Why is Polkadot (DOT) the next Big Thing?

Polkadot had many nicknames, but the “Ethereum killer” name which the coin used to be called in the past explains why DOT will shake the whole crypto industry.

Although Gavin Wood, its founder, insists that his project is not a competitor to Ether, the idea behind Polkadot shows us it one day would become a strong means. Let’s sink into it deeper.

How it all started

First, let’s signify the fact that the history of Polkadot started at the time when Ethereum was launching, as Gavin Wood was the co-founder, CTO, and main developer of Ethereum. Wood also created the Solidity smart contract programming language that stands at the core of Ethereum’s ecosystem.

In early 2016 left Ethereum to invent a more solid programmable blockchain. He was mainly focusing on how to build a sharded version of Ethereum. Not surprisingly it didn't take long and in October same year he released Polkadot`s whitepaper.

But what is Polkadot?

First of all, Polkadot is a cryptocurrency company that aims to power the decentralized future of the internet (Web 3.0). It is interoperable with other blockchains not only inside but also outside of cryptocurrency, it allows to build smart contracts, tokens, and new blockchains. In addition, the project gives blockchains the ability to exchange information, and it is upgradeable with no need for hard forks. What's great about Polkadot is that the protocol is governed by DOT holders.

Problems that Polkadot Solves

Polkadot is aiming to solve one of the biggest problems that Blockchain is facing and it is interoperability. Today the crypto market is in a state of too high segregation. All blockchains operate as separate islands of data almost not using the information the other networks offer. DOT eliminates these issues by integrating a variety of patent technologies. And as we mentioned before, Polkadot can transfer information from Private Blockchains to the Public and vice versa.

GRANDPA Consensus

Polkadot introduced the crypto industry with a completely different consensus mechanism called GRANDPA - GHOST-based Recursive Ancestor Deriving Prefix Agreement. GRANDPA provides Polkadot with a way more secure and resilient network, also allowing networks to pool security.

Why GRANDPA

This mechanism is super scalable even compared to digital currencies such as ETH. If we take Ethereum which can process around 12 transactions per second, GRANDPA answers with a serious upgrade. It provides almost instant confirmation times, as it takes a second for transactions to complete.

Benefits of DOT

If you wonder why to connect individual blockchains, the first and the main reason is it gives the ability to send any type of data within any type of Blockchain. You are able to communicate any data across public, open, and permissionless blockchains to enjoy the best of characteristics of each network.

Polkadot thus is a breakthrough to a new phase of security, scalability, and interoperability. It allows developers to build the next-generation applications that get permission data from a private Blockchain and apply it on a public Blockchain. These functions make some analysts suggest that Polkadot contains a probable threat to Ethereum’s dominance.