Polkadot the Parachains Network

Described as the ”next-generation blockchain”, Polkadot is an open-source sharding layer-0 protocol that facilitates scalability through cross-chain blockchain unification.

Polkadot is designed to achieve full decentralization by enabling users to build and conduct transactions on their applications, dAPPs, institutions and services built on its network.

Its native token DOT which has a total supply of  1,103,303,471  tokens aims at creating parachains by bonding; being staked to strengthen the network’s security and give holders a voice in the governance of the network. 

*Learn more about parachains here.

Number of Contributors

“Serious” Contributors on the Polkadot network are given commit access to any project they see fit. The network provides projects which are more like an open wiki than a standard guarded open source project. Currently, the network has roughly 154 contributors on the master project excluding merge commits and bot accounts with 97.4% of them using the Javascript programming language.

Number of Issues

Out of the total 1199 issues fronted by the community, 841 have managed to be closed while 358 remain open. On the other hand, while 78 pull requests remain in progress, 2917 have already been addressed. 

Tracking  data available on Polkadot’s Github page, the major pressing issue seems to be how the engineers can make parachains work properly through “low-level networking.”

“Low-level networking” is defined as the APIs and utilities on top of which the actual high-level protocols (such as collation and PoV distribution) are implemented. In essence, the team is dedicated to ensuring that collators properly connect to the validators assigned to their parachain.

Number of Commits

Polkadot devs and the community at large can keep track of the developments on the network by tracking the number of commits on Github. 

There are an impressive 2600 commits so far to the master code on 7 currently open projects with 5 having been closed 

Number of Releases

There are three native runtimes released for Polkadot since its debut.

The pioneer version of the current network was the Kusama Canary Network in 2019, an independent network built to “warn” Polkadot developers of any major issues before launch and deployment to the higher-stakes environment of Polkadot.  

Next came the WestEnd Test Network replacing Polkadot’s previous Alexander testnet. The testnet allowed teams and devs to deploy and test a parachain on Polkadots network in preparation for launching deployment on mainnet.

In October 2021, the latest version Polkadot v0.9.12 went live as a proof of authority network with governance controlled by the single Sudo (super-user) account. This upgrade gives validators a voice by joining the network and participating in the consensus.  

Number of Forks

Unlike other networks that require hard forks to upgrade, a case in point Ethereum and Bitcoin, Polkadot has a forkless approach to blockchain upgrades.

While the Polkadot, which is built on Substrate, undergoes the same consensus process including adding proposals to the queue for voting, once it gets enough support from the community, the code is added on-chain without human intervention and its executed automatically.

This forkless upgrade has been lauded for preventing community friction, solving the issues of forks with multiple upgrades and reducing price volatility often associated with hard forks.

Track the latest developments on the Polkadot Network HERE

PN: “This data is not final and may be updated from time to time”