Polkadot to debut parachain auctions after governance vote

Published at: Oct. 13, 2021

Polkadot has laid out a schedule to debut parachain auctions on Nov. 11 following unanimous approval from the blockchain’s on-chain governance council members. The news marks a landmark achievement, as it fulfills the final core technical element of the white paper published five years ago.

Parachains are uniquely distinctive layer-one blockchain platforms that operate laterally alongside the main Polkadot network, in addition to being tethered to the Polkadot Relay Chain. Their purposeful function can be witnessed across a multitude of areas from decentralized finance to smart contracts.

Speaking at the Sub0 Conference as representatives of Parity Technologies, Polkadot founders Gavin Wood and Robert Habermeier confirmed that Polkadot now holds the technical capabilities to implement parachains, auctions and crowdloans for the first time.

In an immediate response, Proposal #118 was motioned by governance member Joe Petrowski, expressing details and recommendations for the deployment.

The first Polkadot parachain auction of the initial batch is slated to begin on Nov. 11 and will continue at a rate of one per week for five consecutive weeks until the final auction on Dec. 9.

The initial bidding period will last for two days, followed by a five-day ending period. Two unique features about the proposal of this auction schedule are that unlike the immediacy of Kusama’s project onboarding after auctions, Polkadot auctions will be held in transit for a period of one month.

In addition to this, there will be a 75% capacity of projects to that witnessed on Kusuma, in a bid for quality over quantity.

Within the proposal, and indeed further quoted later in this piece, canary network Kusama was cited as having a positive impact on the evolution of this concept in both abstract and practical terms.

Kusama, a sandbox platform designed for developers to experiment with blockchain applications before their official launch on the Polkadot blockchain, has recently implemented the success of 11 parachain slot auctions.

In addition to commending the near-flawless process of the Kusama auctions, the official report also noted that 2.4 million Kusama (KSM) tokens have been contributed by 49,000 uniquely active addresses during the auctions.

Cointelegraph reached out to Peter Mauric, head of public affairs at Parity Technologies, for an exclusive commentary on the inspiration behind the proposal as well as the potential impact the implementation may have on the Polkadot ecosystem:

“Kusama was launched in order to give the teams building the core Polkadot protocol, parachains and their constituent communities an opportunity to battle-test their tech and teams. While there were a few bits of expected chaos along the way, the experience over the past few months deploying parachains on Kusama have given us confidence that they are ready for prime time on Polkadot.”

He went on to discuss the positive impacts that the implementation will have on the Polkadot ecosystem, saying:

“This is the moment everyone has been waiting for since the Polkadot paper was introduced over five years ago. The promise of parachains has always been core to what Polkadot aims to achieve: scalable, customizable and truly decentralized infrastructure for the next generation of layer-one protocols, in the form of these parachain networks.”