Polkadot Primer
By Mira Christanto and Wilson Withiam
Many investors have probably heard of Polkadot, but when attempting to learn about it couldn’t get past the Polkadot-specific jargon. To date, this inability to sift through the jargon has been costly, as Polkadot has quickly risen to the top 5 cryptoassets, and become one of the most exciting emerging blockchain ecosystems in the industry. If your eyes have glazed over previous explanations, this is a great place to finally understand Polkadot’s vision and the implications for the ecosystem if it succeeds.
We outline Polkadot’s background, how it works, its strengths, and its risks. Polkadot’s ambitions are big and their founder, along with a large community of developers, has been on track to take on the challenge.
What’s Polkadot’s background?
The original Polkadot whitepaper was released in October 2016, by Gavin Wood - co-founder of Ethereum. He’s also credited for creating Ethereum’s Solidity smart contract programming language and for Ethereum’s launch. Much of the material within Polkadot’s whitepaper came from Gavin’s early research on how to scale Ethereum. When he left Ethereum in 2016, he founded two entities that would create Polkadot, called Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation (W3F). W3F is the non-profit R&D arm while Parity is a for-profit software company commissioned by the W3F to develop and upkeep Polkadot.
How much money did they raise?
Their fundraising history, managed by the W3F, is as follows:
Mira was a Senior Research Analyst at Messari. Prior to joining Messari, Mira was a Senior Portfolio Manager for a US$6 billion Asia Pacific equities fund at APG Asset Management. Mira received a BA in Economics and Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences from Northwestern University.
Wilson Withiam was a Senior Research Analyst at Messari. Previously, he worked at Circle Research where he conducted research on cryptoassets. He graduated with a B.Sc. in Kinesiology and Exercise Science before studying computer science and economics at UConn.
- What’s Polkadot’s background?
- How much money did they raise?
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- How will Polkadot achieve this?
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