The holiday season is coming around again and with the new year, let’s take a quick retrospective about what the Polkadot project achieved over 2021. By now it seems rather a tradition to begin with a look at the amount of code across the technology at the heart of Polkadot…

In the first two articles I wrote on XCM, I introduced the basics of its design and versioning structure. In this article, we will take a deeper look into its underlying design and execution model. Since XCM is based around the instruction set of the XCVM, a very high-level virtual…

In the first article I wrote on XCM, I introduced its basic architecture, goals and how it could be used for some simple use cases. Here we will move on to inspect one interesting aspect of XCM in depth: how XCM can change over time without introducing breakage between the…

As the final Polkadot 1.0 release, complete with Parachains draws close, the Cross-Consensus Messaging format, XCM for short, is approaching its first production-ready release. This is an introduction to the format, its goals, how it works and can be used to achieve typical cross-chain tasks. One fun fact to begin…

The first real-world functional parachain Statemine, began processing permissionless transactions after an on-chain upgrade last week. After some smooth running over the weekend, the time is coming to move to the next stage: slot auctions. Here is our recommendation for how Parachain auctions should be rolled out in the coming…

The staged launch of Polkadot is about to reach another chapter. As we approach the launch of Parachain functionality and the auctions and crowd-loans behind them, let’s look at what’s coming. The launch of Polkadot began around ten months ago with the first four phases; the last — a move…

Despite being a tough year for pretty much everyone (with the possible exception of Amazon and takeaways), the Polkadot network and community is coming out of 2020 with the wind very much behind its sails. So now that we’ve reached the end of 2020, for better or worse, let’s have…

Two weeks ago we started the first vote on the fledgling Polkadot network. That vote has just ended and the results are clear. With a turnout just shy of one third of the tokens, the recent Polkadot redenomination poll was a major result for stakeholder decision-making. This number is all…

Polkadot just moved into Phase 3; Phase 4 will be coming later today. Here’s what’s happening… Unlike any other blockchain to date, Polkadot’s launch process is a multi-stage affair, phased over several weeks, where pieces of new functionality are added, piecemeal, until the initial “production version” is hit. I use…