Polkadot 2.0's Ambition: Restructuring and Interconnection
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Polkadot 2.0's Ambition: Restructuring and Interconnection
CrossChain is no longer the mainstream narrative in Web3, but CrossChain is Blockchain.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: NingNing
Following the principle of "buy first, then research," I established a position three weeks ago. Since then, I've begun seriously studying Polkadot's latest developments.
After enduring a painful bear market period marked by layoffs, Gavin Wood passing leadership to professional managers, and ecosystem projects leaving, the Polkadot team delivered a series of new features in 2023—XCM V3, OpenGoV governance module, system parachains, asynchronous backing, and parathreads—to enhance interoperability, governance participation, efficiency, and scalability within the ecosystem.
In 2024, Polkadot will enter a new chapter: Polkadot 2.0.
Features and capabilities to be delivered in Polkadot 2.0 include:
Agile Coretime
Coretime is a new concept introduced in Polkadot 2.0, representing the time required for validation and consensus on Polkadot. It is the most scarce resource on the network.
In Polkadot 1.0, coretime was allocated to parachains via slot leasing, where parachains bid for slot usage over fixed lease periods ranging from 6 to 24 months.
However, in Polkadot 2.0, coretime becomes a fluid, tradable, accumulable asset that can be bought or sold as a fungible token.
This mechanism, known as Agile Coretime, makes it significantly easier for developers to launch and maintain applications on the Polkadot network.
On-Demand Parachains
On-demand parachains represent a more dynamic approach to acquiring blockspace. Unlike existing parachains that produce blocks regularly, they allow collators to request a core (a block production opportunity) only when needed.
Ethereum<>Polkadot Cross-Chain Bridge: Snowbridge
Snowbridge aims to create a trustless bridge enabling interoperability between Polkadot and Ethereum.
The design principles of Snowbridge are trustlessness, generality, and deterministic execution.
Its goal is to achieve Ethereum<>Polkadot interoperability comparable in quality to inter-parachain communication within Polkadot.
Kusama<>Polkadot Cross-Chain Bridge
Achieve Kusama<>Polkadot interoperability on par with Polkadot’s native parachain interoperability.
Elastic Scaling
Asynchronous backing allows collators to submit parachain blocks using older relay chain parent blocks, improving efficiency and scalability.
Sassafras Algorithm
Sassafras is a new consensus protocol designed to resolve fork-related issues commonly found in other probabilistic leader election-based protocols.
Sassafras establishes a unique mapping between slots and validators for each epoch, ensuring only one validator per slot.
Specifically, the Sassafras algorithm works as follows:
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Election: At the beginning of each epoch, a set of validators is randomly selected through a lottery process.
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Assignment: Each selected validator is assigned to a specific slot.
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Validation: When a slot arrives, the assigned validator generates a block and submits it to the network.
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Confirmation: Other validators confirm the submitted block; if a majority agrees, the block is added to the blockchain.
Through this method, the Sassafras algorithm ensures only one validator per slot, thereby preventing forks.
The Sassafras algorithm is a popular solution among PoS blockchains for reducing consensus overhead on the mainnet.
In my view, the two most important features in Polkadot 2.0 are Agile Coretime and the Ethereum<>Polkadot cross-chain bridge Snowbridge.
Agile Coretime restructures the coupling relationship between Polkadot’s relay chain and parachains, dramatically lowering operational costs and burdens for parachain developers (recall how much PR campaigning, community rebate programs, and capital negotiation efforts were required during previous slot auctions).
Moreover, once the coretime trading market Lastic launches, coretime will be freely tradable, forming a market-driven fair price and enabling optimized allocation of coretime resources.
The Ethereum<>Polkadot cross-chain bridge Snowbridge is a masterstroke. As illustrated in Paradigm's "Crypto Planet" comic, Ethereum is the super-central node in the Web3 universe—every Alt L1 and L2 must draw capital, users, and developers from the Ethereum ecosystem.
The launch of Snowbridge shows that Gavin has放下 his inner pride, acknowledged reality, and started preparing infrastructure for a “Sybil attack” on Ethereum.
The above is a brief analysis of Polkadot 2.0’s ambitions.
Finally, here’s my take on CrossChain: although CrossChain is no longer a dominant narrative in Web3 today, after deep diving into the cross-chain bridge space, I’ve reached a conclusion—CrossChain is BlockChain.
From a certain perspective, Ethereum itself is also a CrossChain project: the Ethereum mainnet can be seen as analogous to Polkadot’s relay layer, while EVM-compatible Alt L1s and L2s resemble Polkadot’s parachains.
However, due to Ethereum’s permissionless and trust-minimized neutrality principles, the coupling between its “parachains” and the relay layer is looser than in other CrossChain systems, resulting in weaker cross-chain interoperability across its ecosystem compared to Polkadot and Cosmos.
The lack of a unified standard for cross-chain interoperability has made Ethereum bridges prime targets for hackers and severely degraded user experience when interacting across the Ethereum ecosystem (compare transferring assets between Polkadot parachains versus between L2s).
Both the Ethereum Foundation and U.S. crypto VCs recognize this issue, having respectively incubated Connext and LayerZero to compete for dominance as Ethereum’s cross-chain interoperability standard. Currently, LayerZero leads in data metrics, but the long-term outcome remains uncertain.
We’ll dive deeper into the battle for cross-chain interoperability standards in the Ethereum ecosystem another time.
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