Polkadot is considered the second biggest ecosystem after Ethereum for on-chain development. In recent years It has seen a significantly higher level of development activity than other major altcoins. This is because it is designed to alleviate the existing issues in building blockchain applications, like -slower and resource-intensive development processes.
Using Polkadot, you can easily and quickly develop custom blockchains using the Substrate framework. It is a multi-chain sharded network that can process multiple transactions on parachains. This improves scalability and flexibility. The network is extremely flexible and adaptive, thus enabling sharing of functionality and information among participants. Also, It has an extremely sophisticated governance system that is user-driven.
What is Polkadot?
The Polkadot is a third-generation blockchain network protocol for blockchain interoperability. It unlocks the potential of blockchain by enabling multi-chain connectivity, and as a result, multiple blockchain networks can perform uninterrupted transactions.
It consists of four main components:
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Relay chain: It is the heart of Polkadot. It helps to create shared security, consensus, and interoperability among various chains.
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Parachains: These are independent chains with their tokens and can be modified for specific use cases. Parachains are connected to each and a relay chain. The relay chain provides shared security and contributes to network scalability and pooled security.
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Parathreads: These are similar to parachains, have flexible connectivity, and are built on a pay-as-you-go economic model.
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Bridges: Bridges allow parathreads and parachains to connect and interact with external blockchains.
Parachains, custom blockchains built on top of Polkadot, can carry out interchain transactions. The relay chain provides shared security in a trust-minimized way for these transactions. Polkadot protocol helps to create an interconnected internet of blockchains where each application can process transactions in a parallel nature. Hence they are known as parachains.
Polkadot consists of heterogeneous blockchain networks that are secure and connected by Polkadot relay chains. Bridges also connect them with external networks. It can control its governance and is integrated with the Substrate, libp2p technology and Wasm. It uses the GRANDPA algorithm, and its run time environment is coded with programming languages like Rust, C++, and Golang. Polkadot uses the nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) to select validators and nominators and increase chain security.
What are all things you can develop on Polkadot?
Decentralized exchange (DEX)
You can build interoperable DEX platforms using Polkadot’s web3 ecosystem and substrate framework. With these DEXs, you can facilitate the seamless exchange of tokens and cryptocurrencies across multiple parachains.
Substrate-based dApp development
As parachains use a multi-chain substrate-based framework, you can develop DeFi apps, IoT applications, digital wallets, gaming apps, and web3 infrastructure using Polkadot.
NFT marketplaces
You can develop interoperable NFT marketplaces using parachain development kits like substrate, SDKs and other Polkadot tools. You can also build an NFT gaming platform using Polkadot. By unlocking the power of cross-chain functionality in Polkadot, players can trade NFTs across blockchain platforms.
Smart contract development
There is a scope for developing smart contracts for different types of parachains. These smart contracts are written using Parity’s ink and supported by the substrate framework. Using Polkadot, you can enable cross-chain compatibility for smart contracts and initiate multi-chain functionality.
DeFi services
Through the Polkadot development platform, you can empower DeFi services as it supports interoperability between public and private blockchains with cross-chain compatibility.
Conclusion
Polkadot, a sharded blockchain connecting multiple chains on a single network, allows them to exchange data and securely process transactions. This solves major scaling problems that have hindered blockchain development. Any blockchain can join Polkadot’s infrastructure, a random set of validators using heterogeneous shards. Thus Polkadot’s use cases are more important than any other blockchain. This indicator includes transaction chains, oracle chains, file storage chains, identification chains, data distribution chains, funding chains, IoT chains and privacy chains.
