Polkadot Plans to Increase Parachains to 1,000 in Upgrade
Polkadot, a platform focused on blockchain interoperability, has announced its intention to expand the number of parachains from 100 to 1,000 through an upcoming upgrade. Despite being one of the most valuable networks by market capitalization, Polkadot has experienced a decline in user activity over recent months, similar to other layer 1 networks.
DOT’s Significant Price Decline
The drop in user activity follows the crypto winter of 2022. However, the planned upgrade may stimulate demand and potentially support the native currency DOT.
Currently trading at $4, DOT has fallen by over 90% from its peak price of $55 during the last bull market. Although this decline has impacted prices significantly, other altcoins like Solana and Algorand have also faced similar outcomes.
Despite the Asynchronous backing update announcement on September 21, DOT has not seen significant movement and continues to trend lower towards its lowest point in 2023.
The Significance of Asynchronous Backing for Polkadot
Polkadot developers are now focusing on Asynchronous backing as a key upgrade. Sophia Gold, the Engineering Lead at Parity Technologies, referred to this update as “the most significant evolution of parachain consensus since we launched parachains almost two years ago.”
The objective is to increase the number of parachains to 1,000 by the end of 2024, which would significantly boost the network’s transaction processing speeds to over 1 million.
Asynchronous backing enables flexible scheduling for our future scaling work through elastic scaling and instantaneous core time. We have a credible roadmap to get Polkadot to support 1,000 parachains and 1m+ transactions per second. The design is there – we know how to scale Polkadot for the indefinite future.
Improving Scalability with Asynchronous Backing
The introduction of “pipelining” is a notable feature in Polkadot’s update. This allows multiple parachain blocks to be processed simultaneously instead of waiting for one block to be fully validated and included on the relay chain before proceeding with the next block.
As a result, Polkadot will be able to process more transactions per second at any given time, effectively scaling the network without relying on layer-2 solutions commonly used in Ethereum or Bitcoin. With enhanced throughput, Polkadot will have increased capacity and aims to reduce blockchain validation time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds.
A key advantage of Asynchronous backing is that any failed parachain block can be reused if it was not successfully added to the “relay chain” on the first attempt. This improvement enhances network efficiency by reducing wastage.
By combining pipelining and reusing parachain blocks, Polkadot developers believe that increasing the number of parachains from the current 100 to 1,000 becomes feasible due to improved on-chain scalability.
Hot Take: Potential Revival for DOT?
Polkadot’s planned upgrade to increase the number of parachains from 100 to 1,000 is an ambitious move that aims to address the declining user activity on the network. While DOT has experienced a significant price decline, the introduction of Asynchronous backing and the scalability improvements it brings could potentially stimulate demand for the native currency. With enhanced transaction processing speeds and increased network capacity, Polkadot seeks to position itself as a viable solution for blockchain interoperability and scalability in the future.
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