About

Polkadot is a distributed blockchain computing protocol that acts as a base layer providing validation and security for other sovereign blockchains, called parachains. It was built using Substrate, a blockchain developmental framework. Polkadot’s base layer is the Relay Chain, which uses a Nominated Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism with its state machine compiled into WebAssembly.

History

Gavin Wood (Co-Founder of Ethereum) conceived the idea of Polkadot, publishing the first draft of the Polkadot whitepaper in October 2016. The project was founded to provide a base layer for a decentralized internet, where independent blockchains could securely communicate with one another.

Before the publication of the Polkadot whitepaper, Wood left the Ethereum Foundation in January 2016 and founded a for-profit firm called Ethcore. The company initially worked on Ethereum’s development but eventually rebranded to Parity Technologies and pivoted to working on Polkadot.

In 2017, Wood and Peter Czaban established Web3 Foundation (W3F), a non-profit entity that would support Polkadot as its flagship project. In October 2017, W3F conducted an ICO for Polkadot. A vulnerability in the multi-sig wallet that held the ICO funds was later exploited (Nov. 6, 2017), freezing ~513,774 ETH ($155.00 million at the time) of Parity Technologies’ working capital.

Parity Technologies launched an early version of Polkadot's code and design under the Kusama brand in September 2019. Kusama is a canary network that serves as a testing ground for new Polkadot changes and features. Polkadot's mainnet was launched on May 26, 2020. The project took a progressive decentralization approach where the W3F retained unilateral control over protocol changes early on before relinquishing its authority in July 2020. Transfers of Polkadot’s native token, DOT, then went live in August 2020.

Polkadot parachains launched in late 2021, with the first parachain slot auction beginning on Nov. 11, 2021, and won by Acala. Approximately one month later, on Dec. 17, 2021, Polkadot completed its multi-stage launch, with the first five parachains going live on the Relay Chain.

On May 4, 2022, Polkadot’s XCM format launched. The XCM is a messaging format that standardizes messages between parachains, allowing for greater interoperability. In July 2022, Polkadot’s next iteration of governance, OpenGov, was announced before going live on Kusama on Nov. 23, 2022.

On Oct. 21, 2022, Wood stepped down as CEO of Parity Technologies and was replaced by Björn Wagner.

On Nov. 1, 2022, nomination pools were released, allowing tokenholders to stake as little as one DOT.

On June 15, 2023, Polkadot implemented the OpenGov governance system on the mainnet, which removed the Council and Technical Committees from the governance process and replaced it with the Technical Fellowship. OpenGov also introduced a new process for governance proposals centered around 15 different governance proposal tracks. A complete list can be viewed here.

Also, on June 15, 2023, Polkadot launched XCM V3, an upgrade to the XCM messaging format introducing advanced programmability, bridging capabilities with external networks, cross-chain locking, improved fee payment mechanisms, and support for non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

On July 19, 2023, Polkadot announced it had completed and officially released “Polkadot 1.0,” completing all features and functionalities outlined in the Polkadot whitepaper. As part of this release, Polkadot’s runtime codebase was fully transitioned to the fellowship’s GitHub, which is managed by the community via OpenGov and the Technical Fellowship.

On Oct. 10, 2023, Parity Technologies announced the “go-to-market will be more effectively driven by the broader Polkadot community. As such, Parity is sunsetting its go-to-market functions to make room for the emergence of new ecosystem leaders beyond Parity.” A commercially reasonable search found no additional disclosure(s) from Parity Technologies clarifying the meaning of “go-to-market,” or who the “new ecosystem leaders” may include.

On Sept. 20, 2023, governance proposal RFC-0032: Minimal Relay was introduced, proposing to migrate end user functionalities on the Polkadot Relay Chain, such as staking, validator elections, governance voting, and parachain slot auction participation, into system parachains, to maximize secure blockspace on the Relay Chain.

At Polkadot’s Decoded conference in June 2023, Wood proposed overhauling parachain auctions and Polkadot’s general model as part of “Polkadot 2.0.” Specifically, Polkadot 2.0 would introduce the Agile Coretime model, a marketplace for allocating time on parachains via NFTs, allowing more agile and on-demand access to resources. Furthermore, instead of long-term parachain leases via parachain slot auctions, time on parachains (aka Coretime would be sold monthly “just ahead of usage.” The Agile Coretime development is part of CoreJam (Collect-Refine-Join-Accumulate), a larger development to redesign how the relay chain processes parachain information and workload. On Feb. 20, 2024, the Parity Technologies team announced the Agile Coretime had been implemented on Polkadot’s Westend testnet. As of April 14, 2024, a commercially reasonable search found no disclosure(s) regarding an intended launch date on Polkadot’s mainnet.

Additionally, the team intends to introduce parathreads (also called On-Demand Parachains. Parathreads operate similarly to parachains, but rather than reserving a dedicated parachain slot, parathreads will require a fixed fee paid in DOT to have Relay Chain validators periodically validate a given parathread. According to Polkadot’s forum, ZK-based and nested multiple Relay Chain scaling mechanisms are also being explored.

As of April 14, 2024, Polkadot is live and operational, supporting 50 parachains. Tokenholders can use DOT to pay gas fees, send transactions, operate validators, and participate in governance. “By the end of 2024,” the team intends to launch the Asynchronous Backing upgrade to enable validators to process multiple parachain blocks concurrently, increasing overall network performance. As part of the upgrade, the active validator set will increase to “around 1,000 validators.” As of April 14, 2024, this upgrade is live on the Rococo testnet.

Additional project developments:

• Elastic Scaling to allow parachains to use multiple cores (aka execution slots) to include multiple parablocks within the same relay chain block. As of April 14, 2024, the project’s documentation outlines a three-phase process where elastic scaling will first work on parachains with a permissioned collator set, then with a permissionless collator set, and then a final phase whereby parachains can access multiple cores continuously. Based on a commercially reasonable search, no intended launch date for any particular phase has been disclosed.
• SASSAFRAS (Semi Anonymous Sortition of Staked Assignees For Fixed-time Rhythmic Assignment of Slots) is an intended extension of BABE, the block production protocol used by Polkadot as of April 14, 2024. Once implemented, SASSAFRAS is intended to act as a constant-time block production protocol for Polkadot, “ensuring that exactly one block is produced with time-constant intervals.” As of the same date, a commercially reasonable search found no disclosure(s) regarding an intended launch date.

21Shares has filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Jan. 31, 2025, for the 21Shares Polkadot Trust.

In August 2025, Parity Technologies has announced that Gavin Wood will return as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in late August 2025, following the departure of Björn Wagner.

In July 2025, SEC granted "accelerated approval for the proposed rule change by NYSE Arca to amend NYSE Arca Rule 8.500-E (Trust Units) and to list and trade shares...of the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index ETF."