Polkadot Launches Testnet for Sharding Cross-Communication

Published at: Aug. 6, 2020

The Polkadot (DOT) project launched a testnet to evaluate its planned sharding implementation based on parachains.

The key component that separates shards from being just many independent blockchains is communication. Shards need to be able to communicate with their peers to enable cross-shard token transfers and other forms of interoperability.

Called Rococo, the new testnet is designed specifically to test Polkadot’s inter-shard communication protocols. It was released on Aug. 4 and teased by Parity developer Bastian Köcher.

At launch, three separate parachains called tick, trick, and track will be available. Developers will also be able to add their own parachains. The network is based on a consensus algorithm known as Proof-of-Authority, which is essentially a form of trusted consensus which incorporates an admin key. This mechanism was chosen because consensus is not so important for the testnet’s current purposes.

At launch, Rococo supports Horizontal Message Passing — a way of sending messages and thus tokens between parachains by going through the Relay Chain. This has a similar purpose to Ethereum’s Beacon Chain.

Polkadot’s eventual goal is to implement Cross-Chain Message Passing, which would avoid using the relay chain to pass messages and thus enable quicker and more direct communication.

The Rococo testnet is an important milestone in Polkadot’s complete sharding rollout, as currently the blockchains are largely isolated entities. Developers warned that the system is not yet entirely stable and will be updated with new code later on to gradually prepare for a mainnet release.

This follows Polkadot’s mainnet release in July, although with somewhat limited functionality.

Projects building on Substrate

Polkadot’s architecture is based on the concept of parachains, which are independent but cross-communicating blockchains. Parachains are themselves based on Substrate, which is a blockchain building framework that provides the software foundation for parachains. Substrate-based blockchains can be used in stand-alone mode as well, but a framework called Cumulus makes it very easy to integrate them into Polkadot.

So far, many projects are building on Substrate in preparation for the network’s eventual launch.

Cointelegraph recently reported on a DeFi project called Stafi that creates liquid IOUs based on staked tokens.

Other projects include a Bitcoin-to-Polkadot bridge, Chainlink, Celer Network and many others.

The project is also pushing heavily to bring new developers to the ecosystem thanks to a collaboration with Gitcoin.

Tags
Technology
Polkadot
Parity
Related Posts
Exclusive: Gitcoin and Polkadot Cooperate to Bring New Developers to Blockchain
A partnership announced on Tuesday between the Gitcoin project and Polkadot will help the interoperable blockchain platform’s developers find community support and funding. Gitcoin’s current function can be considered as an experiment in a new way of funding public goods based on the concept of "Capital-constrained Liberal Radicalism," or CLR, championed by Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin. This works through Gitcoin Grants, a hybrid public funding mechanism that relies both on community contributions and wealthy donors. CLR is similar to the concept of matching donations, but they are not backed one-to-one. Instead, a quadratic funding system changes the weight of each …
Technology / June 16, 2020
Polkadot could introduce ‘common good’ parachains with DOT-based smart contracts
As Polkadot gets ready to launch parachain auctions, a combined fundraising and market interest discovery mechanism, the team is realizing that some core features may be ill-suited for the auction mechanism. Polkadot parachains are somewhat analogous to the sharding proposal for Ethereum 2.0. Each parachain is a largely independent blockchain built for a particular purpose. Many projects building on Polkadot — like Moonbeam, Equilibrium and Acala — are developing their own parachains where the project’s tokens would act as a native currency used to pay for transactions. The parachains are able to communicate with each other through the Relay Chain, …
Technology / Feb. 25, 2021
Polkadot’s roadmap for full launch fuels rally to all-time highs
The Polkadot project released a detailed roadmap on Monday for the highly anticipated rollout of parachains and slot auctions, which should mark the full launch of the protocol. The roadmap is divided into three main stages. The current phase is the Rococo testnet environment, where developers can test mechanisms to communicate between various Polkadot parachains, its analog of shards. The platform uses a mechanism called Cross-Chain Message Passing-lite, or XCMP-lite, to allow parachains to send tokens and generalized messages to each other by going through Polkadot’s relay chain, the central coordinator of the network. The Rococo testnet was launched in …
Technology / Feb. 16, 2021
Polkadot Aims for Ethereum Ecosystem with Chainlink Integration
Polkadot is gearing up for its upcoming network launch as it revealed an integration with Chainlink (LINK) on Feb. 25. The integration of Chainlink oracles may be crucial for the development of Polkadot decentralized finance (DeFi) and other advanced smart contracts. Chainlink has completed an initial integration on Kusama, a canary network for Polkadot similar to a testnet. Chainlink was previously available on other blockchains through adapters, but this is the first move outside of the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem in 2020. Polkadot developers will thus be able to access external data by using Chainlink’s oracles. This is crucial to enable …
Technology / Feb. 25, 2020
Polkadot Will Feature Layer Two Scaling Thanks to Celer Network
Celer Network will develop its layer-2 solutions for Polkadot, an upcoming blockchain network developed by Web3 Foundation and supported by Parity Technologies. The sidechain scaling solution is positioned to improve performance beyond what is possible with layer one scaling. As announced on Feb. 20, Celer Network and the Web3 Foundation have partnered to port Celer’s State Channel Network technology to Polkadot’s development environment. Cointelegraph interviewed Mo Dong, co-founder of Celer Network, to learn more about the planned integration. Layer Two Benefits Celer Network focuses on providing a blockchain-agnostic scaling solution based on layer two scaling. It is part of a …
Technology / Feb. 24, 2020