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Exclusive: How to Achieve Interoperability Between Polkadot and Bitcoin?

Polkadot has caught widespread attention among blockchain project investors recently. Founded by Ethereum Co-founder Gavin Wood and managed by Web3 Foundation, Polkadot recently completed its private token sale with 500,000 DOT tokens at the valuation of $1.2 bn.

Claimed as the candidate of Decentralized Web 3.0 Blockchain interoperability platform, what makes Polkadot so popular? We are glad to speak with Jack Platts, Head of Collaborations of Web3 Foundation to share with us how Polkadot is interoperable with Bitcoin! He also explains the GRANDPA protocol of Polkadot and how Polkadot can interact with Ethereum!

To start off, can you briefly introduce Polkadot to our readers?

Polkadot attempts to abstract away security and interoperability so that a higher level, user-facing applications can focus on building products. We think of Polkadot as an infrastructure for infrastructure. Polkadot is developer-facing, and kind of handles the connection between many disparate blockchains, economies, and markets. You can think of it like the UN or the United States Federal Government, where the countries or states contribute but ultimately have their own fiefdoms and control over how their citizens live.

Talking about Polkadot, the project of Web 3 Foundation. Can you elaborate on what is GRANDPA (GHOST-based Recursive Ancestor Deriving Prefix Agreement) consensus?

GRANDPA is the finality gadget used in Polkadot. It’s also a Substrate Runtime Module so anyone building a blockchain, whether for Polkadot or not, can use it too. The research team at Web3 Foundation created GRANDPA so that Polkadot could be scalable and secure. Rob Habermeier wrote a great blog post on the intricacies of GRANDPA and Alistair Stewart wrote a more technical paper for anyone interested. I’d encourage folks interested in consensus to check those out, as well as our Wiki.

Polkadot claims that it allows interaction with smart contracts in Ethereum. Can you elaborate on this can be done?

Web3 Foundation is providing grants to teams building bridges. One of the first bridges will be to Ethereum, but it’s important to note that Polkadot is not a smart contracts platform. It’s a networking protocol, a kind of trade a security agreement between blockchains. So by bridging in Ethereum, and having native parachains that provide smart contracts like Edgeware, all other blockchains connected to Polkadot can use smart contracts and the state of those contracts, too.

How to achieve interoperability between Polkadot and Bitcoin?

This would be done via a bridge chain. Polkadot can connect any previously existing blockchain if it matches two criteria:

It must have the ability to form compact and fast light-client proofs over the finality and validity of its blocks and state change information (this would include new UTXOs in a Bitcoin-like chain or logs in an Ethereum-like chain).
There must be a means by which a large set of independent authorities (perhaps up to one thousand) can authorize a transaction. This could include recognition of threshold signatures, such as the Schnorr scheme, or a smart contract able to structure logic against a multi-signature condition.

Bitcoin and Bitcoin-like chains fall short on these characteristics. To address the first criteria, Polkadot validators can simply run a full Bitcoin node. To address the second criteria, either a soft-fork allowing extra-protocol controls over funds or a hard-fork enabling a threshold-signature-friendly signing scheme such as Schnorr is needed. Neither are impossible goals, however, a significant degree coordination would be required to achieve them.

Exclusive: Can Web3 Foundation Achieve a Truly Decentralized Web?

Exclusive interview with Jack Platts: Part 2

Following the technical underpinnings of Polkadot in Part 1, Jack Platts, Head of Collaborations Web3 Foundation reveals their effort towards the goal of the decentralized web! He also explained the governance and technical challenges in achieving a decentralized web!

How Web 3 Foundation can achieve a truly decentralized web?

Web3 Foundation convenes, coordinates, and funds the projects, teams, and individuals that are building the frameworks for a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web.

All of our research, grants, and events we view through the lens of the Web3 Technology Stack. The development of this inclusive set of interoperable and extensible protocols is the primary measuring stick by which we evaluate our progress. The Web3 Tech Stack guides how we approach research, collaborations, and grants. We’re most interested in funding and providing a platform for the protocols and pieces of the stack that are less monetizable or appealing to companies to tackle. That is where we as a Foundation can step in and act, and if everyone does their piece we will over time build a fully decentralized web together. For example, decentralized and private messaging is a piece of the stack that many applications need because currently, we rely on centralized services to handle our encrypted messaging if it is encrypted at all. So we are working with other teams in the space to research this problem and implement a solution. This type of thing is more difficult to monetize, so it’s great for us as a Foundation to step in and jumpstart the development so that downstream teams can build their own applications using the protocol.

Source: Web3 Foundation

The Web 3 Foundation aims to construct an internet where users are in control of their own data, identity, and destiny. What are the governance challenges in doing so?

Web3 Foundation only provides grants for open-source software. Everything we do we try to do in an open, transparent way. We try to foster that type of culture internally, and we have some work to do to be totally transparent. Some groups in the space do an even better job than us, like Aragon. It is difficult from a governance perspective to push open-source across the industry because there is money involved with some of these protocols and companies. But that is what we stand for: open-source, autonomous software.

What are the technical challenges in achieving syntactic interoperability and semantic interoperability for the internet? How do you overcome these challenges?

From a technical perspective, it is difficult to have perfect interoperability when users need control and privacy. The blockchain is a great truth machine, but not always a great privacy machine. We employ and work with many cryptographers who are trying to solve these challenges so that use cases in health care and banking can also be interoperable. I like the analogy to the early Internet where Intranets ruled and private companies and systems dominated the industry. We’ve now come full circle and that is why Web 3.0 is so important. You have to trust that the private, closed systems are doing the right thing, and we’re building protocols that obviate the need for trust. We like the phrase “Less Trust, More Truth” for what we’re doing.

In the creation of a decentralized web, how do you compare the existing competitor, like Tron (TRX)?

As long as systems and applications are open and transparent about what they are and what they are doing I don’t think there is much competition in the space from one protocol to the next. There are probably too many smart contract platforms at this point, especially since they cannot talk to one another right now, but we mostly think about our competition as closed, proprietary systems that control and provide very little information about what they are doing with your information or how it is stored. Those types of applications are our competition. That is the status quo and we want to tear that down.

Polkadot (DOT) Continues on Bullish Momentum, Becoming the Sixth-Largest Crypto by Market Cap

Over the last few days, Bitcoin has seen a couple of corrections, reaching from its daily high of the $11,800 level to seeing its daily low of $11,000 in just a few hours. Bitcoin has slightly recovered and is trading at $11,383 at press time.

The world’s first cryptocurrency reached a new yearly high of $12,450 around a week ago but has seen over $1,000 of losses since reaching its high in 2020.

Although Bitcoin seems to be showing bearish signs, Polkadot (DOT) is currently trading at $5.58, up from $3 earlier this week. The Polkadot (DOT) token was approved by major exchanges earlier this week and has recorded a return on investment (ROI) of more than 80 percent in the past four days.

Polkadot is a blockchain protocol founded by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, which achieved $5.36 billion market capitalization recently, six days after the protocol enabled its token DOT for transfers.

With the recent bullish momentum, Polkadot has become the sixth-largest crypto by market capitalization, surpassing Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC), according to CoinGecko. Just two days ago, Polkadot reached tenth place in the crypto market by market cap.

Simon Dedic, the CEO of BlockFyre recently commented:

“Can you remember what $ETH caused from 2016-2017? $DOT is in the middle of causing the exact same from 2020-2021.”

Why is DOT’s price surging?

Polkadot redenominated its token on Aug. 21, where its new DOT token is now 100 times smaller than the old DOT tokens. During this evolution, the DOT value soared 40 percent. At Polkadot’s block number 1,248,328, the redenomination occurred, while the firm made it clear that it would not affect the percentage share of Polkadot.

As a project by the Web3 Foundation, Polkadot allows developers to build and join blockchains together, facilitating cross-chain communication and interoperability by connecting different blockchains on one unified network.

DOT tokens are the native tokens of the Polkadot network, and DOT token holders are able to control the direction of the network. Governance functions enabled by the network allow token holders to determine fees, auction dynamics, and scheduling the addition of parachains. Upgrades and fixes to the Polkadot platform is also up to the DOT token holders.

With the enablement of numerous blockchains being able to interoperate on the Polkadot protocol, the platform allows for more efficient scaling, as it is a sharded blockchain.

Polkadot has gained wide media attention from its new denomination, major exchange listings, including Binance and Gemini, and the increased demand for scaling. The recent decentralized finance (DeFi) craze has also led to the surge of fees on the Etheruem blockchain network.

Polkadot Announces The Launch of Phase Five with Parachain Functionality

Gavin Wood, the creator of Polkadot and Kusama, announced in the official blog today that the Polkadot mainnet is about to start phase five-the final phase of Polkadot where decentralization and permissionless features will be achieved at the end of July 2020.

The core developers will manage the launch of parachain functionality and the auctions and crowd-loans behind them.

The staged launch of Polkadot took 10 months to complete in the first four stages. Polkadot, as a heterogeneous and scalable multi-chain, has so far been in the form of an independent single-chain. With the launch of the fifth-stage parachain function, the final vision of Polkadot’s heterogeneous sharded system will also become a reality.

Last week, Parity Technologies (the core team behind the development of Polkadot’s initial implementation) released version 0.9 of Polkadot running on the Kusama network.

In the official blog, it wrote that:

“Kusama has already been upgraded to the logic contained in this release (v9010) and so is now finally ready to host parachains.”

Wood did not point out the specific release time of the Polkadot’s parachains, but said that the two things need to be done before that. The first is the need to conduct a comprehensive external review of the new versions of the Polkadot and Kusama network; the second is the need to successfully conduct at least one auction involving crowdloans and host at least one functional parachain.

Wood added:

“For the next two months, effort will be directed towards reliability, refactoring and performance. “

According to Coinmarketcap, Polkadot (DOT) ranks as the 8th largest cryptocurrency, with a total market capitalization of $ 38,799,552,557 today.

Polkadot has risen by 5.14% within 24 hours and up to 13.46% within a week. At the time of writing, DOT is trading at $41.47.

Gavin Wood Steps Down as CEO of Parity Tech While Retaining the Chief Architect Position

Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Parity technologies has officially resigned as CEO of Parity.

According to news reports from Parity, Wood will continue to be a major stakeholder and chief architect but will give up his role as CEO. The next CEO will be Parity co-founder Bjorn Wagner.

Wood’s decision to step down as the CEO comes from his need to find eternal happiness and also have enough time for the things he enjoys doing such as coding, designing, creating ideas, and working on Polkadot token (DOT) so as to deliver value toward fulfilling the company’s mission.

“My retained efforts will be geared toward ensuring that Polkadot and Web3 become available to a large amount of the population,” says Wood, adding that he believes the first step in doing this will be to assist the community in creating a number of intriguing chain-integrated social primitives, which are essential for the company to create a truly Web3 platform.

Parity technologies is a key provider of blockchain technology built to disrupt centralized online services and provide institutional innovation.

This was made available with the creation of Parity Ethereum, a prominent Ethereum Client. Currently, Parity is concentrating on Substrate, a blockchain foundation that is industry standard. It has made use of it to create Polkadot, a decentralized web blockchain meta-protocol that connects and secures global crypto-economies.

Through the Polkadot Relay Chain, the Polkadot Protocol can link public and private chains, permissionless networks, oracles, and emerging technologies. This enables these separate blockchains to share data and transactions in an untrustworthy manner.

Many Polkadot users do not seem to be bothered by the news. A Twitter user @Qinwen_Wang says “anything Gavin does or chooses, we support.”

The news of Wood’s resignation as the CEO of Parity comes after Alex Mashinsky recently tendered his resignation as CEO of the troubled crypto loan company Celsius Network.

Peng Zhong, CEO of Ignite, the organization that created the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem also announced his departure from the company earlier in July.