Blog

Polkadot is designed to take back our digital sovereignty and agency from powerful third-parties, while also providing the foundation for new business models, services, organizations—and even entire societies and economies—to take shape and thrive into the future.

On-chain governance and autonomous enactment give the token holders agency, the vehicle to express their opinions and the guarantees about the impact that their expression has.

The new paper Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations expands on the white paper, presenting a comprehensive and updated description of Polkadot’s design components and subprotocols. Some of these are outlined here.

The genesis block of the Polkadot network was launched on May 26th. To celebrate, we have created the first builder’s bounty with over $6000 DAI to be won, split over three challenges.

Polkadot’s highly-anticipated release follows three years of intense development work. Mainnet launch builds on the success of Kusama canary network release in 2019.

Westend provides a testing environment for our infrastructure partners to test their Polkadot and Kusama deployment and processes.

A referendum was just held on Kusama regarding whether or not to redenominate DOTs on Polkadot in a 1:100 ratio. Web3 Foundation used this referendum to gauge sentiment from the community before the launch of Polkadot.

Polkadot is a next-generation blockchain protocol connecting multiple specialized blockchains into one unified network.

The Polkadot network will have a phased roll-out plan, with important milestones toward decentralization marking each phase in the process.

The building of trust-less bridges between Polkadot and other blockchain networks is one of the top priorities for the Web3 Foundation. Chorus One’s effort lays the groundwork to build this technology for the Cosmos ecosystem.

As the launch of Polkadot draws near, many are asking how the network will compare to Kusama and how both will be used in different ways going forward.

Polkadot development continues to progress rapidly, and we're pleased with the proven track record the technology has developed with the launch of Kusama last summer. The Polkadot codebase has undergone a series of audits since late 2019, and we expect to release the results of these security assessments as we progress through Polkadot's launch. Over the past few weeks, we have been closely monitoring the progress of COVID-19 through our communities. In light of the pandemic, we'll be re-evalua