What's Up With Polkadot?

In November 2020, Polkadot was one of the hottest new things in crypto as the network launched and the DOT token went live. At the time, we released a report explaining the core value proposition of Polkadot and highlighted a few marquee projects building on the network.

Almost five months later, Polkadot has made some progress, but not as much as I expected back in late 2020. Cosmos’ Stargate upgrade was launched last month, putting more pressure on Polkadot to roll out their solution. However, this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Rehashing the Basics

Polkadot is a base layer network that allows other blockchains built on the Substrate framework to connect with each other. This base layer is known as the relay chain. Its primary purpose is to enable interoperability, synced transactional finality and a shared security model for each of the blockchains connected on Polkadot. 

Blockchains that connect to Polkadot this way are called parachains, and only 100 parachain slots can exist at a time. These 100 slots are split