Blog

To close out the year, we asked colleagues across the Polkadot Launch Team to reflect on their work in 2019 and discuss what part of their work they’re most looking forward to in 2020. We’re excited to share their answers (some serious and some light-hearted!) with you below.

So far, we have discussed how BABE creates blockchain candidates and GRANDPA finalizes them. We know that we need more than two-thirds of validators to properly follow the protocol. But how many validators are there? How are they chosen? Why should they follow the rules?

Blind Assignment for Blockchain Extension (BABE) is a block production engine that was inspired by Ouroboros Praos, another proof-of-stake protocol. It can be used on its own because it provides probabilistic finality, or it can be coupled with a finality gadget like GRANDPA.

In the introduction to this series, I outlined that a consensus algorithm helps a network of computers answer three questions. GRANDPA addresses the second.

This series will be a discussion about security and consensus in Polkadot. In part 1, we will define some terms before getting into the details of how Polkadot creates and secures blocks.

Kusama is about to get a new logic core; here’s the details.

Hello from the SubstraTEE team at Supercomputing Systems AG! In this post we’d like to introduce key concepts of trusted off-chain computing. We’ll show what you can do with our tool, SubstraTEE, today and what our vision is for future applications.

After a little chaos, Kusama is ready for the next chapter: CC-3 and at long last the governance handover.

San Francisco & Zug ― Web3 Foundation and Polychain Capital are joining forces to launch the Polkadot Ecosystem Fund during San Francisco Blockchain Week. The fund is a Polychain-operated investment vehicle jointly capitalized by Web3 Foundation and Polychain.

Kusama just got an upgrade I’m pleased to announce that at exactly 9am today (Zug time), Kusama CC-2 went through a full upgrade to runtime version 1005 as found in Polkadot release v0.6.3.

Three weeks ago, we released Kusama Chain Candidate 1 (CC1). After several key fixes to the Polkadot, including the Babe consensus layer, we’re pleased to release the next chapter in Kusama: CC2.

By: Joe Petrowski Polkadot is now even more accessible to projects that may not have the capital to secure a dedicated parachain slot and gives the opportunity to become a parachain if their application requires high throughput.