Polkadot, an interoperability project, has launched a nearly-complete version of its blockchain after three years of development.
Polkadot has gone live with its first “chain candidate” (CC1), a nearly-complete version of its blockchain. The blockchain has been under development since 2017, at which time it raised $140 million in one of the year’s most successful ICOs.
According to the network’s managing partner, Web3 Foundation, today marks the first phase of Polkadot’s mainnet rollout. At this stage, Web3 Foundation will retain control of the network, running nodes and validating blocks. Investors of Polkadot’s native token DOT can also access their accounts to express intent to become validators or nominate other validators, although they cannot transfer DOTs at this time, a Polkadot spokesperson said.
Polkadot will first launch under a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm controlled by the Web3 Foundation. The network will test out various “Sudo” modules in the same manner as Polkadot’s experimental Kusama network did in 2019 until a chain candidate is selected.
“Polkadot is, in many respects, the biggest bet in this ecosystem against chain maximalism,” Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood said in a video interview published today. “Even if there were one perfect chain, I don’t think it would stay perfect for very long. I would argue that it’s really not such a good plan to be so focused on backing one winner above all others.”
An alternative vision for hosting decentralized applications (dapps), Wood began the development of Polkadot in late 2016. Wood also co-founded Ethereum – including writing the network’s yellow paper and its programming language, Solidity – before becoming disenfranchised with that blockchain’s progression toward a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm (an overhaul commonly referred to as Eth 2.0).
“Polkadot CC1 is freshly born; beginning its ‘life’ at 17:36:21, Zug time,” Wood wrote. “We’re now at block #400, with Grandpa and Babe chugging along quite happily. So far so good.”
In the weeks before going live, the Web3 Foundation made a proposal to re-denominate DOT and increase the total token supply by 100 times — a move that ultimately generated some controversy. Although the Polkadot community passed the proposal at the time, the foundation decided to table the implementation and conduct another poll after the launch.
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