it was one of the most opportune times to do an ICO.
So this is exactly what they did in October of 2017 the web3 foundation conducted the Polkadot public sale and they were able to raise an eye-watering 140 million dollars this was in return for 50 of the 10 million dot token supply subsequent to this raise web 3 unsurprisingly chose parity as the company that would develop the Polkadot network parity developed a number of other blockchain-related products and one of those was a multi-signature wallet this was the same wallet that parity used in order to store their large treasure chest of ICO funds.
Well 10 days after the fundraiser someone was able to accidentally and permanently freeze most of the funds in the wallets. Now i remember this happening and it was the second such instance on the parity wallets in a matter of a few months the end result was that at least 66 of the total funds raised in the ICO were lost forever.
There were also a number of other users who lost access to funds in the incident and in total about 513,000 eth were thought to have been lost despite this though Polkadot and the web3 foundation still had enough funds to meet their development milestones and they forged on 90 million dollars.
When you have such high name value behind your project there are always more investors willing to fill the breach. Polkadot was able to raise more capital in 2019 by selling off some of their initial dots this was all through a private sale. Then in July of this year, the web3 foundation had one more bite of the cherry they decided to run a third private sale where they were able to raise a total of 3982 bitcoin almost 47 million dollars.
So Polkadot does have quite a storied history and that is before it even fully launched but there must be a reason that investors are willing to invest such sums in a project like this despite it losing 66 of its initial raise i think it comes down to some pretty extraordinary tech.
