Built with the best technology
Polkadot’s relay chain is built with Substrate, a blockchain-building framework that is the distillation of Parity Technologies’ learnings building Ethereum, Bitcoin, and enterprise blockchains.
Polkadot’s state machine is compiled to WebAssembly (Wasm), a super performant virtual environment. Wasm is developed by major companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla, that have created a large ecosystem of support for the standard.
Polkadot’s networking uses libp2p, a flexible cross-platform network framework for peer-to-peer applications. Positioned to be the standard for future decentralized applications, libp2p handles the peer discovery and communication in the Polkadot ecosystem.
The Polkadot runtime environment is being coded in Rust, C++, and Golang, making Polkadot accessible to a wide range of developers.
Processing transactions in parallel
Parachains are specialized blockchains that connect to Polkadot. They will have characteristics specialized for their use cases and the ability to control their own governance.
Interactions on parachains are processed in parallel, enabling highly scalable systems.
Transactions can be spread out across the chains, allowing many more transactions to be processed in the same period of time.
Polkadot is solving many of the problems that have held back blockchain technology so far — all in one place, without compromising.
A better security model
In both Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake systems, blockchains compete with each other over resources to secure their networks, and blockchains are easily attacked until they develop a significant community to support their network.
Polkadot takes a different approach by letting blockchains pool their security, which means that the blockchains’ security is aggregated and applied to all.
By connecting to Polkadot, blockchain developers can secure their blockchain from day one.
Transparent on-chain governance
Updates to the protocol happen fork-free via transparent on-chain voting, so protocol development never stalls due to the lack of a clear process. The relay chain uses a sophisticated governance mechanism that is designed to establish a transparent, accountable and binding process for resolving disputes and upgrading the network.
DOT tokens are used to participate in governance decisions, including tabling proposals, voting, and bonding.
Parachains are free to design their own governance mechanisms, allowing for maximum freedom without affecting other parachains.
GRANDPA: a trustworthy consensus algorithm
Polkadot uses its original GRANDPA (GHOST-based Recursive Ancestor Deriving Prefix Agreement) consensus for a more secure and resilient network.
Under good network conditions, GRANDPA can finalize blocks nearly instantly. Under bad network conditions, like a network partition, GRANDPA can finalize large quantities of blocks (theoretically millions) at once when the partitions resolve.
