Polkadot DOT Unveils New Roadmap – Here’s Everything You Need to Know

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Jaroslaw Adamowski

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Jaroslaw Adamowski

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June 26, 2023 06:55 EDT

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The developers of the Polkadot blockchain have released a new roadmap which paves the way for a number of major changes to its operations in the coming months.

Rob Habermeier, Polkadot’s co-founder, said in a statement that Parity Technologies, the entity behind the blockchain, has developed a number of solutions designed to enhance Polkadot’s operations.

“These bridge a number of categories: parachain scalability, parachain development, relay-chain governance, cross-chain communication, common-good parachains, bridging to other ecosystems, and staking. We’ve been hard at work on delivering the code for these features and upgrades and look forward to having them accepted by the Polkadot community,” Habermeier said.

The blockchain’s co-founder explains the planned modifications will enable Polkadot to expand or acquire the following capacities:

Parathreads / Next-Generation Scheduling

Parathreads are pay-as-you-go parachains which allow to start a blockchain with the ease of initiating a smart contract. Parity Technologies estimate that parathreads will be ready for launch between the first and second quarter of 2023.

XCMv3

Polkadot’s cross-consensus messaging (XCM), a universal language designed for cross-chain communication that can be operated inside or outside the blockchain’s ecosystem, will have its third major release until the end of 2022.

FRAME: Weights V2

Weights, the mechanism by which Substrate transactions and actions are measured against block capacity, will be updated to their second version which will introduce a notion of multi-dimensional weights. These “measure not only execution time but also the amount of state accessed by a particular operation,” according to Habermeier who says the new version is to be ready to use by mid-October 2022.

Governance Overhaul

Polkadot’s governance system is expected to evolve with an agile update that will remove the council and technical committees, introduces the Polkadot Fellowship, as well as move every decision in Polkadot to referendums by the blockchain’s community. The new system is to be deployed at the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2022 following a vote by the community and approval by token holders.

Collectives Parachain

The blockchain’s Common Good Parachains team has been working on final testing for Polkadot Collectives, a new parachain, with an estimated launch in October 2022.

Bridge Hub

Parity’s bridges team has been working to develop a Polkadot<>Kusama bridge, with a bridge hub designed to serve as message routing service within each network. Its launch is scheduled until the end of 2022.

Nomination Pools & Fast Unstake

Polkadot is also continuing its march toward a future full of proof-of-stake blockchains, with Nomination pools, which enable users to permissionlessly develop “pools” of stake which others can join, being part of these efforts.

“Nomination pools will be added to Polkadot as of the 0.9.28 release, but with the default parameters, no pools can be created yet. Once this runtime is enacted, a governance proposal can set the initial configurations, such as how many pools can be created, how many members can join, etc.,” according to Habermeier.

Staking Dashboard

In addition to the work on enhancing the capacities of the staking protocol itself, Polkadot’s developers say they also recognize the need to make staking maximally accessible to end users and regular persons. As part of these efforts, the Staking Dashboard is to exit its open beta shortly, but it is feature-complete and can be already used, the blockchain’s co-founder said.

Disputes Slashing

Polkadot’s parachains protocol went live last December, and disputes slashing is to be enabled until the end of this year. Owing to this, validators who “submit invalid parachain blocks will be slashed for their entire stake, and validators which create faulty disputes will be slashed for a small amount to discourage spam,” he said.