Polkadot blog

Introducing Polkadot and Kusama Gifts, the easiest Way to send DOT and KSM to Friends and Family. Polkadot and Kusama Gifts are a new way to send DOT or KSM to anyone, even if they don’t already have an account or wallet....

Parachains are now officially ready for launch on Polkadot and the auction schedule has been proposed. The news that Polkadot is now technically capable of supporting its first parachains....

The third article on XCM takes 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 machine, this amounts to becoming familiar with this machine architecture....

Polkadot founder Gavin Wood inspects one interesting aspect of XCM in-depth: how XCM can change over time without introducing breakage between the very networks it is meant to connect....

This primer on XCM, Polkadot's inter-chain messaging format is the first in a series of articles explaining what it does, how it works, how to use it, and what it could become....

By Bill Laboon, Director of Education and Community at Web3 Foundation Parachains are the diverse layer-1 blockchains that run in parallel on...

This post provides important background information on the candle auctions and crowdloan mechanisms for these slots and recaps what happened during the first five auctions....

A look at why candle auctions are the most suitable form for blockchain auctions, as seen in recent research done at the Web3 Foundation....

Nominating and validator selection are crucial parts of user interaction with Polkadot. This post presents background information on nominating and things to consider when selecting validators....

With the increase in the number of accounts nominating on Polkadot and Kusama, we have seen some limitations of the current staking parameters. In order to prevent issues from occurring when these limits are reached, some restrictions are being added to the staking system on both networks....

The first Kusama parachain slot auction has ended and the first parachains have successfully connected to the Kusama Relay Chain, delivering the last piece of core functionality outlined in the Polkadot whitepaper: purpose-built, interoperable parachains....

On 24 May 2021, Polkadot nodes failed with an out of memory (OOM) error on block 5,202,216. This block contained an on-chain solution to the validator election, which is normally computed off-chain and only takes place on-chain if no off-chain solution is submitted....